After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age

The Noise of the Gravediggers

Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death revealed the underlying crisis of meaning in Western civilization, which has been temporarily filled by the civil religion of progress that is now itself dying.

• Nietzsche’s 1889 mental breakdown in Turin, where he embraced a beaten horse and went insane, symbolized the psychological toll of his philosophical project to announce the death of God and create new values
  • Nietzsche was virtually unknown during his productive years, publishing works at his own expense that were largely ignored
  • “I seek God! I seek God! We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers” —Nietzsche’s madman
  • The scene in Turin involved Nietzsche sprinting across a plaza to protect a horse being beaten by a teamster
• Christianity was so central to 19th-century European culture that even atheist philosophers like Auguste Comte tried to create pseudo-Christian substitutes rather than genuinely secular alternatives
  • Comte launched a ‘Religion of Humanity’ with a holy trinity of Humanity, Earth, and Destiny, complete with secular saints’ days
  • Christian concepts undergirded all political thought from conservatives to liberals, with shared assumptions about moral order
  • Many Europeans no longer believed in God but still embraced Christian ethics and social forms
• Nietzsche recognized that abandoning belief in God logically required abandoning Christian morality and meaning, since Christianity forms a complete philosophical system where all parts depend on core beliefs
  • “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” —Nietzsche
  • “Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things” —Nietzsche
  • Without divine authority, moral standards become merely personal preferences rather than objective truths
• Progress has become the surrogate God of Western civilization, filling the same emotional and cultural role that Christianity once played as a source of ultimate meaning and moral order
  • The omnipotence and benevolence of progress are core doctrines of a secular religion as widely embraced as Christianity once was
  • Progress makes a poor substitute for a deity because its supposed benefits are becoming increasingly hard to take on faith
  • Civil religions are more vulnerable than theist religions because they must deliver results in the material world
• Religion as a category is a human abstraction for organizing similar phenomena, not a fixed definition, and civil religions like Americanism and Communism display all the functional characteristics of traditional theist religions
  • Categories are tools created by human minds to sort experience, and their usefulness matters more than their absolute truth
  • Americanism has sacred scriptures like the Declaration of Independence, saints like Lincoln, and formal rites like the Pledge of Allegiance
  • Communism functioned as a missionary faith with sacred scriptures, doctrinal debates, and street-corner evangelists

The Shape of Time

Different cultures conceive of time and history in fundamentally different ways, and the modern Western obsession with linear progress is just one option among many that was adaptive during the age of cheap energy but is becoming maladaptive now.

• Americans routinely ignore historical lessons from speculative bubbles, with the author personally witnessing four identical boom-bust cycles where people rejected historical parallels and insisted ‘it’s different this time’
  • The 1987 stock market crash, tech stock bubble, and real estate bubble all followed patterns described in Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929
  • Friends consistently responded with condescending pity when the author cited historical precedents, preferring books like Dow 36,000
  • The same people who lost money in previous bubbles made identical mistakes in subsequent ones
• Morphological thinking—comparing similar structures across different examples—enables prediction by recognizing patterns, as demonstrated in evolutionary biology where constraints limit the range of possible forms
  • Goethe showed that human skull bones are modified vertebrae and plant parts are modifications of a single leaf structure
  • Evolution isn’t free to create everything theoretically possible due to genetic and environmental constraints
  • Six-limbed mammals are theoretically viable but impossible because early vertebrates happened to have four limbs
• The modern fixation on what ‘can’ happen rather than what ‘does’ happen stems from the rationalist revolution that replaced mythological thinking based on specific examples with abstract theoretical thinking divorced from historical experience
  • Mythology preserved practical knowledge in memorable stories that could be learned in childhood and recalled in old age
  • Widespread literacy triggers rationalism by allowing people to compare and criticize written versions of oral traditions
  • Early rationalism is liberating but eventually becomes rigid dogma that ignores inconvenient realities
• Hesiod’s vision of history as relentless decline from a Golden Age to an Iron Age was adaptive for post-collapse Greece because it encouraged practical strategies for survival in a depleted environment
  • Hesiod lived in 8th century BCE Boeotia during the aftermath of Mycenaean ecological collapse
  • His worldview advised distrust of innovation, reliance on traditional wisdom, and keeping a year’s grain supply
  • Hope was portrayed as the nastiest curse in Pandora’s box, an enticing delusion that things will improve when they won’t
• The Chinese conception of time as intersecting cycles of different speeds, codified in the I Ching, represents a mature approach to pattern recognition that enables strategic thinking about historical change
  • Chinese thought recognized many different cycles—seasons, human life, dynastic rise and fall—each with its own patterns
  • The I Ching’s 64 hexagrams represent abstract stages in cyclic patterns, allowing practitioners to anticipate transitions
  • Masters used pattern recognition to ‘get there first’ in contexts from politics to martial arts
• The linear progress narrative became adaptive during the age of cheap abundant energy but is becoming maladaptive as that era ends, requiring a shift to more historically grounded ways of thinking about time
  • Belief in progress worked for over 300 years because abundant fossil fuels made continuous expansion possible
  • Different shapes of time are tools suited to different historical situations, not absolute truths
  • The end of cheap energy makes progress-based thinking as obsolete as Hesiod’s decline model was in an era of growth

