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Title: Midnight in the Century
Author: Miguel Amorós
Date: November 8, 2012
Language: en
Topics: culture, environment, philosophy, science, technology
Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/midnight-century-notes-against-progress-miguel-amor%C3%B3s
Notes: Transcript of a presentation delivered on November 8, 2012 at the Círculo de la Amistad-Numancia, in Soria, Spain. Translated in November 2013 from a copy of the Spanish original obtained from the author.

Miguel Amorós

Midnight in the Century

“… memory needs to reestablish the thread of time to recover the central

point of view from which the road forward may be discovered. From that

point begins the reconquest of the capacity for critical judgment that

will be based on verifiable facts, that will be able to respond to the

degradation of life, and that will precipitate the split in society, the

preliminary moment for a revolution, proposing the historical question

par excellence, that is, the question of progress.”

“History of Ten Years”, Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 2

Made famous by the Enlightenment, in its origins the idea of Progress

was almost subversive. The Church imposed the dogmas of creation and

permanence that established the immutability of living beings, created

by the divinity just as they were, which is why there are very few lines

in the Encyclopedia under the caption of “Progress”, which is simply

defined as “forward movement”. On the other hand, Diderot and the other

Encyclopedists did not consider civilized society to be superior to the

society of the savages—quite the contrary—which is why their position

with regard to progress was sceptical or reserved, to say the least. For

one reason or another, the idea was imposed in Europe during the

Industrial Revolution. As Mumford said, “progress was the equivalent in

history of mechanical motion through space”. It was the interpretation

of the fact of change as something that only went in one direction, in

which going backwards, or decline or regression, were explicitly

excluded. Enlightenment thought interpreted industrial production as the

herald of a world free of religious prejudices and ruled by Reason,

where happiness would be within the reach of everyone. The reality often

contradicted this interpretation, but the contradiction was resolved by

supposing that backwards movement formed part of the advance; for

example, it was assumed that the ugliness of industrialized society was

pregnant with a future in which material abundance would be the rule and

freedom its result. And to top it all off, science would solve all

problems, the economy would grow and the democratic state would offer

equality before the law in the realm of distribution. Every coin has an

obverse side, however, and under the blows of science, statism and

productivity, progress has led us to the verge of disaster: science and

technology have transformed the means of production into increasingly

more powerful means of destruction; economic development has engendered

inequality, social injustice and poverty everywhere, and in the process

has devastated the natural environment; the state has become a

many-tentacled bureaucratic monster that devours the life of its

subjects. Social and ecological disasters have become common currency

and dissatisfaction, like the crisis, has become generalized.

Individuals, crushed by production and politics, are incapable of

mastering their fates. Within them resides a void that has been

accumulating for more than two centuries that renders them utterly

incapable of formulating and communicating their dissatisfaction,

although for the first time ever the belief in a better future is

generally collapsing. Confronted by the real possibility that the world

is now plunging into even greater difficulties that augur its doom in

the not-too-distant future, the idea of the future has lost all its

relevance. In view of these regressions on such a vast scale, the

sufferings of past generations seem to have been in vain. This is

significant because all emancipatory ideas from the French Revolution up

to May 1968 were justified in the name of scientific reason and

progress.

For the progressivists, science revealed inexorable economic and social

laws whose historical necessity was not questioned, since, inscribed in

the nature of things, they were beyond all human designs: in order to be

equitable and just we have to acknowledge and obey them. The founding

principle was the one that postulated the continuous and unlimited

perfectibility of the human being, by virtue, according to Godwin, the

first to refer to anarchy, of the empire of scientific Reason. Fourier

said that it was the desire of nature that barbarism would tend by

stages to reach civilization. Proudhon even claimed that the idea of

Progress replaced the ideal of the Absolute in philosophy. Marx

designated the working class as its main historical agent, as the

“greatest productive force”. The historical process, according to Hegel,

as it moved forward left the Idea (progress) in its wake. His disciple

Marx taught us that this process was nothing but a natural unfolding of

economic stages in obedience to laws against which the human will was

powerless; the human will was, furthermore, determined by these same

laws. It was the historical process associated with the scientific and

technical development of production that lay at the heart of the Marxist

doctrine that was so effectively criticized by Bakunin, a doctrine in

which it was implicit that the scientific knowledge of its laws would

enlighten a class of leaders who, organized in the party, would guide

the masses in a revolution that aimed at the best possible destiny in a

classless society. There were some powerful blows directed at

metaphysics and religion, but they did not overthrow them; to the

contrary, they reinforced them with a new superstition: scientific

superstition.

