Progress & Nature

In the course of trying to find a new course for myself, I find myself running up against two different intuitions about the world, which more or less were the content of the last post. The first is that nature simply is what it is, and there's not a whole lot one can do to change that. Human beings will be human beings and any attempt to force them into a different mold will rebound. I had wanted to get into education to change minds and so change society. But what I found was that the people who were already open-minded and engaged were the ones who, well, stayed the same. The people who really needed to turn around and look at the world, the people who will go on to vote and run things and who impact all of our lives through their “private” opinions, twisted my lectures into the exact opposite of what I said when necessary to protect their little paradigms. Really, this shouldn't be too surprising – the Enlightenment should have taught us that educated apes just do more damage in their certainty.

But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that some sort of progress is possible, and that as someone in a privileged position, I have a responsibility to be part of that change. What good is intelligence if it can't actually provide foresight about the world's problems? When I'm planning out what to do and not already involved in something, I should be able to pick some life which would make a difference. The world doesn't seem to be merely a cycle, and I can't just hide somewhere while making my own life comfortable while things crumble around me. Maybe it's just my neurosis, but I can't just go off and till my own garden. It seems like a waste of a life, and honestly, life isn't so great that I want to live it merely for my own enjoyment.

Because of the first problem, I can't rely on naïve notions of progress, and I can't get wrapped up in idealistic projects. How can I commit myself to something that I know will probably fail? And I don't see any reason whatsoever to believe that there's any moral force in the universe, divine or otherwise, which will pick things up despite the appearances we've seen in history for thousands of years, or which will come alongside in my tasks when this force also seems to work with CEOs to build sweatshops. But we have seen that societies can change, at least somewhat, and that the way things have been is not the way they always must be, and I can't close my eyes to that either.

So there's this constraint: nature must be worked with. What are some solutions to the problem then? In martial arts, I think of how we work with natural forces to accomplish ends, so it at least seems possible in the abstract to change the world by working with nature. How does that translate into changing society, though? How do we work with the bigotry, power-grasping, tribalism, and narrow-mindedness that seem endemic to human nature (yes, including my own) to produce a society that rises above these things? At the end of the day, we still have our biology which was not built for modern life or for cosmopolitan living, but yet at the same time we can be aware of this and of the possibilities the future could hold. How do we combine the two?

I also think to the Chinese tradition, where you change the world by becoming virtuous yourself; then other people will naturally look to you. Of course, I'm skeptical about the efficacy of this. Confucius didn't seem to make much of a political difference in his day, and people studying him just made him into a new set of material to understand and a tool to demarcate the elite from the non-elite. But given the constraint that we can't just go and change other people by force, it seems like the only option would be to persuade them and let them arrive at the decision by themselves. The question is, what makes for viable persuasion.

This doesn't mean that we can't go and change material conditions as well – in fact, we need to do that. But that still only does any good if we can also change people around us and the structural forces that perpetuate the problems, and we can only do that by hacking the system, as it were. Shows of force in the end don't seem to change the situation, but merely repeat it – not that force is never justified, but that it doesn't seem to be a useful tool toward pushing the world to a different end. So what would work?