Dreams of Perpetual Progress
He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II
Were we really born in the best possible time and place? Or is ours a random moment in infinity—just another among uncountable moments, each with its compensating pleasures and disappointments? Perhaps you find it absurd to even entertain such a question, to assume there’s any choice in the matter. But there is. We all have a psychological tendency to view our own experience as standard, to see our community as The People, to believe—perhaps subconsciously—that we are the chosen ones, God is on our side, and our team deserves to win. To see the present in the most flattering light, we paint the past in blood-red hues of suffering and terror. Hobbes has been scratching this persistent psychological itch for several centuries now.
It is a common mistake to assume that evolution is a process of improvement, that evolving organisms are progressing toward some final, perfected state. But they, and we, are not. An evolving society or organism simply adapts over the generations to changing conditions. While these modifications may be immediately beneficial, they are not really improvements because external conditions never stop shifting.
This error underlies the assumption that here and now is obviously better than there and then. Three and a half centuries later, scientists still quote Hobbes, telling us how lucky we are to live after the rise of the state, to have avoided the universal suffering of our barbaric past. It’s deeply comforting to think we’re the lucky ones, but let’s ask the forbidden question: How lucky are we really?