Scientific fetishism is the substance of the idea of Progress. For the

progressivists of every school science appears as the remedy for every

evil. All thought must adopt its methods and accept its conclusions.

Reflections on truth, justice or equality that are not framed in the

context of science are defined as metaphysical disquisitions. Whereas

religion was a thing of the past, science belonged to the highly

developed future, to progress. The two were less incompatible than was

believed, however. In progressivism, science shows itself to be not just

knowledge, but faith. Saint-Simon, one of the first socialist reformers,

considered his followers to be “engineer evangelists” and “apostles of

the new religion of industry”. For his schismatic student Comte, science

elevated man to the status of “supreme head of the economy of nature …

at the head of the living hierarchy”, awakening in him “the noble desire

of honorable incorporation with the supreme existence”, and, as a

result, leading him to a “perfect unity” with the “Great-Being”, the

definitive form of existence. The most widely-read book of the 19^(th)

century, Looking Backward, a techno-scientific utopia written by Edward

Bellamy, described the process of becoming conscious of the inhumanity

of social relations in religious terms: “The sunburst, after so long and

dark a night, must needs have had a dazzling effect. (…) It is evident

that nothing was able to stand against the enthusiasm which the new

faith inspired. (…) For the first time since the creation every man

stood up straight before God. (…) the way stretches far before us, but

the end is lost in light. For twofold is the return of man to God….”

“The divinity had implanted the idea of Progress in the hearts of men,

judged by which our past attainments seem always insignificant, and the

goal never nearer.” The roots that had only recently been torn from the

ground of religion now grew in a similar soil thanks to the fascination

inspired by scientific magic. Divine authority had only just been

overthrown, and now the new faith promised to make men into mortal gods

inhabiting a techno-scientific Olympia. But because the economy was

based on the separation of individuals from one another, on the

separation between them and the product of their activity, and on the

separation of the latter from nature, its development based on science

generated a surplus value of irrationality. Soon a new kind of leader

appeared, inspired by scientific assumptions, dubious traits that with

the passage of time became predominant, both in the capitalist and

socialist camp; the tendency to justify the means by the end, the

present by the future, or the real by the ideal, for example; the ruling

class appealed to the urgent imperatives of the situation of the moment

in order to destroy the poetry of the liberating revolution, postponing

sine die an ever less substantial justice and liberty. Thus, the social

life propagated first by the bourgeoisie, and later by the bureaucratic

class born from the revolution, tended to regulate itself in accordance

with pragmatic criteria, renouncing the dictates of objective reason;

the latter were reduced to their utilitarian, subjective and formalistic

dimension. As a result, while moral conduct dissolved into mean-spirited

egoism, economic and political order were secured. Comte, whose

political slogan was “Order and Progress”, had already specified that,

“in all cases, considerations relating to progress are subordinated to

those relating to order”. And going even further back in history, an

enlightened precursor like Fontanelle maintained that the truth, the

principal determination of Reason, had to be subordinated to criteria of

utility, and even sacrificed altogether if social conventions so

required. The same thing can be said of all the other determinations.

The bourgeois class, and behind it the bureaucracy, in order to

liquidate Reason, invented a new pseudo-rationalist metaphysics that was

manifested as blind faith in scientific discoveries, technical

innovations and economic development, a faith designated as

“materialism”, which was destined to lead to a perpetual present of

irrationality and barbarism. Stalinism, for example, demonstrated that

not even history had progressed enough and that historical progress had

been nothing but an ideology at the service of a new ruling class, the

party bureaucracy, which was used to disguise oppression on a colossal

scale. After a certain level of this revered progress had been attained,

which led to the first world war and the rise of Nazism, its negative

effects have so far surpassed its positive effects that it constitutes a

threat to the survival of the human species: in the subsequent stage of

development the ultimate end of progress was then revealed to be the end

of humanity, first materialized in nuclear weapons, and then in the

police state and the industrialization of life, and finally in pollution

and global warming. If history continues along the course laid out by

progressivist hubris in all its variants, the endpoint will be

desolation, not the Eden of the happy consumer or the communist

paradise.