The Rock By Lake Silvaplana

Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, conceived at Lake Silvaplana, represented an attempt to affirm life without relying on imaginary future worlds, but his solution was as problematic as the progress mythology it was meant to replace.

• Modern faith in progress and its apocalyptic antireligion both function as forms of ‘provisional living’ that postpone meaningful engagement with present reality by anchoring hopes and fears on imaginary future events
  • Provisional living involves believing life will become what it’s supposed to be once some X factor happens, but X never happens
  • Both progress and apocalypse allow people to put fantasies about the future at the center of their emotional lives
  • The mythologies offer the same payoff as heaven—a dumping ground for dreams that never have to face reality
• Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, conceived during a walk by Lake Silvaplana in 1881, challenged believers to joyously affirm their entire life as if it would be repeated exactly for eternity
  • Given finite matter and energy over infinite time, every event must repeat exactly countless times
  • “Can you face the prospect of infinite repetitions of your same life? Can you joyously affirm that prospect? Can you will it?” —the author
  • The vision came to Nietzsche ‘six thousand feet beyond man and time’ at a pyramidal rock by the lake
• Nietzsche derived his philosophy partly from the ancient Stoics, who practiced radical acceptance of the world as it is and distinguished between what humans can and cannot control
  • Stoics believed humans can only control their choices of action and their assessments of experience
  • Extreme Stoics accepted a universe of endlessly repeated cycles and aspired to affirm the whole pattern without wishing anything different
  • “Fiat justicia, ruat caelum—let justice be done, even if it brings the sky crashing down” —the Stoics
• Oswald Spengler provided a more historically grounded alternative to both progress mythology and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence by showing that civilizations follow predictable morphological patterns of rise and fall
  • Spengler compared civilizations like a biologist compares different species, finding common patterns of development
  • Every society passes through feudalism, urbanization, rationalism, and finally Caesarism as democracy fails
  • Western culture’s focus on science and technology doesn’t make it superior, just different from other civilizations
• Spengler’s predictions about Western civilization’s trajectory have proven remarkably accurate, including the stagnation of art forms, the rise of charismatic leaders, and the dominance of finance over productive economy
  • Traditional art forms would survive only as museum pieces repeated in increasingly stylized forms
  • The 20th and 21st centuries would see prolonged struggle between charismatic national dictators and globalized financial oligarchy
  • Germany’s attempt to unite the Western world failed, but the pattern Spengler described continues to unfold
• Claims that modern industrial civilization is uniquely different from past civilizations fail to account for the fact that it has already passed through all the standard historical stages in the usual order and timeline
  • Global scale doesn’t necessarily create a difference in kind—earlier worlds were effectively as large given transportation technology
  • Advanced technology hasn’t changed basic political and social patterns—corruption in modern democracies follows the same patterns as in ancient republics
  • Even ecological crises have exact parallels in previous civilizations that were destroyed by resource mismanagement

A Peculiar Absence of Bellybones

Life evolved through contingent historical processes that created irreversible constraints on future possibilities, and human history operates under similar constraints that make some outcomes probable and others impossible, regardless of what we might prefer.

