Enlightenment/Progress

Sometimes, when I’m stuck in city traffic, wandering the grocery store isle dedicated to high fructose corn syrup products, or fruitlessly trying to wend my way through recorded messages on the telephone, I imagine that Henry David Thoreau, Jean Jacque Rousseau, or Simone Weil were risen from the dead and there beside me to commiserate. The shock would probably kill them again, however. Despite all their prescient warnings that have been passed down in inspired writings over the decades and centuries, even they would not believe what we have wrought.

In his famous Discourse, The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asks what it is that created the difference between “men and brutes,” and came to the conclusion that it is the “faculty of self-improvement,” why man alone is liable to grow into a dotard and makes him “at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Not a great endorsement of progress, reflection, or our entire historical record. He and Voltaire are credited with bringing Enlightenment to an 18th century European world defined by tyranny, but Voltaire didn’t believe, any more than Rousseau did, that there was much hope for the dotard: “Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men; the common people will always be fanatical.”

Apparently the American founding fathers didn’t think much better of the common people than Voltaire when they created our representative republic and established the electoral college so the common people’s vote could be overruled by the aristocratic vote. They may have thought they were throwing off their European shackles during the American Revolution, but they were quick to identify themselves as the new elites of the vast American continent, ready to conquer the “savages” (Native Americans) and the wilderness, not to mention expanding their agricultural economy on the backs of their slaves.

While the abolitionists and Transcendentalists of the 19th century sought to enlighten American society to the evils of slavery and European religion and culture, Thoreau also talks about humanity distinguishing itself from the “brute beasts” through an unsuccessful striving for “purity.” I can just imagine him, more than Rousseau or Voltaire, who both led what he would probably have called “impure” lives, plunked down in the middle of a shopping mall in Los Angeles, crying out, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

All my life choices have been based on finding that simplicity—avoiding consumer culture by living in the closest thing to its last vestige in northern New Mexico. Then I get here and I end up fighting the environmental “purists” who tell me that the indigenous folks who live up here aren’t pure anymore because they want to continue to harvest trees for firewood and graze their cattle on public lands that used to belong to them. The only thing pure is their environmentalism sin gente, which would like to consign everyone to town and consumer culture so we don’t pollute the wilderness. Civilization becomes the scourge of nature.

Raymond Williams said, in his essay Problems in Materialism and Culture, “It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted man and abstracted nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline.”

Thoreau, these environmentalists, and even the postmodernists fall into the trap of assigning progress an a-political, historically sweeping definition that negates the need to continually pursue a just and equitable world with small, but insistent victories. As I said in my introduction, there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves, that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. You don’t have to label it progress, but you do have to constantly evaluate it as a kind of enlightenment that allows an increasing number of us to flourish.