The idea of Progress establishes an ascendant trajectory from the

societies labeled as primitive to today’s modern civilization. In

practice, it means incessant transformation of the social environment

and constant renewal of the economic conditions that determine that

environment. The present is nothing but a passing stage on the road to a

better future. This idea, however, considers contemporary society to be

superior to all preceding epochs and above all contemplates the

evolution of society as the fulfillment of its own evolution. The future

is nothing but the apotheosis of the present. In reality, the future

vanishes in ideology, leaving nothing of progressivism but a vulgar

apology for what exists. This is why the entire ruling class, in

politics and the economy, proclaims progress as a symbol of its identity

because, to the degree that it dominates the present, it re-inscribes

the past, of which it feels it is the heir, and conjures up the specter

of the future over which it never relinquishes control. Progress is

“its” progress. Leaders make progress, despite their redundancy, thanks

to the progress of ignorance and control, leading to ever more gigantic

institutional structures. Just think of the possibilities of rule that

are opened up by the technological systems of surveillance or mass

culture, not to speak of the extension of the state educational model in

which the first progressivists placed their hopes, which has created a

functional form of ignorance that the virtual space has generalized.

This explains why individuals, however far science has progressed, are

less capable now than ever before of being the masters of their fates.

What they call Progress these days does not lead to the enlightenment of

the mind or to personal autonomy because the only thing it aims at is

economic growth and the consumerist way of life associated with the

latter. The separate power to which it lays claim requires egotistical

and fearful, or better yet, mechanized beings. It does not want beings

who think for themselves and are capable of orienting their moral

conduct in accordance with objective knowledge, but people who are

unreflective and standardized, absorbed by the accessory and the

instantaneous, and gripped by fear—people programmed to bow before the

messages received from the apparatus of domination. The standardization

and commodification of all human activities produces the characteristic

irrationality which our leaders consecrate with the name of progress;

meanwhile, genetic engineering is constructing its biotechnological

foundations. The culture of truth and justice does not flourish in such

progress, but its image serves as an alibi for slavery and oppression.

Alleged social advances are always accompanied by unconsciousness,

dehumanization and anomie, in such a manner that this Progress

eliminates its most important postulate: the idea of the emancipated,

free man.

Let us recapitulate. At first, the modern concept of Progress was the

offspring of the defeat of religion by Reason. The victory of Reason,

however, was only apparent, that is, it was not the victory of

humanization. We have already spoken of the degradation of Reason to an

instrument of power. Now we shall speak of the consequences of this

degeneration for nature. By imposing a rational conception of the world

that supplanted the religious worldview, nature was desacralized and the

world disenchanted. It lost all its meaning and was subsequently viewed

with indifference as an inert object and a raw material; basically, as a

warehouse of resources. This antagonism between a nature that had been

stripped of meaning and a pillaging civilization was embodied in a

series of ambiguous concepts like success, welfare, development, and …

progress. Human activity ceased to celebrate its mysterious relation to

nature and proceeded, not to consider it rationally by trying to

understand its truth in order to be able to orient itself accordingly,

but to dominate it. Then, by converting it into an object subject to

endless exploitation, what was really achieved was the forced adaptation

of individuals to the coercive social environment that was engendered

during this process. The price of progress was the subjection of life to

the pragmatic rationalization imposed by the commodity and the state in

which means are confounded with ends: life obeyed progress, rather than

the reverse. Life enslaved to progress was the crucible where objective

reason was forged and all the concepts that constituted its core

evaporated: truth, justice, happiness, equality, solidarity, tolerance,

freedom…. As Horkheimer concluded: “Domination of nature involves

domination of man”. The tyranny exercised over nature entailed as a

consequence the simultaneous submission and brutalization of the human

being. The evacuation of the conscience was deduced from the mechanistic

conception of man. The most extreme of all the materialist philosophers,

La Mettrie, already conceived of the human being as a machine that winds

its own springs, and considered thought to be a byproduct of mechanical

activity of lesser importance. Such an unprecedented idea, formulated in

the middle of the 17^(th) century during the intellectual struggle

against metaphysical systems and religions, provided a scientific

foundation for the manipulability of the human species, something that

the ruling classes of later times took very seriously. By an irony of

history, religion had nothing to lose in this battle. One hundred years

later, Boolean algebra, which made possible the mechanical simulation of

human thought, reduced the latter to a simple mathematical

representation, in pursuit of nothing less than “revelation from the

mind of God”. If we ascend by the road of binary mathematics, there is

no room for doubt that digital computers are bringing us closer to the

divinity, which is no longer in the heavens, but in virtual space.

