The Doubter's Companion (32 page)

Our civilization knows more than mankind has ever known. Yet it would be difficult to argue that the brain itself has progressed. We still function on a series of basic principles laid down between 500 BC and AD 300. There have been some serious amendments, for example in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, but nothing radical since then.

As for ethical progress, it would take a remarkable imagination to prove the case, living as we do at the end of the most violent century in history, with Western middle-class governments eliminating essential support systems for the poor and children constituting some half the clients of food banks.

Where we have made progress is in what we can do or construct. The progress of knowledge. Technical progress. Social progress.

But can a specific example of progress be counted as an improvement if it is not part of an integrated change? In other words, does not each specific progress carry within it the power to destabilize other elements if there is no integration? An unintegrated improvement may actually provoke an equal regression. Or an improvement may prosper beside an equal regression which will negate it.

Human life itself is a good example of this. Remarkable scientific breakthroughs over the last century have permitted us to live longer and longer. However, parallel and often related scientific breakthroughs enable us to kill each other with increasing efficiency and in ever larger numbers. Medical science has progressed, been converted into drugs and equipment and applied to large national and international structures thanks to precisely the same methods which have permitted the invention, production, sale and use of arms with which we have maintained record levels of violent death throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps most interesting has been the parallel regression in ethical standards among our highly trained élites who manage this creativity, sale and violence. They are the result of the same education system which produces doctors and medical scientists and manufacturers of medical drugs and equipment.

The standard explanations for these contradictory activities are professionalism, the technological imperative and practical reality. What is forgotten is that applied ethics are always central to an integrated view of the human experience. Whatever the political fashions and obsessions of the moment, history eventually judges progress by that standard. Progress as we have chosen to define it today admires and rewards disintegration.

Beyond needing integration to be effective is the even more basic idea that, without applied memory, progress is merely spasmodic—a sort of uncontrolled muscle spasm which may do as much harm as good. This idea of applied memory isn't very popular in scientific, corporate or even managerial circles. They are more interested in the momentary excitement of discovery, of isolated competitive combat and of pure power.

One of the accurate truisms of history is that a civilization which allows the quality of its water and of its water distribution system to decline is on the way out. Over the last 2,000 years we have had clean running water in our cities three times.

The Romans installed complex engineering systems to gather water from distant sources and deliver it via aqueducts to their cities. Once there it was distributed through an intricate underground grid, often from house to house. Remains of these systems can be seen even in the foreign provinces of the Roman Empire.

For half a millennium these systems seemed to disappear. Then with a sophistication greater than the Romans, the Arabs reintroduced them. After conquering Egypt in 803 they built Al Fustat, the original Cairo, with the equivalent of a septic tank under each house.
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In Morocco, in Fez, part of the twelfth-century system still operates, delivering water to each house via ceramic pipes. The river from which it has always collected its water is now badly polluted. However, the delivery pipes still work, each of them graded in size according to a taxation schedule. Larger house, larger pipes, higher taxes. Thanks to these widespread and varied systems the Islamic world was able to develop some cities of 400,000 to one million inhabitants (Baghdad, Cordoba, Al Fustat) and many of 100,000. At that time—the glorious era of Charlemagne—Christian Europe couldn't manage more than 10,000.

We in the West began slowly to install complex urban grids 150 years ago. At first we simply delivered dirty water. Then we discovered the advantages of clean water, which the Romans and the Muslims seem to have grasped without any scientific understanding of germs. From what we know about the past, the water delivered today is dirtier than that of the other two civilizations at their prime. Thanks to the same technical progress which has polluted the water, we are also able to treat it, which makes it clean to the extent that it removes the traditional short-term risks of disease. This liquid usually smells and tastes of the cleansing agents which make it theoretically safe to drink.

By the standards of the Roman and Islamic empires we are now well advanced in our own decline since we have fouled most of our surface sources and are doing the same to our water tables. The question which this poses is whether our ability to treat the water we pollute can be identified as progress.

To be well advanced on our third time through the sophisticated use of water distribution suggests that even in the most basic and important areas we easily forget our own progress, and for centuries at a time. In the early stages of this amnesia, “to forget” actually means we pollute our water sources as if we do not know about our dependence on clean water. Our sophisticated explanations, justifications and bandaging, filled as they are with the laws of the marketplace and the industrialization of agriculture, are irrelevant. History is indifferent to SOPHISM. The sight of millions of Westerners drinking bottled water is a reminder of our disconnection from reality.

If we are unable to act in a consistently integrated manner in such an obvious and essential area, then it isn't surprising that our remarkable improvements in thousands of other areas should leave us confused as to the true meaning of the word progress. Most of us are now willing to admit, at least to ourselves, that we are confused.

But we don't know what this confusion means. Clearly our technical progress over the last two centuries has been miraculous. Clearly we also know less and less whether this continuing progress will produce improvements or regressions or both. And if so, in what dosage.

Three things, however, have become clear: progress may or may not be inevitable as part of a society's evolution, but according to our contemporary assumptions it is not a moral tenet of civilization; progress will turn upon itself and seek negation unless it is part of a larger integrated view of society: progress as we have defined it rewards basic competition and management based upon the pursuit of power for power's sake. Under this same definition what progress denigrates and if necessary punishes are any serious attempts to focus on an integrated view of human actions.

