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Over at Whiskey and Gunpowder, there is an interesting article called Making History and the Myth of Progress. Below is my rather extensive quote of this excellent article, followed by some thoughts in another direction, expanding its scope.
The Communist era began after the invention of the telegraph and was still going strong after radio, telephone, and television had become ubiquitous. But as we will see, information provided no defense against exaggeration and myth. … In fact, one of the myths of Communism was the idea that productivity would increase without interruption and at spectacular rates. This was not based on any observation. It was derived from theory.
The founding fathers of Communism, like Internet investors, believed that a new era had arrived. It was founded neither on observation nor on hope, but on what they thought were the laws of history. In his funeral oration for Marx, on March 17, 1883, held in Highgate Cemetery, Engels honored Marx as “the Darwin” of economic history. Just as Darwin had discovered the key laws that governed the evolution of natural history, Engels said, Marx had discovered those that governed economic and political history. These laws, such as the concept of “surplus value,” which supported Marx’s critique of capitalism, were not laws at all, just pretentious obiter dicta, as Paul Johnson described them. Yet they formed the basis for the many myths that inhabited the fantasy world of Communist society.
The myth of determinism, for example, meant that everything had already been worked out according to the principles Marx described. The myth of progress, whereby conditions improved year in year out, was a myth disproved by Communism itself. The myth of the Marxist New Era held that the entire world would be re-created, not by God or nature, but by man, following the scientific and rational concepts of historical determinism. Finally, there was the myth of the New Man. This new Marxist man, not having the same hard wiring as other men, would be an entirely new being. He would not need a profit motive, for example. Nor would he wish to accumulate wealth or worry about his own family, as all his material and service-based needs would be supplied by the collective.
I don’t want to discount the myths themselves, but rather, I’d like to focus on why we believe such myths. The most obvious reason we believe such myths is because we look at the march of technical progress around us and think, “How can it be that things aren’t getting better? How can it be that such a chain of technical progress won’t end in a perfect world? Why can’t we apply the lessons we’ve learned about nature, and how to control nature, to people?” And this is the thrust of the urge the article in Whiskey and Gunpowder In reality, we don’t control nature, whether real nature, or human nature. At the flood, man and nature were placed at odds, in a more adversarial relationship. There is no real way for man to “conquer” nature or control it. All advances towards controlling nature are, in the end, expansions of the control some men have over other men through natural processes.
Why, when faced with this reality, do we continue to believe we can create an optimal, technically controlled world where everyone is happy and healthy?
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