Here's a story about the future: Things will get better. We will get smarter and richer and happier. Life will be less dangerous, we will know more and we will have nobler ideals. There will be new and better technologies, better health care and better government. Here's another story: Things will get worse. Our economy will fail, and the environment will collapse. Technology will find new ways to kill, destroy and alienate us. We will abandon our values. Dangerous ideas will mislead us, war and violence will tear us apart.

Progress or decline, optimism or pessimism. I believe we are all biased in favor of one or the other. I myself am a natural optimist. Where others see possibilities for disaster, I see ways in which things may turn out well. On some level I really believe that all people are reasonable and would come around to my view if they knew what I know.

We're born optimists or pessimists, but we can unlearn this through knowledge and experience. Optimists and pessimists make the same mistake, they see history as alternating periods of clear progress and decline. But this is often an illusion.

Most people at all times have seen their present as the high point of history. All that has happened in the past, even the bad things, happened as a necessary step towards perfection. We can see this, even if those who had to live through the past did not. They thought they knew everything. Such fools! It is we who know everything. They thought they were being clever, but we know that their cleverness was merely an arrow pointed towards us.

So far the optimists and pessimists agree. They diverge in whether they think this march towards perfection will continue as before, or whether it is now ending. The optimists believe our progress must obviously continue, the pessimists believe it has already come to an end, that the beliefs and practices which made us great have already been abandoned. "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." We have been betrayed by our greed and stupidity, and it will all end badly.

We think the future is a straight line up or down because we think the past is made out of straight lines. The popular image of Western history illustrates this. If you ask someone to tell the story of our culture, it may go something like this: The Greeks and Romans rose to greatness, peaked, and fell. Then there was darkness and misery for a thousand years, until renaissance Italians rediscovered art and rational thinking. Things have been improving ever since. We've had science, religious tolerance, secularism, the enlightenment, democracy, the industrial revolution, capitalism, technology, wealth, all in quick succession, ending in the ultimate triumph of the West.

This is how the broad outlines of history is usually told, and there is perhaps no other way of presenting large amounts historical data in few words, except as successive periods of progress and decline. But this history is not real, it is a lie-to-children, a simple story which gives you an approximate outline, but which falls apart when you look closely at it.

We say that the Greeks and the Romans had a great civilization, but what do we mean by that? Imagine yourself born into Athens in the 4th century BC. Want to argue with Aristotle, give birth to philosophy and science? Forget it! You've been born as a woman, and you're required to spend your life indoors. Or you're born as a slave, or a peasant, or you're drafted and sent into war.

Want to experience the splendour of ancient Rome? If the overwhelming likelihood of being born poor, a slave, or a pesant into a status-obsessed and imperialistic society doesn't scare you off, the 28 year life expectancy should give you pause.

The story is much the same for all cultures at all times. Disease, violence and repression has always been the norm. The cultural "greatness" of a city elite is no comfort to the peasant whose crops have failed, or whose farm stands in the way of an unpaid and advancing army. To the majority of people, "progress" was to know peace, have enough to eat, and arrive into "old age" (ie. your 40's and 50's) after a life of below-average suffering.

In the same way, the dark ages were not as dark as we think. Life expectancy was probably no worse than during the "civilized" era. Once in a while something truly horrible would come along, like war, famine, plague, or Mongols, but then often it did not, and much of what came later was far worse. Life as a German peasant during the Thirty Years War, which killed off maybe 15-30% of the population, was very bad, while the 13th century was a period of population growth. The witch hunts took place during the reformation, not in the (in that area) more enlightened Middle Ages. And so on.

The closer you look at history, the more threads you see. What seems at a distance like a big trend in one direction or the other is actually made up of several trends, often independent of each other, some of them positive and some negative, and these are themselves made up of smaller trends.

Are the last 500 years a story of continual progress in the West? We're much, much better off today, that is not in doubt. But did we arrive where we are through a straight climb of progress, or through a combination of individual improvements and setbacks which luckily turned out well?

There are two areas where we can clearly speak of genuine progress in this period, and they are science and the economy, (and their intersection: technology). Our knowledge of the world has expanded steadily ever since the birth of science. Economic growth got started later, but here too we can talk of fairly steady progress in a growing number of capitalist countries.

If you predict that we in 50 years will be wealthier, have more knowledge and new technologies, you're probably justified. We know that scientific and economic progress is real, we have seen it happen. As long as we maintain the conditions that make it possible today we can expect it to continue, (until we reach some upper limit of knowledge and efficiency, or some lower limit of contentment, beyond which we no longer care).

When we look at other forms of progress, the picture is less clear. Democracy and freedom have not so much progressed in the West as made rare and accidental jumps ahead and backwards, eventually, through war and luck, landing it the victory it appears to have today. The American revolution was one such jump ahead, their Civil War another. Britain came to democracy through gradual progress, it is true, but they were an exception. Europe before World War 2 was a continent of dictators, utopian ideologists and disillusioned democrats. Democracy was widely seen as a failure, an outmoded and weak form of goverment, which would inevitably yield to the vibrant new dictatorships. And this almost happened. Only since the fall of the Soviet Union has it become possible to believe that all countries in the world may soon become democracies.

