 Nermain's book is called the present as history critical perspectives on global power and then in this She interviews 13 different people That I suspect many of you may not know by name But you cannot read a dozen pages here without having to think about it for half an hour 45 minutes Just to let it percolate in your head The book itself talks about a lot of big issues imperialism and global economics the legacy of colonialism Neocolonialism economic inequality global and institutional frameworks Political Islam secularism feminism and human rights a big Target there, you know, how do you miss but it's a wonderful book It truly is Nermain has a Degree from Cambridge University in philosophy and she's also studied at Queen's University in Canada. I Think all of us know that she's on democracy now Not every day, but often frequently enough that we recognize that and that's a big part of Five hours of my life every week To listen to that show and I think a lot of you probably fall in that category She's worked for the sustainable development for policy in Islamabad She worked in London at the International Institute for the environment and development and she also works the Asia Society still in New York, correct? No Well, I'm sorry. Well, you need to Cross out of but a very busy person very talented and She has two YouTube things that I that I think are just Outstanding one is a TEDx talk that was recorded in the Danube of Hungary back in 2013 Translating words it's called and Talking about the promise of democracy with that and three years ago Three years in a month just about she was here at the space gallery in Portland and did a talk on violence and salvation And one of the points that you had to take away from that is she talked about how people are always Blaming the other guy for having an evil intent bad purposes But so frequently our use of power and violence as part of that power is touted for its benevolence the noble purposes and That just as isn't true and Nermain at that time Suggested that we look at effects and not intentions, which I think is a great thing to keep in the back of your head as you listen to people talk About campaigns and and such not intentions, but the effects and so without anything further, I'll bring you to our Distinguished guests this evening their main shake, please give her a big hand. Thank you all so much For coming here and to peace action main for so graciously inviting me So as you probably know or perhaps you don't the topic I'll be speaking on progress The idea of progress and specifically what is the measure of progress? So I'll speak for about 20 minutes and then it would be wonderful if we could have a proper discussion Which I think will probably be the most interesting part of the evening as far as my own conversation talk goes So what is the measure of progress? in everyday language and understanding progress is taken to be a self-evident good desirable by all humanity The very idea of progress its practice its implementation its power has been justified Indeed made a necessity by the conviction that its spread will herald a new era of peace and prosperity in the world Despite the reservations that have been articulated more recently and for all its imperfections and failures Its full realization is the goal to which we ought to aspire If one is to assume then indeed self-evidently that this is true What is it that progress has brought in its wake that is indeed self-evidently good as? Many point out of course correctly humankind is today at the historical peak of its possibilities in the sense both of shaping the world and directing its trajectory Economic resources are greater than ever before Material extreme poverty has been substantially reduced in much of the world There have been massive advances in scientific technical knowledge most notably in medicine and its curative possibilities and effects Human rights law universally applicable has for decades granted formal equality between and among individuals of all races genders and among those with other differentiating ascriptive characteristics and Finally though of course not exhaustively relatively seamless communication and engagement with peoples all over the world has now been made possible on a scale previously unimaginable So yes progress has been all that of course Yet it has been much else and has brought about much else This lecture will address that remainder the much else which remains largely unspoken the world and most recently and in the present moment what is referred to as the third world or The global south which exists of course also here in the north has been subject to this Imperative the imperative to progress the necessity of progress as a means to Emancipation if not Liberation The term developing countries is in fact an indication of precisely that These countries are developing along a continuum whose ultimate objective is to become developed So what has this involved? What have been its harms hidden and revealed? What has progress brought about for millions even billions of people across our shared earthly terrain as Many will recognize in much of the world the march of progress has also entailed an extraordinary violence across several registers cultural temporal psychic and material This propulsion forward or is it backward has in the most generous interpretation unintentionally led to the eradication of methods of languages societies ways of life cultural practices Simultaneously or indeed as a consequence the peoples of the world now inhabit life forms more uniform almost indistinguishable on a scale Unprecedented in its global reach though here one hesitates to use the word unprecedented So banal has it become in its sheer repetition We would do well to recall that progress and its gift modernity has swept everyone in its wake and The ravages of modernity precisely in its completeness is made the most apparent in the places of the world where we perceive mostly its absence one thinks for instance of the assumption that parts of the third world remain pre-modern or primitive It is here after all that the majority of the excluded billions live as Though somehow they have not caught up with the time in which they find themselves as though in fact It is possible to live in this time and Simultaneously outside it in a parallel or perhaps even backward Temporal universe an assumption that fails entirely to consider that not a place on earth has been left untouched by contemporary systemic forms of power and coercion intervention and subordination violence and exclusion To take only the most obvious example No people have been spared the experience or minimally the effects of Colonialism or that most modern of forces capitalism So whatever failures or insufficiencies indeed perversions of modernity we witness Have