The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, October 11, 2024

Notably: The billboard above, glimpsed during a recent trip to cancerland, as Cheryl and I sometimes think of Gainesville (kindly: the town’s doctors have so far made cats of us lives-wise), brought to mind a couple of red-stop reflections. The first is a matter of history: progress is an invention, and a recent one. As Hannah Arendt writes (in On Violence, of all places), “The notion that there is such a thing as progress of mankind as a whole was unknown prior to the seventeenth century, developed into a rather common opinion among the eighteenth-century hommes de lettres, and became an almost universally accepted dogma in the nineteenth.” Before the Enlightenment, there was no such thing as expecting that society could “progress” toward something bigger, better, richer. There was teleology (defined as explaining anything by its alleged final cause, which requires a lot of imagination, sizeable balls, and a lot of arrogance). But teleology is not progress. I’d argue that as a precursor of ends-justify-means ideology, it’s the opposite of progress. Teleology is religion’s friend, so ironically it cannot be the friend of progress, even though what I’m getting at is the second thought that this billboard elicited: the utter falsehood of its anthropomorphic hopefulness. Human progress has no finish line? I can picture a mushroom cloud or two, or the finish line we are rapidly approaching by way of climate change, if it’s humanity as a whole we are imagining. But the billboard’s other falsehood is its message. It’s not aimed at “humanity,” but at the single human being eying the billboard at a red light. It is a sales pitch. Shop your illness with us: you’ll be happy. But it is only about finish lines. What UF sells, what we all sell each other in the end, what we sell ourselves, is that delay from the finish line. The last thing we want is to hurdle and hurtle toward it. If it’s finish lines we’re being honest about, and how can we not be, the last thing we want to be is that athlete, who–assuming he’s not an AI creation–will face his finish line no differently than the rest of us, immortalized though he might illusorily be on a marketing billboard for the year or two UF will use that pitch. Then what? Discarded. Done. Finished. Marketing campaigns  have shorter lives than wild kittens. Human progress has no finish line because it is its own illusion.

—P.T.

 

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In the next four centuries, Christianity was often to have disastrous effects. Confident in the possession of the true religion, Europeans were impatient and contemptuous of the values and achievements of the peoples and civilizations they disturbed. The result was always uncomfortable and often brutal. It is also true that religious zeal could blur easily into less avowable motives. As the greatest Spanish historian of the American conquests put it when describing why he and his colleagues had gone to the Indies, they thought ‘to serve God and his Majesty, to give light to those who sat in darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do’. Greed quickly led to the abuse of power, to domination and exploitation by force. In the end this led to great crimes – though they were often committed unconsciously. It sometimes brought about the destruction of whole societies, but this was only the worst aspect of a readiness to dominate which was present from the outset in European enterprise. The adventurers who first reached the coasts of India were soon boarding Asian merchantmen, torturing and slaughtering their crews and passengers, looting their cargoes and burning the ravaged hulks. Europeans could usually exact what they wanted in the end because of a technical superiority which exaggerated the power of their tiny numbers and for a few centuries turned the balance against the great historic agglomerations of population and civilization.

–From J.M. Roberts’s History of the World (1976).

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