The Work of Progress

A brief essay on the descent of man

Step aside, TED talk man Yuval Noah Harari, and grab your umbrella because I’m about to brainstorm

There exists in our time a tremendous tendency to overcomplicate matters — “"This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit,” as Dril posted many moons ago. Scholars and professors build their makework careers on makeworking the simple things difficult. Politicians speak for hours while saying nothing and hoping you neither notice nor care. But sometimes the truth arrives in its most bare and unadorned form, stripped of all pretense, and we can see ourselves as we truly are: humanzees.

The history of humanzeekind is not nearly as complex as we have been led to believe. Strip away the dates and names and what remains is a rather straightforward tale. Our ancestors spent their days surviving, reproducing, and slowly developing thoughts about why they were surviving and reproducing. This development of self-awareness, which has reached both its apogee and nadir here in the age of Poasting and Gooning, marks the only true revolution in human history. Everything else has merely been a variation on the theme.

Consider what we call progress. The neanderthal clutched a rock as he drifted to sleep. His medieval descendant clutched a dagger or sword. The modern man reaches for a gun or, still edging with his Goon Hard after a hard day spent amidst the slop of his newsfeed, himself. The tools change while the dreams remain constant. We mistake new technologies for new purposes. We confuse fresh methods with fresh motives.

Check it out: the brain’s a-changin’

The truth is not flattering. Most of human existence for nearly all humanzees involved has been and still is, to put it plainly, miserable. Women have hated their circumstances. Men who lacked power — every single one save the kings and billionaires — have resented those who possessed it. Children enjoyed but the briefest respite before being thrust into adult responsibilities and experiencing adult agonies.¹ Life itself is something to be endured rather than enjoyed, punctuated only by the the fleeting distractions of pleasure and the looming inevitability of death.

Nature, meanwhile, continued on its own course entirely indifferent to our growing self-importance. Volcanoes erupted. Predators hunted. The heartless world, alternately cooling and heating beyond our meager powers to regulate it, neither acknowledged nor accommodated our false sense of superiority over it. Some sad, defeated animals, like the domestic dog, allowed themselves to be reshaped in our image, becoming diminutive reflections of our own contradictions. Others, like felids both big and small, still persist in a semi-feral state alongside us humanzees.

What passes for civilization is really just the orderly management of our primary drives. We have not eliminated our fundamental nature; we have merely regulated it, disguised it, and occasionally redirected it. The institutions we have created — government, religion, education, posting/gooning — serve mainly to channel our basic impulses rather than to transform them.

This is not to say there has been no change whatsoever. Modern humans have developed remarkably potent methods of destruction and distraction. We have devised intricate systems of justification for base behaviors that would have needed no explanation to our ancestors. We have created increasingly elaborate social structures to hide the simplicity of what we truly are and what we truly want, only to retreat into our goon caves to access such threadbare impulses for hours on end.

There exists a peculiar reluctance to acknowledge how little has actually changed. We prefer to tell ourselves a story of constant improvement, of moral and intellectual progress, that likely leaves most of us feeling dirty and ashamed, unable to even live up to the status of Neuralink-ready paragons of progress that technology marketers present us as. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,”² etc. This comforting fantasy allows us to feel superior to those who came before us, though we differ from them primarily in our opportunities rather than our inclinations. The guilt arising from the unavoidable fact that we are not better deep down inside drives a wedge between us, separating us even further than tribal competition for scarce resources already has.

Men today, much like men throughout history, fall asleep uneasily, with visions of violence and desire dancing in their heads. The implements may have evolved from rocks to knives to guns, but the dreams themselves remain largely unaltered. Left to its crude devices, the modern mind still revolves around the same fixed points of power and pleasure that motivated our earliest ancestors.

Women, by contrast, have consistently borne the burden of foresight. While men drift off contemplating immediate gratification or the sweet, sudden release of death, women lie awake considering consequences for themselves and the otherwise-neglected offspring they are forced to carry to term. This division persists through all our supposed advancements and reformations. It is one of the few constants in the human story.