perhaps to do with the place to which such areas have been relegated in the contemporary Hierarchy of power not in fact their position outside of it and Yet the triumph of progress its conquests and successes are what we are told what is insisted upon Its damages are less evident its casualties even less so Among the least violent instances One thinks of the linguistic hierarchies produced in much of the formerly colonized world Which have resulted in nothing less than class apartheid From Algeria to Pakistan Fluency in the colonial language French and English respectively is a mark of distinction Enabling membership in the elite classes comprising of course only a tiny Minority far above the millions or even billions who speak the native language or even worse The languages referred to with only barely veiled condescension as a dialect or vernacular No longer even dignified with the appellation language or in another instance the Designation as native or traditional the garments worn in these societies for centuries as Though to have progressed sufficiently to have become fully modern People must adopt and routinely wear so-called Western attire only resorting to traditional wear on special occasions The occasions themselves often the sign of a culture soon to become obsolete The last vestiges of which relegated to those who are doomed to never so to speak catch up To illustrate using one more proximate example In his insightful book Radical Hope Ethics in the face of cultural devastation Jonathan Lear tells the story of the crow nation In giving an account of what occurred when his tribe was confined to a reservation and the buffalo had been led away the chief of the nation says quote The heart of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again He concludes by saying somewhat enigmatically quote after this Nothing happened What does such a phrase mean After this nothing happened How could anything not happen? Did history or perhaps life come to an end even as it continued There is something more to this confession The disclosure possibly of a form of dispossession that empties the world of meaning in this reading Progress may be interpreted as a rather cruel Disertion and Abandonment of those not able to keep up with its pace or demands or not fully Inhabit its potential on Whose part after all and in the name of which power Should we not be forced then to at least also speak of loss Or at least take a moment to reflect on what costs have been exacted on whom and Where and perhaps to recognize that progress has never looked especially promising For those who find themselves in its way Indeed the idea that there is no limit to what human beings are capable of may now sound to some More like a threat than a promise All this is not to say before the charge is even made that these other forms of life Indeed other life worlds were idyllic much less an untainted innocent paradise It is however to say that too much remains obscured from view That perhaps to sever some forms of attachment is injurious possibly fatal Including those attachments which appear irrational and possibly even self Sabotaging and that this too must be taken into account in any narrative of progress as pure Liberation and It is also to say more Essentially that these peoples and worlds did not have the hubris or perhaps only the means To inflict or bestow their cultures practices languages traditions on the entire planet and That too in the name of good of universal emancipation It is also to point out that the wiser thinkers of the ancient world did not profess faith in progress as a temporally chronologically determined improvement in the conditions of human life Think for instance of the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca Who believed in progress as the human capacity for the expansion of knowledge But did not expect from it any improvement in the general community of humankind Such humility if one can even call it that or helplessness is worthy of reflection What makes our moment our world such that we believe unequivocally that the world must without Resistance or a resistance made futile submit to it or ideally fall enthusiastically into its embrace with the conviction that such submission will enhance the well-being of all the world Given its dominance and more importantly its implicit hierarchies for the billions left out of this triumphant march those who remain insistently or without a choice on the peripheries or for those who have Insufficiently moved along this hapless yet quite clear trajectory. We have little left, but derision or even worse pity We can only think or to be certain as a matter of historical fact That those who live in this moment who exist however precariously in this time Do not in fact have a place in it these people the benighted majority Uninvited to join this exalted mission who live in this time Where else indeed would they live? belong elsewhere in a history long lost or relinquished as Though they are suffering from a lack an absence as if they no longer Correspond to this time or that time is hurtling towards an end to which they can never hope to arrive It is to treat living people as if they were their own ghosts as good as already dead Haunting the modern present as if already banished from the world Hoping in the manifest destitution of their condition for their own exorcism The structures of the modern world perhaps like the pre-modern, but we all know how terrible those were Seem routinely to produce such superfluous and marginalized communities These are not exceptions as we often think or are told but rather the consequence of a structure of power That necessitates subordination on the part of majority populations it matters very little what form they take within developed or developing societies as effects or products of an increasingly voracious capitalism a system itself predicated on untold exclusions or within broader systems of total control and Given the means at our disposal these people and countless others can be dispensed of in unparalleled numbers in the most spectacular example World War two which occurred principally of course in the most modern and developed of all societies World War two resulted in as many as 80 million deaths 80 million to say nothing of the manner of those deaths as Original and stunning as unspeakably horrifying One would like to say inhuman But sadly they are perhaps and only all two human in More recent memory the Cold War so terribly and misleadingly named is The perfect example of the hierarchy of power and of life that seems so indelibly etched in our collective consciousness this period of several decades from 1945 to roughly 1990 Widely regarded as a time of peace because the two then most powerful countries managed to resist mutual destruction and Seemed instead