Once the obscurantist side of science had been revealed, as extreme

specialization divided knowledge into stagnant compartments, and its

inability to provide a holistic, unitary and coherent conception of the

world that would constitute individuals and reinforce their connections

with nature became manifest, technology stood alone as the last

fetishism to denounce. In the latest phases of capitalist domination,

progress is equivalent to technical progress, since the experts who work

on behalf of the latter attribute to technology the prospect of ultimate

salvation, which has been transformed by employers, politicians and

fanatical disinformers into an almost millenarian orthodoxy. With

technology, the evils of development will be cured with more

development. As a result, technology has created an artificial and

hierarchical environment that is alien to social needs, an environment

within which all of everyday life transpires, a second nature that

completely determines the social order. Individuals have escaped from

the constraints of natural conditioning only to be enslaved by machines.

Machines intervene in relations between humans and now mediate between

humans and nature, preventing any direct relation. Man, climbing aboard

the wagon of progress, is definitively isolated from his own kind and

cut off from the cosmos, which he does not view as something that is

alive, nor does he consider that he is part of it. The British biologist

and crystallographer John Bernal celebrates this emancipation from

natural servitude in his book, The World, the Flesh and the Devil: “The

cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent

chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the

acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be

less and less needed.” The human mind capitulates before the mechanistic

concept and worships technology. Automation collaborates in this

process. The individual considers himself free to the extent that he

allows himself to be led by machines, which now comprise his

environment; machines do all the work and even spare him the labor of

reflection. But freedom of a mechanistic order excludes the right to not

use machines. Everyone depends on them and no one can live on the

margins, that is, no one can live in opposition to Progress.

In a quantitative world, technical reason values reflex reactions above

intelligence, efficiency above meaning, and calculation above truth, in

such a way that when you hear someone speak of “artificial

intelligence”, it is not because artifacts have become capable of

thought, but because human thought has become mechanical. For the

visionaries of total dehumanization, machina sapiens is nothing more

than the transfer of our mental legacy to a mechanical progeny, since

man, immersed in a technological universe, functions like a machine and

the machine functions like a human automaton. His destiny, as the

current conditions of existence indicate, is “to pass the torch of life

and intelligence to the computer”. The conclusion that is drawn from

this circumstance, however, is not the rejection of technology, but the

rejection of the role that it plays in the current historical period of

capitalist rule, beginning with its redemptive religious function that

is so widely shared by the masses. Technology, insofar as it facilitates

the metabolism between humans and nature, is necessary. The tool was

created for man. But when it becomes the discourse of power, i.e.,

technology, it becomes a threat to the survival of the species.

Technology follows a road that begins with basic human needs and ends by

creating its own world. That is the moment of its autonomy, the moment

when it takes over. Everyday life is powerless against an invasive

technology that constantly alters society as it introduces an endless

series of innovations. If we were to make an inventory today of what it

has contributed to and what it has taken from society, the result could

not be more negative. On the one side of the ledger, the implantation of

homo oeconomicus, the man who is motivated solely by self-interest, in

one part of the world, and an increase in the level of superfluous

consumption. On the other side of the ledger, the pauperization and

exploitation of the other part of the world, the depletion of resources,

the accumulation of armaments and the destruction of the planet. One may

thus confirm that the biggest social problem is not the lack of

development, but development itself. It is not the lack of technology,

but the absence of human goals.