So are we seeing a trend towards democracy, are we seeing progress, something steady and reliable? Perhaps it is better to say that we have gone through earthquakes of democracy, something rare and random. These earthquakes have changed the landscape so that democracy is now thought of as the norm, but it could well have gone otherwise, and it still might.

Peace? The same. There has been no long-term progress towards peace in the West, only a succession of more and less war-like periods. The overall trend was never good. Europe's warlust peaked with a hundred-year period which saw the invasion of Africa and more, two world wars and several genocides. Today we live in a comparatively peaceful period, and this is an improvement, but improvement is not the same as progress. Progress is something we can expect to continue, improvements can be one-time events. Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is too early to speak of progress towards peace. Perhaps there will be, if global democratization continues, but if so this will be a new process, not the continuation of an old process.

The idea of progress is questionable for democracy and peace, and it is barely supportable when it comes to public beliefs and moral standards. We automatically think of ourselves as better informed and more ethical than our ancestors, and since they thought the same of their ancestors we get the illusion of progress. And there have certainly been improvements. We no longer see women as inferior, racism is unfashionable, our culture has been liberalized and individualized, and we're all global idealists in some way or another.

But how much of this was progress, and how much just change? We tend to remember those changes that prefigured our own ideals, like the birth of democracy in Greece, but this is historical cherrypicking. We have to take the good with the bad. To us, the reformation stands for religious tolerance and independence of thought, but at the time it led to fanaticism, persecution, and religious authoritarianism. Progress? Decline? No, change.

And we should not confuse the march of time with genuine progress. We know how the past turned out, we know the answer to questions that troubled previous generations, but that does not mean we are better informed about the present, or better able to make important decisions, it just means that we live later than they did. Scientific knowledge regularly seeps into the public consciousness, for instance we all know what DNA does, but that does not mean that we as a culture pay more attention to science than we used to, or that we will pay more attention in the future.

Religion and superstition show no sign of going away, and the media freedom of the internet promotes conspiracy-like worldviews rather than undermines them. The whole public sphere of news, opinion and ideas is a mess of near-useless noise. People believe what they want to believe, they seek confirmation not knowledge. New ideological fads strike regularly and hard. Entire sciences are shrouded in fog.

I am not saying there is decline, I am saying that satisfaction with our own superiority is often unjustified, as is the idealist's belief that they can make people more rational than they are today. Our brain isn't changing, it is and will be what it always was. No amount of scientific and scholarly knowledge can fix its cognitive flaws. There is no cure for being superficial, uncurious and dumb, or for being irrational and arrogant. There is no "victory" ahead, just continuation, change, and with luck an occasional improvement. As David Stove puts it in The Plato Cult:

Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down to five, say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong.

It hurts to realize this. If like me you're a natural optimist, belief in progress gives everything a sense of purpose. It's like those computer games where hours of hacking and slashing away at monsters are rewarded with a steady succession of experience points and better weapons, it's the same feeling. We're going somewhere.

To not believe in progress (or less so) makes the world a scarier place. Suddenly we're on our own, everything is just "one damn thing after another". Twenty years from now, I may have a higher standard of living, and own technological gadgets I am unable to imagine, but people will be the same, and life will be the same. Journalists will still be incompetent, politicians and activists still dishonest, ideological single-mindedness and conspiracy theories will remain popular. Or at least we can not expect otherwise.

This realization is scary, but also liberating, and not all unpleasant. I cannot "win", the rules of the game will not allow it, but I can reject those rules and play by my own, all the same.

"Our brain isn't changing, it is and will be what it always was. No amount of scientific and scholarly knowledge can fix its cognitive flaws. "

And you call yourself an optimist? Science is getting the hang of the human brain. A project is underway to simulate first the neocortical column and then the whole brain itself. And once we understand it, we should be able to cure diseases such as stupidity. That is, if the patient is smart enough to agree to the treatment...

As for my own expectations for the future, all that is required now is to stay alive until immortality is achieved. Of course there won't be a hard treshold. But some discovery will let you live five more years. Within those five years, maybe some other discovery has taken place. As scientific progress is accellerating (all the new stuff we invent help us invent new stuff) eventually there will be a last human being on earth to die of natural causes. Bummer.

OEK: And once we understand it, we should be able to cure diseases such as stupidity. That is, if the patient is smart enough to agree to the treatment...

Well .. science could land all kinds of surprises on us, but I don't think a cure for stupidity would be greeted with welcome. Same with other enhancements. Reminds people too much of some book or movie or other, and maybe they're right to be a little scared. The ability to reprogram and/or simulate our brains opens the door for anything. Read any singularity scifi? Don't underestimate the power of ideology, that door could be shut fast once people consider the possibilities. Even today people are terrified of genetic research.