content to wage their wars elsewhere Where perhaps the absence of peace was incidental or maybe irrelevant This period was among the most brutal in much of the developing world Against received wisdom and very much on the contrary These decades were marked by widespread and devastating war the so-called proxy wars and not only those Waged between the two superpowers resulting in millions of casualties even more refugees and displaced persons and Before we dismiss this as ancient history. We need to recall the enduring legacy of these wars Consider for instance the landmines that still kill and maim thousands from Laos to Afghanistan most of them children So how are we to evaluate this period and its characterization? Disgracefully referred to by some historians as the long peace What allows such an appellation and how even in the abstract does this have to do with progress and its valuations? There are other examples One thinks of those who bear the costs of one of the signature if collateral consequences of accelerated progress We are living now in the Anthropocene In other words our present geological age is the first in which Human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment This has had the effects it has with which we are now all too familiar Despite the insistence of some in this country that it is a fiction or to quote one presidential contender Climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy Such a dismissal is only possible in a context that is spared the most brutal effects of this scientific fact It is the world outside Structurally and repeatedly consigned to irrelevance which suffers its worst consequences as in India to name only one of literally innumerable examples where over 300,000 farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years 300,000 farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years The causes as with everything are complex But have minimally to do with repeated droughts or conversely excessive rainfall Both leading to successive years of crop failure with farmers having no option but to resort to bank and private loans resulting eventually if predictably in crippling debt and For all the talk of India as a rising power of having progressed at a marvelous rate Agriculture remains the single largest employment sector with 70 percent of India's 1.2 billion people living in rural areas Areas that have long been made Inhabitable for reasons apart from climate change of course, but with climate change too as an effect of the rampant modernization spawned and implemented over decades of development policy Then more visibly there's the story now haunting the world of Syria of Iraq Though the latter given our chronic historical amnesia has faded virtually entirely from memory Despite its almost complete ruin In Syria then Aleppo one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities The mention of which left one third party candidate utterly mystified in Aleppo then Suffering from the misfortune of its geographic location Modern warfare has done what successive invasions failed to do throughout the ages laying waste to half the city This ancient world heritage site as it was designated by UNESCO is Now threatened with total annihilation We have come so far that one is tempted to say that this inexorable advance of progress has no end in all senses it will both continue and also have no definable goal We see now some of its less benign effects The proliferation of means making possible the destruction of the world and that too many more times than once structural enduring inequalities in wealth opportunity inclusion the total conquest of nature the almost complete devastation of social relations communities and bonds a denuded morality a concept which appears now in anachronism insistently lingering somewhere in the shadows associated only with the worst conservatism as A relic from another time once defined by a sense of restraint a time that must urgently be left behind The collapse of any substantive politics or the possibility of participation in the political process No matter how democratic a term itself that has long been evacuated of meaning and yet remains one of the signature marks of progress the hierarchies of life Human life above the world of nature of course, but also of certain human lives certain forms of living above others So in light of this not to mention colonialism total war genocide totalitarianism, etc Is it possible to be consoled by the thought that progress will one day in the indefinable future? close yet so far Free us all entirely from what apparently constrains our full human potential Should we not instead conclude that the brutal violence inflicted by human beings under any name Torture slavery genocide Cannot be consigned to the past like exhausted theories in science They simply return in a different guise and Given the means now available to us it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than any significant improvement in it There is also not the ancillary fact that the idea of humanity itself seems a fiction Composed as it is of billions of people for each of whom life is singular unique and naturally final So what would it mean to speak of a general progression of a general progress? encompassing every single one of the seven billion human lives now present on earth as Appears increasingly true Human beings have been blessed or cursed depending on the moment with a seemingly limitless capacity for enhancing knowledge While being chronically incapable of learning from it or from experience One such edifying realization might be that there can be little progress only an Unending struggle with our own obstinate nature Paranthetically psychoanalysis Which is both an intellectual project and clinical method has largely fallen into disrepute No doubt in part because of its avowed admission of the limits of human agency Nevertheless psychoanalysis wisely though in what now appears to be a wholly futile gesture Tried to inform us that human beings can scarcely be masters of their destiny We might instead come to view the idea of Resignation as a virtue though resignation has long been considered a form of weakness and even worse Submission as if through sheer will Itself hardly a constant or even definable force We might alter the conditions of our own existence or even more brazenly Imagine that we can change those of humanity at large Freud suggested that we come instead to understand the determining role of fate and history in our lives While also affirming a more modest ambition Namely affecting a minor change in our orientation Toward that fate as also toward our place in the social world Finally a Few words on the link between progress and peace if indeed there is one or maybe one Quite apart from this only very partial chronicle of