• Life’s evolutionary history involved arbitrary choices that permanently constrained future possibilities, such as why vertebrates have backbones instead of bellybones and four limbs instead of six
  • Pikaia in the Burgess shale had cartilage along its upper edge where fish would later develop backbones
  • If Pikaia had cartilage along its lower edge, all vertebrates today would have bellybones instead of backbones
  • Early fish that ventured onto land happened to have four large fins, determining the limb pattern for all future land vertebrates
• Convergent evolution demonstrates that ecological pressures create similar solutions to environmental challenges across unrelated lineages, as seen in the dolphin-like shapes of both ancient ichthyosaurs and modern cetaceans
  • Ichthyosaurs 100 million years ago evolved the same basic dolphin form as modern dolphins and porpoises
  • Whale ancestors looked like furry crocodiles because they filled the same ecological niche as crocodiles
  • Environmental constraints force similar adaptations regardless of the starting genetic material
• Human societies face similar constraints and exhibit convergent evolution, making some historical outcomes probable regardless of cultural preferences, which offends modern assumptions about unlimited human possibility
  • Complex societies consistently develop through feudalism, urbanization, and eventually collapse in predictable patterns
  • Most theoretical possibilities for social organization never appear because historical and environmental constraints rule them out
  • The author’s critics demand detailed explanations of why impossible things can’t happen rather than accepting morphological evidence
• The transition from oral to literate culture reliably triggers the collapse of mythological thinking and the rise of rationalism, a pattern that has repeated in every major civilization
  • Rationalist revolts occurred in Egypt around 1500 BCE, China around 750 BCE, Greece and India around 600 BCE
  • Each movement began with reform attempts and moved toward absolute rejection of traditional religion
  • Literacy allows comparison of different written versions of myths, revealing inconsistencies that oral tradition accommodated
• Ages of Reason systematically fail because they fixate on what ‘can’ happen rather than what ‘does’ happen, leading to theories that make logical sense but fail to predict actual outcomes
  • Human brains evolved for finding food and mates, not understanding the entire universe, creating predictable cognitive limitations
  • Rationalist movements collapse when their rational models repeatedly fail to match observable reality
  • The resulting backlash usually brings what Spengler called the Second Religiosity—a renewal of religious approaches to truth
• Current fusion power research exemplifies how progress mythology traps scientists in a self-defeating loop where they cannot abandon failed approaches because their professional identity depends on believing in inevitable technological advancement
  • ITER facility costs $17 billion and is years behind schedule, representing the most expensive methods after cheaper options all failed
  • Fusion researchers are professionally committed to progress ideology and cannot admit their field may be impossible
  • The mythology of progress prevents learning from failure because it treats setbacks as temporary obstacles rather than fundamental limits

The God with the Monkeywrench

The pursuit of repeatedly failed policies has become standard in contemporary industrial society because dominant minorities identify with specific approaches regardless of their practical results, exemplifying the self-destructive patterns that characterize civilizations in decline.

• Arnold Toynbee identified the transformation of creative minorities into dominant minorities as the key mechanism by which civilizations destroy themselves through rigid adherence to failed policies
  • Creative minorities succeed by developing new responses to challenges and rising from below through demonstrated competence
  • Dominant minorities rule by coercion rather than inspiration and respond to every crisis with the same stereotyped policies
  • Replacement from below breaks down when new leaders are selected for conformity rather than innovation
• Fusion power research has consumed vast resources for decades while discovering mainly that fusion power, if possible at all, cannot be achieved at any affordable cost
  • Scientists have worked on fusion since the 1950s, with current costs at $17 billion for ITER and rising
  • A few thousand dollars once drilled oil wells producing for decades; fracked wells cost $5-10 million and deplete rapidly
  • All less expensive fusion methods have already been tried and failed, leaving only impossibly expensive options
• The mythology of progress traps researchers in self-defeating behavior because they cannot admit fundamental limitations without undermining the worldview on which their professional identity depends
  • Scientists see themselves as figures at the cutting edge of technological progress leading humanity to a better future
  • Progress literally means continued forward motion in one direction, treating setbacks as temporary obstacles to inevitable victory
  • Fusion researchers are stuck pushing on a door marked PULL, wondering why it won’t open
• Fermi’s paradox—the absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations despite the galaxy’s age and size—has a simple solution that scientists reject because it contradicts progress mythology: technological development is subject to diminishing returns
  • Stephen Webb surveys fifty proposed solutions to Fermi’s paradox but dismisses the diminishing returns explanation as ‘unduly pessimistic’
  • Interstellar travel is likely beyond the point any species’ technology can actually reach due to economic constraints
  • The refusal to consider technological limits reveals how deeply progress assumptions shape scientific thinking
• The supposed ‘conquest of nature’ by humanity represents a temporary exploitation of fossil fuel resources that is being reversed by natural selection and resource depletion
  • Antibiotic resistance among bacteria is spreading rapidly as evolution adapts to pervasive antibiotic use
  • The Green Revolution’s pesticides and herbicides face the same resistance problems that are erasing short-term gains
  • Petroleum extraction now requires hugely expensive methods as easily accessible deposits are exhausted
• The mythology of Man’s conquest of Nature follows the same trajectory as Germany’s conquest of Russia, with initial victories giving way to strategic overextension and inevitable retreat to starting positions or worse
  • Proclamations of Man’s glorious victories over disease, hunger, and distance mirror German propaganda about eastward expansion
  • Like German forces retreating westward while propaganda claimed victory, technological campaigns are being fought closer to home
  • The question conquerors should ask is what terms of surrender will be demanded when campaigns of conquest fail

Life Preservers for Mermaids

A new religious sensibility is emerging that seeks wholeness within nature rather than escape from it, challenging both traditional salvation-focused religions and the civil religion of progress that promised technological transcendence.

