Every coin has the other side. Every action produces a reaction. If a drug has clinical effects, it also has side effects. There’s a cloud behind every silver lining.
And these are just simple things. Something as complex as a civilisation serves up dichotomies and trichotomies galore – nothing is unequivocal, straightforward, clear-cut.
If asked to name the two most salient features of the modern West, most people would probably mention political democracy and scientific progress. Moreover, the same hypothetical respondents are likely to opine that both features are without a downside.
If someone told them that, for all their virtue, democracy and progress may well destroy our civilisation culturally, intellectually and possibly even physically, they’d decide they are talking to a madman. Yet there would be method in his madness, and truth in his assertion.
Both Plato and Aristotle were wary of democracy, especially when it isn’t balanced by other forms of government. (In fact, they favoured mixed regimes and warned against any unalloyed political system, be it democracy, oligarchy or monarchy.)
Aristotle referred to democracy as a “deviant constitution”, and he didn’t just mean it was flawed politically. He feared that democracy would produce a wounding ricochet on society because, if people are equal in one respect, they’ll deem themselves equal in all respects.
That would destroy the hierarchical spine of society, without which neither culture nor social stability would be possible. It was mainly in this sense that first Tocqueville and then Mill feared that democracy would bring about the “tyranny of the majority”.
In a representative democracy, the majority exercises political power only nominally. It delegates real power to a rather small elite that steadily moves away from the electorate while fostering the illusion that the people govern themselves. Such an elite can indeed become bossy or even despotic, and modernity serves up many illustrations of that.
But the real danger is different. For, when democracy is elevated to the status of absolute good, it vindicates Aristotle by spilling out into domains other than just political ones. Because everyone has an equal vote on political candidates, people eventually get to assume that the same horizontal arrangement applies everywhere.
Every opinion is as valid as any other, every taste as impeccable, every judgement as infallible – democracy breaks political banks and floods every walk of life with toxic effluvia. The effect is devastating and instantly observable.
Since commerce is also egalitarian in essence and, nowadays, all-pervasive, people acquire boundless power to vote for intellectual and aesthetic products with a show of hands, each clutching a wad of banknotes.
As a result, opinions that would never even be voiced in any other system become dominant. Abominable tastes marginalise beauty. Ignoramuses mould orthodoxies and set trends. Depravity trumps normality. Discernment bites the dust.
This directly affects the other claim that modernity has to civilisational ascendancy: scientific and technological progress. However, for all its usefulness, it exacerbates the downside of democracy.
Just because people can fly around the world in less time than it took to travel from London to Newcastle a couple of centuries ago, they develop such a deep attachment to progress that they assume it’s ubiquitous.
Science, in the shape of Darwinism, reinforces this view of life. People transpose their belief in Darwin’s slapdash theory of predetermined meliorative evolution into the conviction that political, social, economic and cultural trends are similarly vectored. But they aren’t.
People begin to see society as a machine that can be easily finetuned or redesigned, or else as a biological mechanism functioning according to predetermined rules. Yet it is neither. Society is a fragile and complex construct susceptible to all sorts of dangers.
One danger is the growing chasm between scientific progress and human regress. Prometheus might have given people the gift of fire, but he also gave them ways of turning that fire against themselves.
I’ll steer clear of dystopic, yet realistic, scenarios of mankind destroying itself with its advances in nuclear physics or artificial intelligence. Suffice it to say that sophisticated tools require sophisticated operators. When this condition isn’t met, trouble ensues.
What’s worth mentioning is that scientific progress can act as the sand in which mankind can bury its head and ignore unfolding social catastrophes. Take something as mundane as crime – specifically murder – rate.
About 400 homicides a year were committed in Victorian England. Today, the corresponding number is 600, give or take. Considering that the population has grown to double the size, we may flash a smug smile and rejoice: if anything, today’s situation is better and it’s certainly not worse. So what’s that about the moral decline of modernity?
In fact, we are looking at a catastrophe hiding behind scientific progress. Our surgical techniques, pharmacology and life-saving equipment have improved so much since the 19th century that thousands of wounds that would have proved fatal then are today regarded as mere scratches.
This is good news for victims who’d otherwise be dead, but catastrophic news for the moral health of society. If today’s victims of assaults were treated with 19th century techniques, our murder rate statistics would surge upwards exponentially.
Some experts estimate that today’s murder rate would be at least 100 times higher than in Victorian England. That means we have a much higher proportion of individuals ready to inflict grievous wounds on their neighbours. Hence our pride in modern scientific advances should be leavened with horror at the moral and social catastrophe those advances mask.
There used to be a stock joke in the Soviet army. A sergeant would ask a recruit: “What’s the most important part of a rifle?” Having heard the answer, he’d say: “Wrong. The most important part of a rifle is the soldier’s head.”
Far be it from me to offer Soviet NCOs as paragons of intellectual attainment. But you can see how that crude exchange could be extrapolated to Western modernity, with its unshakable belief in democracy and progress. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that.
Interesting article. Just last night I was pondering technological progress and what truly useful gadgets might be on the horizon. While the 20th century saw much progress and made our lives easier and longer, it seems to me that most of our current progress is frivolous. For example, I can set the desired temperature on my thermostat by walking over and pushing a few buttons. I do not need to control it with my phone, miles form my home. While I certainly make use of ordering products online rather than driving to a store, it is a poor replacement for entering a shop, browsing through the goods, and interacting with a courteous and knowledgeable shopkeep (a rare occurrence, I know). There are so many innovations that stifle human creativity and social interaction. The effects of that are so complex and widespread we may not understand it all for decades.
In addition, the modern obsession with democracy has led to an obsession with absolute freedom. But not freedom in a political sense. We worship freedom of choice. The whole point of our lives has become to choose. We care not what choices are made, we live to choose. People choose to kill babies, to kill the old, to pretend to change their sex, to live off the work of another rather than work themselves. As long as we are free to choose, then our lives supposedly have meaning.
Few seem to notice that, unfortunately, we have less freedom than ever before. Our governments wield power that King George III or King Louis XVI never dreamed of. We are told what car to buy, what lightbulb we must use, what showerhead we must install. Poor George and Louis never considered that they could force their subjects to ride a certain horse, burn a certain candle, use a particular bucket. Progress!