Anyway, this would come from scientific progress, not social progress on its own. The future of science and technology is fundamentally unpredictable (as in impossible, not hard - to predict that a technology will become possible in the future you must think it up today, thus ruining your own prediction). So I'm not saying we won't ever improve ourselves, I just don't believe it's meaningful to talk of social progress in the world we know of.

As for my own expectations for the future, all that is required now is to stay alive until immortality is achieved.

Perhaps, but don't count it. You're dying, get used to it.

Bjørn Stærk: You're dying, get used to it.

Never! Give me immortality or give me death!

"And once we understand it, we should be able to cure diseases such as stupidity. That is, if the patient is smart enough to agree to the treatment..."

Who needs agreement? In the future, the smart guys will make the dumb guys submit to "treatment"

As for immortality...I'm already immortal...just have to be thawed out when the time comes and History needs my advice.

A word about life expectancy. That number is an average, so a 28-year life expectancy doesn't mean that 30-year olds were considered old in ancient Rome. High mortality among children and young adults due to disease, childbirth, war, etc., brings down the average for the whole population.

Peace? The same. There has been no long-term progress towards peace in the West, only a succession of more and less war-like periods. The overall trend was never good. Europe's warlust peaked with a hundred-year period which saw the invasion of Africa and more, two world wars and several genocides.

Not really. It is a well-known fact that around 100 million people died from wars in the 20th century. Far less known is that pretty much the same number of people were killed in the 19th century, and when the population was significantly lower. Mortality from warfare shows a marked trend downwards, despite the enormous losses during the two world wars.

World wars in the sense large, general wars have occurred many times in history, and WWI was neither particularly brutal nor destructive. Unfortunately, the terms used for the great wars 1914-18 and 1939-45 indicates they were unique, which is not really the case (except in the technology used).

Patrick: That number is an average, so a 28-year life expectancy doesn't mean that 30-year olds were considered old in ancient Rome.

Yes. People of all age-groups died at a rate we today would find appalling, but if you survived childhood there was a fair chance of living into middle and old age. That doesn't make the Roman empire an attractive place to live, though. That's something the "kings and battles and geniuses"-approach to history (which is what most people are familiar with) has tended to overlook.

Jan Haugland: Mortality from warfare shows a marked trend downwards, despite the enormous losses during the two world wars.

That's interesting, but what is your source? I found a list of approximate war deaths for the 19th and 20th centuries, which doesn't seem to agree with that. But then there is no way to make good estimates for the 19th century and much of the 20th, and it is also a question of how you define "death by warfare". Killed on the battlefield, or dead as a consequence of war? And is it fair to speak of "peace" when your own government murders you, like in the Ukrainian genocide?

In either case, my concern here is with the word "progress". Even if there were fewer relative deaths from war in the 20th than in the 19th century, I don't see how we can call this progress towards peace. The world was not a more peaceful place, and fewer deaths could be caused by other things than a trend towards peace, for instance different methods of fighting or different alliances, or the impact of war could be reduced by economic or medical progress. (I'm just speculating, of course.)

Looks like pessimism is the winner, via Instapundit:

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship

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Who needs pessimists when there are optimists like you, Bjørn.

I can't find any comfort in your last paragraph. What do you mean there? You talk about a future which might not be that bright as some optimists like to have it, which all makes sense. But then you suggest we just 'change the rules'. How does that change a reality where progress is not a given fact? How do rules affect reality (or the future) at all? Which rules do you suggest we change? You have to let us in on that. I would like to turn this scary place into a liberating one, too (I hope it doesn't involve drugs).

Don't let us hanging out there with just those two sentences.

Taco: But then you suggest we just 'change the rules'. How does that change a reality where progress is not a given fact?

I meant you can play by your own set of rules, even if nobody else does, or even cares. If everybody acts in a way you think is dumb or wrong, then maybe you can't change that, but you can still do things the way you think they should be done. You can assert your alternative, calmly and resolutely. I think this actually becomes easier when you don't expect everyone to come around to your view, because then you can switch from something a bit desperate ("why won't they listen to me??") to something constructive ("here's what I believe and live by").

This works for views about religion/philosophy, ethics, politics and other things. Maybe people won't change, but you're still free to decide your own life.

Sandy P: Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship

.. which shows that even former Soviet dissidents don't automatically know what they're talking about.

In general, one is an optimist is one believes that there will not be a fundamental change in cultural values in the future and one is a pessimist if one believes that there will.

We see history as a generally positive progression because our own values are products of it. One of the defining periods in Western history was the Renaissance and it was out of the Renaissance that the foundations of modern values, those widely held in the West today, emerged. Someone like Savaronola would view the the Renaissance negatively because it was a movement away from the established values of the period.

Another book for you o read, Bjorn:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595550542/002-1466734-8612049?n=283155

An Army of Davids by the blogfather.

An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

If possible you should ask your father if he considers you smarter,richer, and happier; than he. The world's going to hell. Fast.

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