The duality of love and hate likewise remains unchanged. We have always simultaneously despised and lusted after one another for the very same qualities and actions. What attracts us also repels us. What fulfills us also destroys us. These contradictions have not been resolved by time or progress; they have merely been dressed in new language and new customs, screens of separation that range from the basic (the confessional screen) to the sophisticated (the iPhone screen).

The modern conceit is that we have somehow transcended our humanzee nature. We have not. We have simply found more intricate, furtive ways to express it or more elaborate means to deny it. The fundamental drives that animated cave people continue to animate us, however much we may disguise them with technology and rationalization, with weapons of mass distraction white-knuckled in our Post Hand and Goon Hand.

This is not necessarily cause for despair. There is a certain comfort in recognizing continuity. The problems that plague us are not new, nor are they products of modern decay. They are as old as humanity itself. And if they have always existed — surely the philosophical heavyweights of yore would argue thus — they are not problems to be solved with pills, surgeries, and advanced AI chatbots but conditions to be managed: a terminal case, inherited at birth, of being “mortal men, doomed to die.”

We might do better to accept our nature rather than constantly trying to overcome it. The tension between our animal origins and our self-reflective consciousness cannot be eliminated. It can only be acknowledged and accommodated. Our efforts to deny this tension have created as much suffering as the tension itself — suffering that is different in kind if not in degree.³

The course of human history, viewed without sentimentality or self-flattery, reveals not an upward arc but a circular path. We return repeatedly to the same essential questions and conflicts, though in different forms. What changes is not who we are but the stories we tell ourselves to live.

This is not to suggest that all our efforts at improvement have been futile. We have, in certain respects, created more comfortable conditions for ourselves. We have air conditioned our rathole lodgings, extended our pain-filled lifespans, and expanded the storehouse of forbidden insights purloined from the tree of knowledge. We have developed forms of social organization and cooperation so byzantine that we barely exercise any agency in their operation. These are not inconsequential achievements.

Yet beneath these surface improvements, our fundamental nature remains largely unaltered. The cave person wondering at the stars differs from the astronomer peering through a telescope primarily in method rather than motivation. Both seek to understand their place in an incomprehensible universe. Both are driven by the same mixture of curiosity and fear. Either would goon and post all the livelong day, like apes in the primate house, if they possessed adequate food and shelter but no other outlet for their basic drives.

Perhaps the most honest history would acknowledge this continuity without either condemning or celebrating it. We are what we have always been: thinking apes struggling to reconcile our physical drives with our capacity for reflection.⁴ Neither angels nor demons but creatures of contradiction, forever caught between what we desire and what we understand.

The simplest and most melancholy truth about our complicated history may be that it is not nearly as complicated as we pretend. We kill. We reproduce. We think about killing and reproducing. And occasionally, in the spaces between these activities and in those increasingly infrequent moments when we are not edging and posting, we create something that seems to transcend them — art, philosophy, science. But even these apparent transcendences are, in their way, expressions of the same fundamental drives, which manifest in much cruder form in the nigh-involuntary activities of the Post Hand and the Goon Hand.

Even without today’s oh-so-clickable current-thing crises and tomorrow’s tiny apocalypses, women will continue to worry about tomorrow. Men will continue to dream of transient pleasures. And humanity will continue to alternate between loving and hating itself for the very things that make it human. This is not a failure of progress, which is neutral. It is simply the nature of our human, all-too-human selves.

1. From the Greek agōnia, from agōn ‘contest’ — appropriate here that life itself is a contest that ends in failure, loss, a “good death” if you’re lucky (few such cases).

2. Nonsense on stilts. It bends toward just us, as in just us humanzees getting on that grind and doing our thing.

3. This kind of suffering keeps the various psychologists and other headshrinkers busy, which is good for the GDP, unemployment data, &c.

4. Fortunately, those big brains, freed from the complex labor of the hunt, are starting to shrink.