warfare and dispossession Peace is invoked by everyone Not least those governing affairs of state national and global who repeatedly tirelessly profess an absolute commitment to peace while inflicting the worst atrocities in its name There are of course countless others with less cynical more benevolent intentions But given the ubiquity of the word in the mouths of everyone Should we not be at least a little suspicious at every moment of its enunciation? Should we think instead in light of what has occurred and more of the same likely to come? That even if we assume human progress is an evolutionary process a movement of space within time of time within space of which peace may be a part that Progress is a process that may well be going nowhere and Still as John Gray reminds us in his remarkable book the silence of animals To suppose that the myth of progress could be shaken off Would be to ascribe to modern humanity a capacity for improvement even greater than what it ascribes to itself I'd like to end with one of the canonical readings of progress Which seems only to become more prescient with the passage of time Though it was written at the very pinnacle of human debasement the mid 20th century The German Jewish essayist and philosopher Walter Benjamin writes then of the angel of history Whose face quote is turned toward the past Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe Which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet The angel would like to stay Awaken the dead make whole what has been smashed But a storm is blowing from paradise It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned While the pile of debris before him grows skyward This storm is what we call progress So I mean all is beautifully and passionately and poetically said and and I really appreciate what you said it's sort of a It's it seems that the The real progress I mean you can you can say that probably you can define progress as Scientific progress and all of that that's led us down that road without any wisdom But another kind of progress is that internal progress, which is perhaps the only kind of progress that That is that is real or whatever But I mean that that is the kind of progress that our entire education system seems to be turning its back on in favor of mathematics and and Applied science that can be applied to making more things to to sell Yes, I agree Yeah, I mean the That's exactly right and and what I was trying to say is that The system we live in Where we've arrived how we've gotten here. I don't know but where we are has had has produced Costs has exacted costs many of which we ourselves are not even aware of Which is why I you know the the example of the the Crow Nation. It's I don't know how you convey Psychic violence I Don't know how you convey what it means for a people To lose their language or to feel that the language that was theirs or their parents or their grandparents or for Generations is now worth nothing nothing in the sense that if you speak this Language you will be destitute poor and dead Right. How does one give an account of what that means for billions of people right and yet that is the structure We live in and this is forget all of the more the most obvious forms of violence and you know poverty Inequal all of those things are there But at the same time there is and so the point that you made about Elevating science and math and all of this right it's all in the service of what it's in the service of perpetuating a system That rests that is structured on the dispossession of the majority of the world's population. That is not incidental Right. It's absolutely built into the foundation of the system of which we are all apart So, you know, I think in a lot of the the conversations and it's very important obviously to think of specific moments specific instances in which people can intervene and have as it were their voices heard that's I Completely that that yes, that makes a lot of sense But I think it's also very important To try to keep in mind a more I don't even know more no a historical That there was time before this time right there were people lived and Still try although they're not succeeding and they won't for long Even if they are now to live in a radically different way People lived with values that we we have no conception of we can't even imagine and all we can think is oh Well, they didn't have the point if they all could have had air conditioners and 20 iPods and iPads or whatever Then they would have well, I don't I mean, what is that argument? Maybe but Maybe not right. Why would we assume why would we assume that our own desire and the structure of our desire now Can be projected all the way back and we can feel sorry for the too bad. They didn't have iPads, right? I mean, I'm making it's a caricature, but you see that we we have this assumption Which in many cases as I've said, you know, I I'm not entirely disputing that we live somehow at At the highest possibility or we're getting there. Okay, we're on the track So they're minor problems and but we're gonna adjust those right it's a self-correcting system So capitalism will now somehow reform itself to be more answerable to the people. I mean or Climate climb the climate. Well, we're gonna resolve this right? It's just a matter of a few we'll do this here and do that there and the Paris climate agreement was signed and then what It's to see that and I don't want to sound so fatalistic, although I will That there's a system that's been put in place and again I don't know how it got there and who's responsible for its continuation But it's almost as though it now has it's it has its own propulsion and its own logic And it will continue until it doesn't because this earth we've eaten it alive And it's not going to keep sustaining the people who are on it for all eternity Irrespective of what we think we can recycle our newspapers and our bottles It's not gonna get us very far after thousands of years or hundreds of years of eating the earth Thank you. I recently read a book by Victor Frankel. He survived the horrible death camps and As long as I've talked about peace. I Almost have to say I wonder if we ever can achieve it because it looks like according to him that we have evolved To be this way. We have evolved to what to protect our environment is Just like the birds. I mean we hear the beautiful sound of the birds We think isn't that nice, but really what they're saying is look out This is my territory and don't you dare encroach on it? And so I don't know how we can ever get beyond that Evolutionary phase of our our lives today So I can just comment. Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right Well, do you remember what the names man search for meaning or something the Victor Frankel book? Yeah Yeah, yeah, I like that very much when I read it Yeah, I think that's that's you got exactly the the problem. The problem is that Within the word itself progress. They're very good connotations, right because we think of it as The connotation is of course one of improvement, right? And This is not to impute Intentions to whoever I mean I can speak of it in the context of Development in in the third world right the idea of development which came In the as the the second world war ended a number of colonies former colonies became Decolonized former French and British Colonies others as well and the idea was it was a very benevolent idea, right? Much like colonialism had been is that these people because they're poorer the darker Races as it were They don't they haven't had the gift of enlightenment. They need roads and schools and you know So it's it's it's impulse. Let's say That's what this is bracketing for the moment cynicism right saying well Actually what they wanted was markets or what they wanted was cheap labor or what they want Let's even bracket that right Let's just say that what they actually wanted was these people to become like us one has to think of what kind of narcissistic delusion Makes that possible when World War two has just ended right and we can all think well that was an exception Right that was exceptional in the history of your Euro-American Humanity that is an exception Whereas whatever barbarism we see in Africa Asia or Latin America, that's the norm Right their violence is normal and our violence is exceptional right we aired but we didn't mean to right It's too bad for those 80 million people, but okay, whatever we'll be better next time right? But it's absolutely implicit right because we are the ones who will show these other people we will teach them We will give them our textbooks. We'll build their railroads and we'll make Hospitals for them right in a gesture of benevolence and I'm not doubting again that in part it was that But in part it was many other things too, and it had many other effects And those effects are what we need to understand and this Victor Franco the book that you cited It's precisely that right that there was that the logic the Holocaust and everything that occurred and could only have been possible With this degree of progress it was not possible You could kill people and you wanted to kill as many people as you wanted to kill But you couldn't you couldn't put them in gas chambers and organize them right you couldn't count them Organize them build structures that would burn them to ashes This is a unique modern invention that happened in the heart of Europe Europe which had at its peak colonized 80 percent of the world Right that form of administering populations and doing away with them is a modern phenomenon Yes, wars were waged in the past and yes all kinds of brutalities. I'm not in the least bit defending But the scale we have to consider the scale the scale and On what basis do we have nuclear weapons that can destroy the world a thousand times over? What it's not enough once what I mean it might what I mean, what do you say? Yeah, I mean it's beyond insanity and everybody knows it we all live in this and then there's all this discussion What is the US policy? No first use will Obama change it will Obama not change it and what is no first? I don't know if you guys saw the second debate or the first debate of Course Trump had no idea. What is no first use? Clinton changed the subject So we have no idea what the candidates think that the US is is It's the only of not I don't know if it's the only country But it has not committed to this to the idea that would only use nuclear weapons as a defense in other words if it's attacked then The US says no the US maintains the right for first use to be the further You know the country to use nuclear weapons first, but it's that you know We can talk about these little things like you know, oh, it should be this way and it should be But I mean you just have to think I mean just structurally What what how did this how did it come how did this happen? Whose idea was it that we should have a quadrillion nuclear weapons? And if we're so concerned about the fate of humanity, right? Well, what about the 300,000 farmers who've killed themselves or the children were starving to death all over the planet? Why not destroy one nuclear weapon, right? I mean if you really your heart is bleeding for all of humanity. Well, there has to be a better demonstration of it than that Are you familiar with the book of Freyre, Freyre and the veins of you know and reading that the torture and the Devastation that was done to the people of South America by the Spaniards. Are you talking about the open veins of Latin America and Guadalajana? That is such a painful book. Talk about progress You know and putting these people to work in minds. These really elites of the society at the time and within days Within hours they were dead from exhaustion and overwork and so forth It's such a painful book. You know that's progress. You know, it's Terrific you have to read that and what happened when the The Americas were discovered, discovered and you know the natives of the beautiful gardens and sustainable crops They knew how to use the land and so forth and so on. We were going to teach them better. That's very much That's very painful. If you read the history and you Relate to it or try to relate to the people and understand what it must have been about. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, and this is really an unanswerable question, but really How do we go about changing the paradigm of progress? What what is it that I mean clearly there's something in us that's leading us or this Belief I actually I'll go on and aside My mother is there of the person who believes that progress is always positive and she says it's because I'm an optimist And I think that any progress scientific or whatever is going to move us to a better place Clearly that's not happening. So how do we change the paradigm? I mean, how do we adjust our thinking and how we look at progress and how societies should be full should be formed? I mean, you know, I think your mother is right in a certain sense I mean that then that's an opinion that's shared by many people and to a large extent it is true Which is why I mean there are many things that have happened that have obviously Dramatically altered the conditions of our material well-being not all of us, of course, not even the majority of us But certainly some of us I mean, I think one of the reasons why I tend to think more structurally is By which I mean rather than thinking of Specific, let's say policies or a specific event, you know, like last week this happened or Next week this will happen or it'll be the elections and then it'll be clean I mean, and that's not to say