Humans today occupy a bewilderingly vast range of social complexity and technological development, from spear-shaking paleolithic clans with bones through their noses to astronauts riding rockets through the stratosphere. Yet there seems to be a popular assumption—far from universal, but certainly widespread—that every human society can be placed onto the same long-run curve of progress: a hyperbola that ultimately reaches to the stars. According to this view, societies at any given moment will be spread all along that curve, the less advantaged ones at the lower end, the more advantaged ones higher up, and all will trace the same triumphant swoosh of progress, given enough time.

I think that that view, though wrong, is useful as a foil for an alternative view, which is, firstly (and most obviously) that societies’ “curves” can and do differ greatly, and secondly (much less obviously) that their development always ends in a flattening out against an asymptotic ceiling, rather than a run to infinity. Some societies will fly much, much higher than others before their progress ends, but, even for the progress-worshipping West, a ceiling is always there.

A related idea is that, at any given moment—in the span of history that stretches from the present back perhaps to the Neolithic Revolution—there are two fundamentally different kinds of society: “progress” societies that still have substantial positive rates of scientific, technological and other forms of cultural development, and “stasis” societies that essentially have stopped developing on their own.

These are simple ideas applied to a complex world in which “progress” has a somewhat hazy definition; any “society” usually is connected to and influenced by others; and societies often are snuffed out or merged with others long before they mature. There is also a substantial genre and history of academic theorizing about civilizations and their supposed “life cycles,” vulnerability to climate change, etc.

But surely there is no harm in putting forward a new hypothesis—and I think it’s fair to say that my amateur take here is rooted in evolutionary principles and in the historical record.

That record suggests pretty clearly that the true “progress” societies in existence today—the ones that would continue to develop on their own without external help—make up only a small minority of humankind, and are chiefly European-derived. The dominant, default mindset for our species is instead the stasis mindset, and even if, at present, the societies ruled by that mindset are elevated by handouts and hand-me-down technology from their rich and progressive cousins, and might look as if they are progressing too, they will probably regress when that influence ceases.

The asymptote

It should interest us, more than it evidently does, that stasis societies are seen also among some non-human animals. These include large-brained ones (chimpanzees, porpoises, elephants) whose cognitive abilities and social structures are probably at least comparable to those of our earliest paleolithic ancestors.

I think that by considering the situations of these animal societies, we can understand better why the progress of most human societies has been so limited. Long before humankind became a factor in their lives, each of these species-groups reached a sort of equilibrium with its natural environment, featuring stable populations, relatively long lifespans, and few if any serious predators—and thus, no heavy selection pressure favoring substantial change.

We can infer from this observation that human subpopulations and societies generally have experienced similar developmental trajectories, from fast change to slow change to no change as they adapted more effectively to the challenges presented by their environments. In other words, even if human developmental trajectories reached greater heights, especially after the neolithic revolution introduced new societal dynamics and new selection pressures, they still tended to flatten out at some equilibrium level, some happy Eden—usually corresponding to what we would now consider a low level of development: Think of the Mayans Cortes first met on the shore of the Caribbean, the Visayans bullied by Magellan, the Powhatans of Pocahontas, and the Polynesian kingdoms that hosted (and ultimately roasted) Cook.

Humans’ collective success at populating the Earth eventually led to substantial crowding and clashing of societies, which, where it existed, would have been a significant new source of pressure to become larger, more sophisticated, more coordinated, more powerful. With a bit of luck, “first movers” in this sense could quickly have turned themselves into local hegemons. But the imperial civilizations encountered by European adventurers in the heathen world were in most respects far behind their conquerors—the Aztecs could not make anything from hard metals, for example—and generally seemed to lack the cultural traits needed for long-term scientific and technical progress. Even the most progressive non-European civilizations, in China and the Islamic Middle East, had more or less fallen by the wayside by the time Europe began industrializing.

