Bowers Reading 2: The Myth of Progress

The main idea of this chapter seems to be his criticism of progress. He identifies it as a myth and then picks it apart in different ways. I am not going to talk about progress directly here. I am going to pick out parts of his attack on it and examine those. In the end, I like his attack on progress, but I am a bit disappointed in that fact that he doesn’t explain a few things in more detail and he also seems to not go far enough for me in some of his criticism—he seems to use his method selectively. 


Myth and ideology:
He starts by offering different definitions of what a myth is. I was pretty excited about this at first because I thought maybe he was going to try to rehabilitate the idea of myth. At first he says that myth is a story that is believed but is not true. Well, this for me is just dull and avoids the point because we haven’t established what the criterion for truth is. I was excited to hear the Bruce Lincoln definition as “ideology in narrative form.” They can be “truthful depictions of historical events, as an allegory or personification of natural phenomenon, or as an explanation of ritual.” According to Bowers, Lincoln also says that “They are used to convey religious or idealized experience, to establish behavioral models, and to teach.” This to me is a fairly exciting definition of myth. 

Myth has usefulness and meaning though it may not be factually true or accurate in a strict sense. It was very disappointing for me to see Bowers pass this by and move on to talk about a definition from James Conway that says myth is a story or ideology that is untrue. It seems odd that he would move in that direction even though he points out that this means “today’s decedents from ancient cultures living in non-Westernized regions of the world, would be faced with acknowledging that their current lives are based on lies, misconceptions and illusions.” That seems to go against his desire to promote and preserve localism and multiculturalism. He doesn’t stop on that definition, but he does say that it has given him insights that influence what he does settle on.

Bowers’ final definition is “an ideology or, in a more limited sense, as an idea that justifies a series of behaviors and values that are based on misconceptions and illusions essentially destructive to the well-being of a community and the environment.” As I understand it, he is saying that it is an untrue story (like Conway did) and using as his truth criterion that something is untrue if it is “destructive to the well-being of a community and the environment.” This equates myths with lies or misconceptions (the first intentional the second not necessarily so) that are destructive for the people that believe them. I am not sure why he needs to use the word myth here at all and can’t just talk about lies and misconceptions. But that may just be a problem I have because I think myth can be good in many cases and in some ways are actually essential.



Ideology and vocabulary:
Though he does distinguish myth from ideology, Bowers does keep them very close and treat them both as mostly negative. While I agree that “Ideologies control thinking by providing the vocabulary that aligns everyday behaviors and values”, I think he goes a bit too far when he adds that, “The vocabulary is especially important in that it ensures conformity of thinking while at the same time excluding alterative vocabularies and thus alternative ways of thinking and acting.” Words have histories and are living things. An ideology can try to keep the words from changing (or at least in ways that it finds undesirable) and keep their histories hidden, but that is always a struggle and the ideology is never absolutely capable of controlling the words. It is hard for things to change, but they always can and do. 

I would also add that I have been hugely influenced by Nietzsche’s “Truth and Lies” essay. Nietzsche would agree when Bowers says that language controls our “thinking by providing the vocabulary that aligns everyday behaviors and values,” including our understanding of reality and truth. For him, that is what makes a comprehensible world that we can live in together. The point is not to get beyond that (as Bowers seems to me to suggest we need to, but hasn’t yet explained how or what that would be or look like) but to keep the language and/or ideology fresh and in touch with lived experience, goals, outcomes and sustainability of the community that uses them. (Or that is the way I have come to understand Nietzsche.) Bowers seems to suggest that there is something better suited than myth and ideology when it comes to founding language, truth and reality. (Actually, I am not even sure he would question if reality needs to be founded, and maybe not even truth.)



Tradition and Traditionalism:
I like the way that he values tradition and at the same time acknowledges that they are never fixed and are always changing and in need to change. “Time-less and unchanging” traditions don’t exists (or shouldn’t), and traditions are always changing: adapting or evolving. To think that a tradition is unchanging and timeless is rightly called traditionalism, which is really a kind of fundamentalism. Traditions are alive and (should be) dynamic.



Moore’s Law:
The point about Moore’s Law is very good. However, I do wish he would go into why it “is not a law in the same sense as the law of gravity or the law governing the speed of light.” My guess is that those other two laws are physical laws that don’t require human involvement. Gravity and light do what they do if humans are there to watch or not, or even if humans never were. Moore’s Law is like a law in economics or political science. These things require human involvement and really are based on human involvement and activities. If people are not motivated to research ways to fit more transistors into a smaller space, then there will be no progress. Motivation may be curiosity, profit, the belief that progress in this area will have some positive benefit in the world, etc. If people weren’t motivated and did not believe it was possible and desirable, Moore’s Law would not continue to be true. Another issue is the funding to do the research. If money isn’t there to do the research, then it won’t be done and progress won’t happen: the law will not continue to be true. People have an effect on things: how they turnout, how well ideas work, etc.

My guess is that that is what he means but saying they are different, but he doesn’t explain. I wish he would. And I think if he explained this at this point, he would be able to take a more nuanced position on capitalism later. 


Capitalism:
He does well to say that “the primary value of the capitalist system is achieving the greatest possible level of profits.” Yet, this goes against at least two of the economic theorists that he mentions. Smith and Friedman are two that I am familiar with and my reading of them (which is by no means unusual) puts them at odds with this simplification of capitalism and its primary value. Bowers seems to equate selfish interest with self-interest. Yes, that is the way that most people who are pro-capitalism these days see it: they reduce self-interest to profit and see that as the highest value of capitalism. However, when he talks about this drive contaminating politics and government, he is assuming that economics becomes the primary system of values and thinking that govern most of what happens in society. That may be true, but that is not what Smith and Friedman advocated. 

They both saw economics as a field that was not all encompassing, that should coexist with politics, science, etc. as equals having their own purviews and limits. That has been lost in general society. Bowers would do well to talk about how a more positive tradition of capitalism was lost somewhere along the way and maybe see how we can reclaim it. He wants to reclaim localism and other traditions, but he doesn’t look in to the history of capitalism like I think he easily could and see where that could be revived to make it more positive. (Below is a link to something I had been thinking about doing anyway, and I already had some notes and quotes. I finished it to go along with this.) 


On Social Justice:
He is critical of the traditions of capitalism and technology, but he seems to take the traditions of social justice and localism as being without downsides. He says that there are some, “misconceptions and biases of earlier eras, that should not have been constructed in the first place.” Examples he gives are ones that are contrary to our current ideas of social justice like slavery and equality. Now, I don’t mean to justify slavery or inequality, but these are modern values that have come up over time; they are historically relative and have a history and language of their own. However, he seems to want to make them universal (against his championing of localism and cultural diversity) and eternal (against his idea that everything has a history). 

I wonder if this is a blind spot in his thinking, or if he has arguments for doing this that he is just not presenting. He gives reasons for questioning our current thinking on progress and technology, but then he takes up social justice and other things without justifying why they should not also be critiqued. (Or maybe I am being way too much of a post-modernist here.) 



In the end, I still like much of what he has to say because he is taking things to a deeper level than usual. However, I think he is being a bit vague in some places and a bit selective as to where he does go deeper. It makes me think that all of this is done just to push his position on environmentalism, which wouldn’t be bad. Yet, that makes this more of a polemic than a work of philosophy or deeper social criticism. 


Adam Smith And Spontaneous Order: Capitalism, Sympathy and Community