Carl Jung and the aesthetics of progress
This century of ours, the 21st, is thoroughly unlike the one that preceded it. The 20th saw death on an impossible scale, it saw the arrival and departure of ideologies, traditions and dictators, many of which considered themselves infallible. Nothing was sacred and all was possible. The megalomania of the Great Wars cast great doubt on the nature of humanity, and every turn seemed a road to nowhere.
The late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, have been peaceful and prosperous, much more so than would have seemed possible at the height of the Cold War. We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, the West sang softly in praise of itself. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
Democracy flourished and spread, and it seemed the War to end all Wars was finally vindicated. History, Fukuyama declared, is over. It was finally time for us to enjoy the plentitude and prosperity our ancestors had died fighting for.
And the ensuing decades have been fruitful indeed. Global poverty has fallen from 40% at the start of the 1980’s to below 10% now. Literacy rates are up 50%. Life expectancy is up by 10 years. Third-world consumption and GDP have soared. By effectively every metric, our economists tell us, we have progressed.
But this macroscopic vision of the world is misleadingly rosy. While we have seen undeniable economic progress in absolute terms, there have been costs to this progress. The nature of society has been drastically altered, with industrialization, mechanization and technology all becoming inextricably linked to our idea of progress. The current age, despite its unmatched material prosperity is also characterized by acute discontent. As old ways of life die, amid the backdrop of a secularized society, rising rates of depression and suicide, the nuclear family disintegrating, political turmoil, the echoes of the uncertainty of the 20th century seem to sounding again. The sacred idea of progress is being questioned once more.
‘Progress’ itself is a vague idea. It is so central to our thinking, and always has been, it is difficult to step back and consider it objectively. Modernity is the story of progress; the Enlightenment sacralises it and Manifest Destiny indulges it. It runs through capitalism’s expansion (or declension, depending on who you ask). From Obama to Reagan to the Tsars and Khans, to anarchists and Marxists, none fail to appeal to some form of it.
But the current variety of techno-industrial progress that dominates the modern world has some very distinct features. It is entirely materialistic. The metrics by which any nation, state or place are judged are utilitarian and economic. It assumes that humanity’s glorious zenith can be totally conceived in observable metrics (GDP, life expectancy, education rate, carbon emissions etc.…), with moral, spiritual and aesthetic factors being irrelevant.
Modern progress also fetishizes gigantism. The notion that ‘bigger is better and biggest is best’ is abundantly apparent in development dogma. This has the knock-on effect of ruthlessly prioritizing efficiency, as small changes can produce substantial decreases in cost over large scales, dis-incentivizing the presence of features for their own sake.
When Dianne Feinstein said “a city that is not growing is dying”, she revealed what I consider to be the most insidious axiom of modern progress. It is insatiable.” Growth for the sake of growth,” said Edward Abbey, “is the ideology of a cancer cell”, and I agree wholeheartedly. The techno-industrial economic system is reliant on the continuance emergence of new, bigger markets in order to maintain its survival.
The ultimate exemplar of this troika is China’s new Belt and Road plan. The trillion-dollar initiative is an expansive combination of investments in transportation, communication, and energy networks across more than 60 countries in Eurasia, Oceania, and Africa. While a few nations had opposed China’s plans (all for strategic or economic reasons), the vast majority have enthusiastically celebrated the plan, with nations accounting for 60% of the world's population and 33% of the global gross domestic product already being signatories.
Many of BRI’s major corridors are known to pass through ecologically sensitive areas. Over 265 threatened species are expected to be negatively affected, with a sub-species of Indonesian orangutan expected to go extinct by the damming of a river. The lack of opposition to the BRI on any grounds other than economic grounds is a most-telling exposition of the modern zeitgeist.
Carl Jung saw the roots of impending tragedy in his own era: The Age of Enlightenment had “stripped nature and human institutions of gods,” Jung professed, “bestowing rationality and wealth but neglecting core elements of human satisfaction. “To dismiss the soul as illusion was to miss something big.”
“Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations,” Jung said, “modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche, destabilized by unfulfilled spiritual yearnings. What the human psyche craves are faith, hope, love, and insight.” Jung thought that the conquering of nature and advent of material prosperity would never be enough to create paradise on Earth, if this blocked the realization of our spiritual potential.
Not only are our last remaining wilderness areas being bulldozed, our rivers dammed and poisoned, but the uglification and aesthetic abuse of our world has become a planetary process. The only place you can find beauty any more is where ‘progress’ has overlooked it.
And we’re powerless to stop it. Questioning the virtue of mechanization and industrialization are outside the Overton window. Outside a few European states, there are no notable politicians entertaining the idea of economic equilibrium, or even sceptical of the notion that material prosperity is worthwhile regardless of if it renders the Earth an uglier, noisier and more prosaic place.
Growing up in Nairobi, I’ve seen first-hand what is happening in effectively every city and town in the world. It used to be that a country home, with its large gardens and fruit orchards of pomegranate and apple, with loose shingle roofing covered in bougainvillea and hedges instead of fences, were affordable and desirable for a middle-class family. The homes had a sense of place and were unique to their time and culture. Everyone knew their neighbours. Today, just 15 years later, these are all but gone, in their place soulless apartments; the ancient trees felled, the gardens tarmacked and electric fences erected. The city I grew up in is unrecognisable.
I only share this anecdote because it typifies so accurately the true, on-the-ground reality of what progress has meant for so many people, and how quickly things change with the inception of industrial progress. The few traditional homes left in Nairobi have become unaffordable to the middle class because of their diminished supply. Our idea of growth is inextricably linked with the uglification of our world.
Thus, I level my accusation on the aesthetics of modern progress; it forces the vast majority of us to live as if beauty doesn’t matter. The built environment of this age does not consider beauty or sublimity important, nor does it celebrate nature and its elegance, but efficiency and rationality instead. Ornamentation is considered superfluous, as is inevitable when our idea of growth is predicated on efficiency.
Once again, Jung was many years ahead of his time, Jung perceived the ontological void that accompanied spirituality’s recession. When “earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the centre of the universe,” he said, people “were all children of God” who knew the path to “eternal blessedness” and “joyous existence.” “Waning spiritual power will induce the rise of unstable, insecure, and suggestible masses,” he warned, “hobbled with debilitating feelings of insignificance, inadequacy, and hopelessness.”
Now it seems as if we worship growth, progress and development above all else. We have somehow created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient Romantic traditions. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. We have built a society where man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate. The crises of depression, suicide, obesity, alienation, hatred and listlessness are a reflection of our humanity railing against this ruthless machine that is demolishing the conditions necessary for our flourishment.
So, to the supporters of progress as currently conceived, then, I raise the following questions; when the farthest corner of the globe has been domesticated, the last trace of wilderness stamped out and conquered; when the suburbs Tokyo, Paris and Cairo are indistinguishable; when man has been fully ‘civilized’: what for? — where to? — and what next?
