The pilgrims of progress who are leading us to self-destruction – The Guardian

Species disappearing, ice melting, topsoil vanishing, choking with carbon emissions when our forebears spoke breathlessly about future progress, this wasnt what they had in mind. Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/AP

Im sitting at the bottom of my garden, reading Paul Kingsnorths astonishing new book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. Its too late, he says. There is no way we can reverse the environmental changes that will lead to our destruction. And the very idea of progress, of continual forward momentum, is precisely the engine of our destruction. I start to daydream. My thinking slips sideways. I start puzzling about the Progressive Alliance. What is a progressive? And how are they related to the progress Kingsnorth believes has been destroying our planet?

The word progressive twists and turns in our political life, constantly shifting its meaning. Tony Blair repurposed the term for those broadly on the left who didnt want to call themselves socialists. Yet David Cameron was also frequently described that way. Now, however, the term progressive means not Tory. The Progressive Alliance urges tactical voting from Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters, to limit the size of Theresa Mays victory. Being progressive is a big party, and almost everyone is welcome. How about Rick Wakeman, Iwonder? After all, he was the poster boy of progressive rock you remember, interminable keyboard solos by men with long hair and silly silver boots. Iknow, Im being slightly facetious. But these days hes a big donor to the Conservatives. Its hard to know who progressives would not invite to their party.

And how come the very idea of progress is intuited as something broadly of the left? A hundred years ago in Italy, the so-called futurists were fascists, appropriating the language of technological progress for the far right. Idealists, workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine, of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity, gushed the futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Love of progress isnt just for progressives. Hell, only last week, even Kim Jong-un was lauding his latest missile launch as a great leap forward.

The historian Sidney Pollard described the belief in progress as the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind that it consists in irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement. These days progressives would write humankind. And yes, thats an improvement. But the idea that history consists of some continual and inevitable elevator towards human betterment is hardly borne out by the environmental catastrophe that our ingenuity and greed are currently visiting upon this planet. Species disappearing, ice melting, topsoil vanishing, choking with carbon emissions when our forebears spoke breathlessly about future progress, this wasnt what they had in mind.

Kingsnorth doesnt romanticise the past. He just points out that seeing the future with rose-tinted spectacles is now more socially acceptable, and therefore more dangerous: The kind of people who are disgusted by an idealized past can often barely contain their enthusiasm for an idealized future.

In economic terms, progress goes by the name of growth. Ever onwards, ever upwards, calls the money-making machine. And we are its servants, poor Homo economicus. Trapped by debt, we are encouraged by our leaders to run ever faster (they call it productivity) to make and buy more useless and invented stuff even if that means us borrowing more to do it. The possibility of one or two Green MPs aside, all of those we will elect to parliament next month will believe economic growth to be an unquestionably good thing. No party will ever form a government on the basis that we will need to learn to live with less. A collapsing planet is a niche interest, an inconvenient externality that will one day be resolved by technological progress that contemporary deus ex machina, good for all occasions.

Ovid had something to say about all this towards the end of the first century BC: Clever human nature, victim of your inventions, disastrously creative. Thats the sort of wisdom you dont need progress to achieve.

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The pilgrims of progress who are leading us to self-destruction - The Guardian