I mean, obviously I work in the news. I do this every day But I think that it's it's very important for for us For people as it were who have some Uncynical right to whatever extent Untainted Unsullied desire for a moderately better world Or better part of the world at least That it's very important for us to think about what we're doing and I don't mean in the sense of You know, should I protest? X thing that's happened. I mean, yes, of course. Yes, there's no I'm not saying don't you know sit around it But it's also to take a larger view, you know to read history To read what is it? How is it that we understand a word that is being used now and what it really means? Right. I mean, it's of course the biggest cliche now everybody says as I did too in a cliched way Democracy well, what does it mean now? And it's not to say that I don't I think undemocratic societies are better than this one or a democratic one But what is democracy itself now consistent really, you know, what are what are the range of options that are available? What so all of this to say that in in every instance if one can just Take a more also a more abstract view Abstract and historical view to see where we stand So that's with the idea of progress Implicit as your mother said an explicit to the idea of an improvement Well, what is it that we want to improve for whom are things improving and also? What is what is the opposite of what's occurring or what's hidden below what we know is occurring because there's always something else going on, right? There's no story of completely seamless Gain when you just think of a life story any of you me, right? I can't tell my life as one of you know, I've grown up I was a little kid then I became a bigger kid that I became you know, what am I? Yes in that sense Yes, I grew up, but my life or your lives I imagine any human life is not a seamless progression Which implies necessarily an improvement along an aging continuum, of course not, right? Things go terribly awry things go very very well things go very very sad. I don't know a million things happen So why would we think of progress in a more global sense as a seamless or relatively seamless? Secular improvement in the conditions of life for everyone It seems odd. No, you think of your own life. You think of a society You think of a country you think of a people if it's not true of them Why and and then think well, what is it that you want it to be and what is it failing to be? I mean, I don't know that that answers your question at all, but that's just roughly what what I think Thank you. Sorry so loud It's difficult not to conclude that education as we know it has been a Disaster in its effects if not its intentions. Could you comment on that? You know, I have to say that one of the An older person whom I knew Who's since passed away? It was two generations above me and he He said to me once that it was very he himself was highly educated He said to me once that he was very surprised by the fact that the more educated people he met the less He was struck by how much less Kind or generous they were like instinctively all right by default Whereas in his own wherever it is that he'd grown up Where people were largely and this is of course not to glorify or say it's wonderful. Everybody should be a literate No, it's just to say that this is one particular perspective on it that There was a kind of way of Being with other people that was not quite so instrumental It's not to say that education is the cause of it, but because education came with a lot else with the construction of a society that made People means right means to an end or education itself now Right. No one thinks oh, I just want to sit around reading Plato because I need to figure out what to think no No, no, it's gonna read Plato and then in my entrance exam to X I'll be able to say why and then if I get into this school then maybe when I go You know me and that's not an individual students fault It's the system of education in which we're all trapped. I mean here, but it's also now more or less I mean not everywhere, but it's certainly spreading everywhere in the world So yes, I mean I think education of course, it's a very good idea I think everybody whatever if they want to learn how to read and write they definitely should and they should certainly have the Opportunity but to think that education as so many people did You know and probably still do that education is somehow the panacea and that what people lack is knowledge as Though people without education lacked knowledge, right? No, they had a very different kind of knowledge But this kind of knowledge that what if if they were only taught, right? They were taught then they would act differently I don't think there's that much evidence of that It's true that you know the kinds of brutality we know of from medieval or pre-modern You know nailing their hands with like nails and you know taking a hammer and taking out people's teeth and so I mean, whatever they were obviously very very brutal and Horrible forms of mutilation torture and so on that's true It just seems that the violence Has taken a shape that is much less recognizable as violence, right? And drone warfare is just the natural culmination of that, right? We want to become as distant as possible from our own murders Right as far away. It's almost as though then we can diss it wasn't me Right, who was it? I don't know who it was, right? I mean, I'm not even in I'm not even in a plane Right forget being like on the ground with someone like wrestling or trying to strangle someone with your own hands You're sitting in a in an air thing control thing in Nebraska and killing someone in Yemen, right? I mean, it's like completely bizarre and yet it is still that it is still a murder So what in a sense and this is obviously putting it very crudely what education has enabled and This is obviously a caricature, but I'll make it anyway It has enabled that distance from one's own murder, right? Because education allowed you to come to the point that you made a drone a Drone a drone can be used for many many many purposes and what did we decide to do? We decided to use it as a means to carry out killings in other countries in which incidentally not out of some benevolence, right? But we just don't want to have the Legality and the compromise of American lives, which of course we must recognize are far more I mean there are a different planet or galaxy compared to the lives of others. We won't compromise those And you come up with this I'm sure of course there are five billion trillion other good uses of education But it's also if there are those we must also look at the other side. There are also these Well, my measure if my measure counts for anything is that it doesn't matter what we think, right? It doesn't it doesn't