PROPAGANDA
   The means by which the thousands of organizations in a
CORPORATIST
society communicate with each other and with the general public.

From its origins in the Vatican Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (
Congregati de propaganda fide
), a body devoted to spreading the Christian doctrine in foreign lands, the idea of substituting propagation for explanation was seized upon by the Heroic national leaders of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Propaganda married romanticism with facts, which seemed to replace any need for understanding. With the invention of marketing tools such as the press release, advertisements, sound bites, PR firms and press officers, this rather exclusive way of influencing people was quickly available to anyone with a budget.

Where once a government minister had a press officer, now every section in a ministry has one. Private corporations have whole communications departments. The American army alone has a corps of some 5,000 Press Officers.

The purpose of these several hundred thousand communications experts is to prevent communication or any generalized grasp of reality. Their job is to propagate the faith. See:
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.

PROPERTY
   One of the two definitions of marriage.

PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT
   One of the causes of our continuing economic crisis:

1. A society obsessed by property sucks essential capital out of growth areas and sinks it into the passive domain of land, bricks and mortar.

2. While property development can create both infrastructure and short-term jobs, it is of limited use in feeding growth. Once built, a building has two economic functions: to justify the collection of rents or interest (passive); or to become a focus for financial speculation over the value of already existing goods (deceptively active).

3. Speculation unrelated to growth has become a central value of Western economies. Property is an important part of that speculation, as is the
MONEY MARKET
and the
ARMAMENTS
industry. All are forms of pure inflation and drain capital from areas of real investment and growth.

4. Since the 1960s Western economies have been repeatedly seduced by binges of property speculation. Each time, short-term massive profits wipe out all memory of the preceding disaster. Never before in history have there been so many South Sea Bubble catastrophes in such a short period of time.

5. The banks and big pension funds are central to this amnesia because they are the two principal sources of capital: the first through debt financing, the second through recirculation of the largest available deposits of money. If there is to be new growth in our economies it must be financed from these two sectors. But they prefer to buy property.

What attracts them is the illusion of concrete collateralization. When a developer goes bankrupt, the lender gets the property. On paper the lender can't lose. Curiously, however, these institutions have repeatedly lost money in property over the last several decades. The reason is simple. The property may be real but the value is not. It is a product of speculation.

6. The managers who run the large deposit banks have a taste for big buildings. They have wasted large amounts of capital by constructing remarkable headquarters buildings and imitative towers in every financial centre around the world. The only function of these palaces is to warehouse a non-productive managerial class.

7. Every society needs housing and work space. A civilization mindful of its future makes sure that everyone has a bit of property. An evolved civilization attempts to ensure that both private and public buildings are of the highest possible quality. Architecture at this level is an ethical expression of society at large. The sign today we are merely involved in speculation is that our buildings relate less and less to any primary use or need. See:
DEPRESSION.

PROPRIETY
   A strong indication that the period of revolutionary change initiated with the Renaissance, the Reformation and the reintroduction of reason has ended is the return of public farting. The new middle classes which began their rise in the sixteenth century identified themselves in part by their sense of group decorum. They, unlike the peasants and aristocrats, did not make sounds or smells in public. In the late twentieth century their self-control has weakened.

The catalyst may have been the linkage of middle-class urban eating habits with cancer of the colon. The direct result has been the rise of healthy food, which is prettified peasant food, including large quantities of reconstituted dried beans.

Hundreds of millions of people living in simpler communities around the world have never stopped eating beans and they are not noted for their farting. However, they drain off several times the water in which dry beans soak before cooking them in a last change of fresh liquid. They do this because the fart-producing enzymes gradually slip from the beans into the water.

If hundreds of millions of non-specialist, non-intellectual individuals know this, why has the information not spread? Is it because our modern élites are educated and work in isolation from society as a whole? Are technocrats as cut off from reality as eighteenth-century aristocrats once were? Is their compulsive exercising and eating of fibre a paradoxical simulation of normal life not unlike Marie Antoinette's desire to play with the sheep on her miniature farm just a few yards away from the palace at Versailles?

Or are these newly healthy individuals merely the victims of their own past? After all, cookbooks are as much symbols of the middle-class structure as is public propriety. It isn't surprising that these manuals in their modernized forms don't take the possibility of farting into account and therefore rarely mention the fact that peasants repeatedly change the water in which they soak beans.

There has never been so much information available, particularly about food. If the middle classes have taken to farting, the most probable explanation is that they have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that they want to. See:
RATIONALIZE and WIND.

PUBLIC RELATIONS
   A negative form of imagination. In Mussolini's phrase, “invention is more useful than truth.”
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See:
TRIUMPH OF THE WILL.

PUBLIC TRUST
   The ease with which the governed and the governors slip into a state of mutual contempt demonstrates how delicate a flower this trust is.

The contempt felt by the governors is an unfortunate strand of the Platonic inheritance. For those who cling to power without modesty, contempt for the populace provides a sense of superiority as well as a group to blame for their own failures.

The public can't be blamed for responding with similar emotions. They are encouraged in this by false populists, corporatists and other enemies of democracy because the destruction of public trust is the first step towards destroying a political system.