• A new religious sensibility is emerging in the Western world for the first time in over two thousand years, focused on belonging and participation in nature rather than salvation from the human condition
  • Religious sensibilities are substructures of perceptions and emotions that shape how religions appeal to human hearts
  • The current Western sensibility, dating to around 600 BCE, centers on escaping nature, history, and the human condition
  • Growing numbers find more cause for reverence in natural phenomena than in claims of miracles or promises of technological salvation
• The older religious sensibility that dominated the Western world before 600 BCE saw the cosmos as a community where gods and humans both belonged, with temple cults focused on shared feasts rather than salvation
  • Ancient temples were houses for deities rather than meeting places for worshippers, with rituals held outside in open air
  • Core ceremonies were sacrifices that literally provided feasts for divine and human participants together
  • Gods lived in various earthly locations—Poseidon in oceans, Pan in forests, Hades underground—rather than being located ‘up’
• The salvation-focused religious sensibility that emerged around 600 BCE initially appealed only to a tiny elite but spread through popular culture and eventually captured major religious movements like Christianity and Islam
  • Early movements like Orphism and Buddhism offered salvation from the natural world through radical austerity
  • Traditional celebrations of sexuality gave way to puritanical discomfort as the new sensibility spread
  • Christianity, Islam, and Mahayana Buddhism democratized salvation by offering faith as a substitute for lifelong austerities
• The distinctive Western obsession with upward spatial direction as the path to salvation reflects the salvation-focused sensibility and appears in both theist and civil religions
  • Other cultures locate divine realms in various directions—Irish paradise was on the Atlantic sea floor west of Ireland
  • Christian ascension imagery required Jesus to levitate upward despite theological definitions of heaven as a spiritual condition
  • Science fiction provided the mythology of progress with rocket ships ascending to space as a technological version of religious ascension
• The Space Age failed to deliver transcendence because actual space exploration revealed that other worlds are merely lifeless deserts rather than the ‘wholly other’ realms promised by science fiction
  • Moon landings produced the anticlimactic response ‘Was that all?’ as the Moon proved to be monotonous gray desert
  • Mars turned out to resemble the less interesting corners of Nevada without even rattlesnakes for variety
  • The most interesting sight from other worlds was Earth itself hanging in space
• Human settlements beyond Earth would lack the ‘biosphere dividend’—the roughly 75 cents of every dollar of human economic activity provided free by Earth’s natural systems
  • Richard Costanza’s team calculated that Earth’s natural systems contribute three times the value of human GDP annually
  • Anywhere else in the solar system, air, water, radiation protection, and food production must be provided by human labor
  • Even if other worlds have biospheres, they would only support life forms adapted to those specific conditions
• Lynn White’s critique of Christianity’s role in environmental crisis confused a religion with a religious sensibility, since the anti-nature attitude he identified appears across multiple religious traditions shaped by the same underlying sensibility
  • White argued that Christianity enabled environmental destruction by depicting nature as lifeless matter for human use
  • The same anti-nature attitudes appeared in late Pagan intellectuals like Iamblichus who were equally uncomfortable with physical existence
  • Christian theology doesn’t require environmental abuse, but the salvation-focused sensibility tends to devalue earthly life

Religion Resurgent

The end of economic growth caused by resource depletion is creating conditions where only non-profit-dependent institutions can function effectively, making religion essential for organizing collective action in an age of economic contraction.