really matter Things I mean we could think it's wonderful. We could think it's terrible We could think it should stop. We could think it should continue indefinitely but It just seems that that it has It's there, and it'll continue to be there long after we no longer are And I think it's the only thing Which I really believe is the only thing that one can try to do Which is already an impossible task is to master one's own Oneself, and I don't mean this in some kind of naval gazing narcissistic self-development kind of way No, it's that to recognize if we see something that's terrible in the world that is being done You recognize that the people who are perpetrating that terribleness are not that different from you and I Right. It's not it's like not us and them and this kind of thing It's like you're you know, it's like the it's a very fine line You want to make sure that you're on this side of it and not that at least most of the time and I don't you know It's not because I think that's a very very big problem that that we have in in That the way that we understand good or bad That it's very hard for us to see in ourselves right not not in other people in ourselves our own less Let's say August desires behaviors intentions and if one can if one Well, it's probably too I Think we would all do well to pause to think and to try to govern our own Instincts and then perhaps be in a position to teach anybody else anything Hi. Oh, that's loud Hey, my name is Jeremy. I Live in Portland so grew up in Brooklyn, New York Thank you so much for coming out here and speaking with us. It was great So I have a quick question that I've been trying to struggle to put the words around so just kind of bear with me here so So this is something that I was thinking about throughout your talk but what you see is being the role of religion moving forward in this discussion of progress and You know, it's Something that secularists will say, you know, religion is backwards And you know like language like you mentioned it was used as a tool of oppression and progress in many colonized nations To make people more like us quote-unquote But it's also an institution of community making and it can lead to spiritual and Like spiritual enlightenment Create love and can give people like those who are sort of been systematically destroyed A sense of purpose when their hearts are on the floor So yeah, just sort of putting it out there as a question. I guess what do you see is being the role of religion in progress Thank you for that. Well, what's your name? Sorry, Jeremy Jeremy. Yeah, thank you, Jeremy. That's Yeah, that's that's a very That's very beautifully put You know, it's like the the point about Torture slavery genocide etc not being consigned to the past as Something that has ended or if it's ended it appears in a different guys today Right, so that it's not to think that something ends and it's over and that same thing doesn't occur now under a different name, right? So I think the same is true of religion in other words The kind of fervor right that religion is said to have incited in the past which it did And violence and so on and of course to this day that you can fill religion in with whatever you want it doesn't matter insane capitalism insane atheism insane, I mean There are a million different Ideologies that can fill that same function if one is going to talk about the perversion or Lunacy of a belief what that belief is to me it makes it very very little difference and I think part of the problem with The critiques Criticisms of religion are that they fail to see precisely what you said that for the large Majority of humanity though, we don't meet them religion is an absolutely defining Experience in their lives and also as you said an extraordinary source of solace when there is so little So then we want to tell them actually that if you want to become modern You become like us Right or else you're just not making it you have all these whacked or if you do believe whatever you believe You just keep it at home. Don't try to bring it into any community or if you do you should hide, right? I mean, it's it's like a very It's like we can now tolerate like what does tolerance mean now tolerance means we'll put up with things We don't really mind But you know the idea of tolerance is actually that you you tolerate what you find despicable that idea is completely gone. This is the makes no sense to anybody if something is is Offensive to me it just should not be before me So I mean to answer more directly your question. I am I mean now of course, what do we hear religion? It's like fucking al-Qaeda and ISIS and murder and so on I Mean there I don't even know where to begin with that. I mean, it's I don't know what anything I say will be a cliche It's not about religion. It's always so let's just assume that Let's assume that What goes on in the name of an ideology Often has very little to do with the ideology itself Right like people say oh communism didn't work. You know, well, I mean, I guess in the way that it was practically I didn't work in a way. I guess but then you could also say well, I don't know Just democracy. I don't know doesn't I don't know right? So I mean, it's like what what are you trying to say, right? I mean, it's like if people are Are going to be Unreasonable which it seems it's in our nature to do or violent or oppressive or Monstrous they can do it under any label they choose it doesn't really matter and so In my view, no Religion cannot and should not be singled out as the perpetrator of the worst atrocities in the world There are many many many people and ideologies competing for that position. I'm wondering if Progress and religion are perhaps antithetical and that the idea of religion is Tends to maintain and go Towards back towards a rude idea progress going towards some kind of projected Advancement whether or not at what cost we don't know but my question to you is We have so much information that we are buffeted with that. It's very difficult not to become Either pessimistic or cynical But if you had to choose between being Pessimistic optimistic a realist or what have you what stance would you advise as being? the best to Tackle what we have ahead of us You know, I was talking to my friend here Dushan who's a very dear and old friend of mine who teaches in Portland And I was thinking because of course as you can imagine when I when I speak In places, it's people often ask, you know Is there any hope and so on? so I thought today I would actually think about this and This I think this is this is the right view. Oh, well, I don't know right It's the right view for me in the moment and it may well be for you as well Antonio Gramsci Wrote in his prison diaries About the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will right, so You