Why This Is an Age Of Regress

The Single Organizing Principle That Explains Our World — And Why It Bodes Ill For the Future

Image Credit: Sarah Silbiger

Dear Umair — how did the notion that a small fraction of humanity should be allowed to endlessly mine ALL resources, including human resources until those resources are completely depleted become accepted? Yes, the West invented the notion of The Great Chain of Being which provided a rationale for this exploitation but how and why did everyone opt in on this figuration? Was capitalism itself the engine that drove all this? Probably, but how?

That’s a great — a profound — question. I’m going to try to answer it the best I can. 

Why is this an Age of Regress? Not my opinion — empirical fact. Centuries of progress have slowed and now starting to reverse. We live at one of the great turning points of human history — many of them. This one? It’s… not good.

So what is it about?

Look around the world. What do you see? What single fact explains how our world is organized and structured — most? Is it capitalism, democracy, liberalism? Not even close. 

The single organizing slash structuring principle of our world is still the Great Chain of Being. For those unfamiliar with this term, it was originally a Christian idea that became an Enlightenment idea that nature was hierarchical, that there was a linear sequence of “worth” of all the things in existence, so rocks were lesser than plants were lesser than animals were lesser than humans. Human beings were further divided up according to “innate” characteristics, which made some “races” better than others. Better, in this context, meant the Enlightenment values of being analytical, individualistic, calculative — the stuff that today we might call Homo Economicus, more simply.

You don’t need three guesses as to which humans ranked highest in the Great Chain of Being. Now, this was all theory, way back then. And it was said that some kinds of peoples were, in these ways, supreme — meaning they held these Enlightenment values most, right down in the blood. So all kinds of new pseudosciences were born — phrenology and the like — to explain these theorized differences. This kind of people had smaller brains. They were only good for being labour, slaves. That kind of person was shorter, on average — and that made them cunning, because they couldn’t rely on physical strength, and so nations of criminals were thought to be. Now, none of this was true. There are no “innate” differences between any of us that make one group of people inherently more rational, calculating, intelligent, or anything else, really.

The simplest example of course, of all this, was women. What was their place in the Great Chain? Well, they were emotional, fragile, swooning damsels. They weren’t intelligent and reasoned and individualistic — hence, they relied on men.

Look around the world again, now that I’ve told you that. What do you see? You should see that our world is basically the Great Chain of Being, made real. Even if it was never true. Look at the entire global economy — it’s basically a recapitulation of the Great Chain. The richest nations in the world are almost all of a certain kind, then comes Asia, and then comes Africa. Is that because, well, white people really are supreme? Of course not. It’s more because some nations — today’s rich ones — went out and conquered and colonized the rest, abusing them terribly and violently, taking their labour, resources, and property. That made them rich. They could then invest that surplus in things human beings had never had the freedom to do before — conduct science, write literature, build systems of advanced public goods like universities and hospitals and so forth.

It’s a shocking and little-told fact that our world is still basically the Great Chain of Being. But not just in terms of the hierarchy of personhood amongst nations. But in more profound ways than that even. Women, having barely a foothold on the ladder, then had to spend centuries fighting for their liberation — from the right to vote to the right to have reproductive healthcare, or even just the right not to have to depend on men, as it was said they inherently needed to, right down to not being property passed down from father to husband and so forth.