• Rationalist movements that denounce religion as outdated have appeared in every literate civilization and follow predictable patterns of initial success followed by failure and religious renewal
  • Rationalist rebellions occurred in Egypt around 1500 BCE, Greece around 600 BCE, China around 750 BCE, following identical patterns
  • Each movement began with constructive criticism and moved toward absolute rejection of traditional faith
  • All eventually collapsed when their promised rational paradise failed to materialize
• Economic growth requires sustained increases in available energy, and its end transforms investment from a positive-sum to a zero-sum or negative-sum game where average investments lose money
  • White’s Law states that economic development corresponds precisely to energy per capita available in a society
  • In contracting economies, for one investment to profit, others must suffer comparable or larger losses
  • Cumberland, Maryland’s empty storefronts illustrate how businesses cannot generate enough profit to pay all stakeholders
• The peaking of global oil production in 2005 marked the end of the growth era, as increasing amounts of energy must be diverted to maintaining energy production rather than supporting economic expansion
  • Fracked wells cost $5-10 million compared to thousands for traditional wells, yet produce far less over time
  • Oil prices above $100 per barrel represent a tax on all economic activity to fund expensive extraction
  • Resources once available for economic growth must now be used to maintain existing energy flows
• Religious institutions historically succeed during economic contraction because they don’t depend on profit motives and can motivate human action through non-economic means
  • The Christian church thrived when Roman economic institutions failed because it didn’t care about profit
  • Medieval Christianity made lending at interest a mortal sin, reflecting the social damage of profit-seeking in contracting economies
  • Religious organizations can organize collective activity around values rather than financial incentives
• The success of Shaker communities compared to secular communes like Brook Farm demonstrates that traditional monastic values—celibacy, communal property, and strict organization—are essential for sustainable communal living
  • Brook Farm lasted only five years because middle-class expectations couldn’t be supported by hand labor
  • Harvard Village Shaker community thrived for generations with 200 members, growing their own food and meeting all needs
  • Shaker success required giving up sexuality, family, personal property, and individual autonomy
• Attempts to create religions for secular purposes invariably fail because they lack connection to the theosphere—the experiential dimension where people encounter apparent disembodied intelligences
  • Up to one-third of people report experiences involving contact with disembodied intelligent beings
  • Religion is the traditional human response to these experiences, regardless of their ultimate cause
  • Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion and eco-religion projects fail because they’re manufactured by people who don’t believe in them

At the Closing of an Age

The current crisis involves not just depleted resources but depleted imaginations filled with dysfunctional ideas, and the cure requires transitioning from the age of reason’s abstract thinking to an age of memory that can integrate the lessons of history.

• Human thinking operates through three distinct modes—figuration, abstraction, and reflection—that correspond to historical ages of faith, reason, and memory in civilizations
  • Figuration assembles sensation into meaningful objects and tells stories to connect everything in narrative patterns
  • Abstraction sorts figurations into categories and builds theories from logical relationships between categories
  • Reflection thinks about thinking itself and can lead to either wisdom or nihilistic madness
• Vico’s analysis of legal history reveals how human institutions move from concrete specifics in dark ages toward increasing abstraction, then collapse back to concrete specifics when civilizations fall
  • Early law codes specify exact punishments for specific crimes without theoretical framework
  • Mature legal systems create abstract principles that jurists apply to particular cases
  • After civilization collapses, successor states return to lists of specific punishments for specific crimes
• Ages of reason systematically fail because abstract concepts are mistaken for reality itself rather than being recognized as mental models with limited applicability
  • Scientists treat laws of nature as invisible realities behind appearances rather than useful summaries of observed patterns
  • The concept of natural laws is a medieval Christian metaphor about God as feudal monarch, not an empirical discovery
  • Rationalist ages become unreasonable when theories stop explaining the most critical aspects of contemporary experience
• The current crisis represents the failure of the civil religion of progress, whose abstract conceptions of reality no longer match the world of declining energy and ecological limits
  • Every major industrial nation pursues economic policies that have never produced growth but fit theoretical expectations
  • People systematically forget lessons from speculative bubbles and make identical mistakes repeatedly
  • The belief in limitless growth from finite resources reveals how divorced from reality contemporary thinking has become
• Unchecked reflection leads to nihilism and social fragmentation, but traditional religious narratives provide the only proven antidote to the infinite regress of skepticism
  • Sustained reflection demonstrates that certainty about anything is impossible, leading to paralysis of will
  • Jean-Paul Sartre expressed the resulting dilemma: if nothing can be known for certain, how can you find reason to act?
  • Religion provides faith as a solution: since all beliefs are unprovable, choose based on values rather than facts
• The mythological figure of ‘Man the conqueror of Nature’ served as a substitute deity during the industrial age but is now dying along with the civil religion of progress
  • Man isn’t any real person but a fictional character who stars in the heroic narrative of technological conquest
  • Paleoanthropologist Misia Landau showed that evolution stories follow classic hero tale conventions rather than scientific evidence
  • The vast majority of humans throughout history have lived in balance with ecosystems, making the conquest model a historical aberration
• The Second Religiosity that emerges from the failure of rationalism may involve entirely new religious movements rather than revival of traditional faiths, depending on unpredictable historical contingencies
  • Roman collapse led not to revival of Roman gods but to imported Middle Eastern religions like Christianity
  • American popular spiritualities follow 30-40 year cycles, with fundamentalism, Neopaganism, New Age, and atheist movements all nearing their end
  • Successful Second Religiosity movements must embrace the new nature-centered sensibility and independence from middle-class financial support