recognize that or another example that that Dushan gave me and is of Pessimist activist Pessimistic activism right so you do a billion things you get whatever I obviously go to work democracy now You know following a million different things that are going on as all of you are doing very very You know committed and worthwhile that you do Everything you do whatever it is you can do that you think will make something somewhere a little better But you do it knowing that it probably won't You know and then another this is another thing that I came up with Dushan one other sorry quote this is the early 20th century a German playwright Bertolt Brecht He says in these dark times will there also be singing Yes, there will be singing About these dark times So there are many ways of interpreting that Dushan and I were talking about it before coming here one is That when things are as they are Whatever can be said can only be About those things being as bad as they are The second is which was Dushan's which I think is right is that art like song Can both because he says yes, there will be something song is not allowed. You will sing art will continue, right? Voice art However, it is poetry it will continue, but it will also be a reflection of the time in which it's produced To me, that's very Obviously, it's rather modest But that's quite hopeful in fact Thanks so much for your talk. I really got a lot out of it and I love the way of thinking that you're laying out It's fascinating. I'm trying to take it all in But I guess one question I have is Aren't you talking or to what extent are you talking about Western ideas of progress and are we limited to that? Sounds like maybe we are but Aren't there other ideas of the future that come from other cultures that we could turn to or try to include like for instance the Wabanaki people in Maine have a notion of the new dawn which is coming and I Like that idea. So anyway, I'm just I'm just wondering You know, am I wrong to say that this is Western a Western idea of progress or do you feel like it's global at this point? Etc. Well, I mean yes, it is it is. I mean its origins are in What is yeah the West and the problem I have is which I find very very disturbing is which has happened really with such Lackardy in my own lifetime is the extent to which the world has become like one, but in the worst possible way Everywhere you go all over the planet There is hyperconsumption the most inane media 12 billion cars worsening pollution Rampant insane consumerism I don't know everybody talking about the same kinds of things It's very very so perhaps all and no doubt all these cultures and peoples and places at one moment Had a different conception of what constituted a good life and a good future a conception of the future I'm sure those people exist We'll never hear from them I mean you happen to live in Maine and you happen to know and you know, whatever I'm sure if I go somewhere and meet people who are I could yeah It's not about to become as it's I mean this this ideology It's all pervasive. It's everywhere and it's also it's extremely seductive, right? It's so everybody's into the whole thing and I Don't know how that that would change earlier one of the elders of peace action Maine Sally Breen mentioned the name of Victor Frankel and he was Austrian or German Jew who was in a concentration camp and and he he devised a method of therapy that he called Logo therapy in other words He felt that there there is an underlying meaning to life and that That is and what he said was he could he spent four years in concentration camps and Among the among the inmates what he noticed was that those who had a some sense of transcendent meaning It might be something as simple as the hope that they're That their their spouse may have survived or their child may have survived even though they were in the camp Those were the people who tended to survive longer Whereas those who gave up hope Died quickly gave up a sense that there was any meaning to this and I think what what what I gather from your talk largely is that the This concept of progress that we have evolved in our society our civilization very Western It it what it what it teaches beneath the surface of education and media and everything else is It doesn't mean anything You can you mentioned rampant conservative consumerism and so on and you know there's a litany of the the the evidences of this definition of progress But yet they're the seeds Jeremy in the back raised the point about religion and I Gathered really I gathered Jeremy wasn't talking so much about institutional religions. He was talking about a inner sensibility that is More like what Victor Frankel who was not religious He his his form of therapy was called existential therapy. He's an existentialist and so you know he and he Witnessed and experienced some of the worst horrors that that any of us in the last century or so have experienced and yet He survived and he lived well into his 80s late 80s. I think and And he was liberated from the camps and so on but he He felt that there was a that there was a an intrinsic sense of meaning to life and that some people discover it Even a glimpse of it in the camps and it enabled them to survive. So that would be a I mean, I appreciate something like the Wabanawtsky Idea of a new dawn coming and so on but but then things of that nature may be just Evidences of this intrinsic sense of meaning in the human psyche in the human soul that's there But all this so-called progress has has masked it It's a very it's been a very successful masking process for the last century or so No, of course that yeah, I agree with you and I think that I mean obviously you guys they're very lucky to live in in Maine in Portland, I live in New York City Where as you might imagine I? Mean you know everything is at a very frenetic pace so What I've in fact been saying This thing of you know reflection and a historical perspective and a sense of one's own Really quite modest place in the world and so on these that these are all in in some way connected to what you're saying that in order to to I don't know whether it's for hope or Just to say transcendence right one has to look I'm not sure where but all the places we're looking are wrong I mean, you know, it's not gonna come with your new Acquisition from the Apple Store, you know what I'm saying or I mean that's and that's just such an easy thing, but it's about something that is Being eroded right and for some people it has been eroded totally And and you're absolutely right of course to live without that is Basically not to live right the heart of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again That is this what you what you're saying The absence of that what what Victor Frankel had yeah Well, I do see it is nine o'clock Thank you so much