Unlike “primitive” cultures, materialist civilization is indifferent to

its dependence on the environment and for that reason has never

attempted to preserve any kind of equilibrium with its natural

surroundings. Its need for growth, disguised as progress, led it to

contaminate the soil, corrupt the air, adulterate the food, and poison

the water, and to exacerbate social differences and endanger the health

of the population. The accelerated destruction of the natural and social

environment that we are now experiencing cannot be avoided but will get

even worse: it is the fruit of the dynamic of the system itself, which

needs to grow as much as possible. Acts of aggression against the land

have become habitual and the problem is not so much their immediate

impacts as their cumulative effects, which assume the form of the energy

crisis, nuclear disasters and global warming. The new environmental

consciousness of our leaders emerges on the scene in order to make

destruction itself profitable, which is inevitable, since it is

inscribed in the dominant mode of production and consumption. Today,

progress colors itself green in order to turn its imperfections into

business opportunities; actually, it does not have any other disguise to

wear: its constant demands compel it to engage in the over-exploitation

of the land. In the kingdom of the commodity, everything has a price,

from the air that we breathe to the rural districts we visit; from now

on, however, this price must be determined by environmental

considerations. The leaders who have been converted to environmentalism

must incorporate the cost of certain instances of collateral damage of

the ongoing disaster into the final price-tag if they want the

foundations of industrial society to continue to exist without

transformation. Should they be transformed, for them this would be the

end of Progress; for us, however, Progress is the end.

The critique of the idea of Progress leads us along dangerous roads that

skirt the edges of ideological abysses. From the philosophical point of

view, the demolition of progressivist materialism does not imply a

return to the duality of matter and spirit, nor is it a rickety bridge

to nihilism. Nor does the rejection of a teleological history

necessarily signify the rejection of history. The denial of a scientific

ethic does not lead to the impugning of science as such any more than

the inanity of the current educational system excludes the idea of

education. Simply stated, the assertion that history does not have a

plan, and that it does not conceal a purpose, that historical laws are

not laws since the history of humanity is a process of becoming rather

than one of consummation; that scientific knowledge is not itself the

social beacon and that the transmission of experience from one

generation to another does not function by way of educational

institutions. We have claimed that social contradictions are ultimately

derived from the contradictions between society and nature that have

been revealed by history. But we are the offspring of enlightenment

Reason, not of the Bhagavad-Gita or the Early Paleolithic era, which is

why we think that these contradictions will not be resolved by elevating

nature to the rank of supreme principle, nor will their disappearance be

magically effected with the help of Heaven or the holy scriptures, or by

encouraging a return to natural religion or to the past. Good intentions

of that kind mitigate neither the crisis of rational thought nor that of

the world, but instead nourish irrational ideologies and fundamentalist

movements that only make these crises more acute. The critique of the

idea of Progress is neither a revolt against Reason nor against

intellectual training and knowledge, much less against civilization in

general; it is a critique of its degradation and its decline. It does

not appeal to Transcendence, a New Science or Tradition, but to thought

that is free of chains, thought that, subverting the ideological

foundations of the system, leads human beings to a rational unity and

harmony with nature.

Not only are we the offspring of the Enlightenment; we are also the

offspring of Romanticism, of its will for truth, beauty and action, and

of its search for spirituality and mystery. We rebel in the name of

Reason and logic, yes, but also in the name of emotion, passion and

desire. While the man who wants to be free does not want to exchange old

myths for new but to go to the root of things, he does not renounce the

“re-enchantment” of the world in absolute variance with the ruling

class, either. This re-enchantment is a way of becoming conscious that

is linked to the revolutionary efforts to forestall the deplorable

process of capitalist progress, which quantifies, mechanizes and

destroys life. It is the reunion of the rational and that which the

surrealists called the marvelous. In the revolution and poetry, which

are becoming the same thing, it is the road to an alternative

civilization. It is the only way that humanity has to grow and become

what it potentially is. The new starting point is not to be found in a

bureaucratization of nature comparable to that which has been imposed on

society, but in a de-bureaucratized reconciliation between nature and

society. Right from the start, this reconciliation challenges the

current conditions that are opposed to it, like industrialization,

statism, economic development and progress. Its program must therefore

be de-urbanizing, anti-industrial, anti-political and anti-progress; it

must promote new values, new ways of life, new methods of social

action…. Nature and society must find their equilibrium, but to do so

they have to be saved from the bureaucrats, the experts, the investors

and the ideologists of salvation. The only way to achieve harmony

between nature and society is by not surrendering, neither in theory nor

in practice, to the logic of domination. Only a society that is the

conscious master of its own history will be able to manumit a nature

that has been enslaved to progress. This is not an eternally possible

proposition, however: thanks to technocracy, domination is manufacturing

a literally uninhabitable world, and as Walter Benjamin points out in

One Way Street: “If the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not completed by

an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a

moment signaled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), all is lost.

Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut”.

The necessary revolution will not break out from a mere contradiction

between the masses of consumers and the financing of consumption, but

from the determined reaction against a kind of progress that

irremediably leads to catastrophe.