Proxy conflicts

The factors underlying European civilization’s substantially greater capacity for progress have been debated for a while now. Presumably they included geographic- and resource-related advantages, cultural developments in the Hellenic and Roman worlds, Christianity and its variants, and other more obscure psychological traits. Given the complexity of Western civilization and the millennia that separate us from the factors in question, that debate over causation might never be settled. That debate might also not matter much, for every civilization has a set of progress drivers, and yet every civ stops progressing and/or dies eventually—and we have no special reason to think that the “exceptional” civ in which we live will remain an exception forever.

One thing that I am convinced does matter is the gap that exists between progress societies and stasis societies—and between their respective mindsets. If there is a novel idea in this essay, this probably is it: the progress vs. stasis divide underlies and helps give rise to a lot of other, more evident divides, though its presence and its influence are never acknowledged.

What more evident divides? I think the clearest example is what we call the “Left” vs. “Right” divide. Marx and Engels, who deserve as much credit as anyone for the modern concept of Left politics, were smart enough to notice that “primitive communism,” in paleolithic, kinship-based, essentially static societies, was the dominant social model for humans until the relatively recent advent of farming. Here in the early 21^st century, with the benefit of a century’s experience and hindsight, we can see that communism and stasis are connected causally, not just coincidentally. Even modern, “advanced” communism ultimately freezes an affected society in time.

That Marx and Engels, like Leftists today, preferred to see their stasis ideology as conducive to “progress” reflects the bias of our progress-dominated era—and of course reminds us of the virtually limitless human capacity for self-deception.

“Conservatives” have hardly been less deluded about their own ideology. In theory, conservatism restricts social change to conserve adaptive cultural traits. In practice, conservatism has been relatively permissive not only of technological and scientific changes, but also of destabilizing social changes including avarice and exhibitionism. Essentially, conservatism in the modern era has become an individualist, libertarian, narcissistic, not-conservative-of-anything ideology—a progress ideology—and as practiced today seems unsustainable to put it mildly.

Thus, I suggest, when the Right shouts for “equality of opportunity” and the Left for “equality of outcomes,” they are, to a great extent, shouting across a much deeper divide than the one they can see. In effect, they are shouting for more progress or for less, imagining in each case that they really want something else.

What about sex differences in policy attitudes? How would men and women have ended up on different sides of the progress/stasis fault-line? As I suggested in a brief 2022 essay, modern women’s relative preferences for ideals such as “equity” and “inclusivity”—and I would now add traits such as cancellations, lenient-policing attitudes, and preferences for low-complexity social structures—may be rooted at least partially* in the paleolithic, essentially static world, which in a sense women never left, their principal social roles having been fundamental and thus highly conserved. In contrast, men have had much greater exposure to the social upheavals following the advents of agriculture and industrialization, and thus have been much more shaped by those changes, especially in progress societies, so that they now possess, on average, a more “modern” set of preferences and biases.

If we examine how the stasis/progress divide corresponds to race and ethnicity, we see only a small, mostly European-derived minority on the progress side, and the vast non-European majority on the stasis side. Non-European societies are often highly stratified, and people in the upper strata of those societies often seem to adapt easily to the progress mindset, if they didn’t have it already. But the general picture suggests that there is something about European heritage especially that makes one relatively likely to have the progress mindset.

Putting these simple ideas together suggests, for example, that we should expect Left-type, redistributionist, essentially pro-stasis policies to come mainly from women as compared to men, from people in developing societies as compared to Westerners—and from developing-society women most of all. That is, of course, what we do see in our world today.

The End of Progress

So far, this essay may come across as yet another negative depiction of non-European-derived peoples—an overwrought way of saying “We’re Number One” as I think my American compatriots still like to do—and maybe also a bit misogynist.

But that is not at all the message I am trying to convey here. Distinguishing the progress mindset from the stasis mindset is not the same as making a judgment about which one is better.

The train of thought that runs through this essay originated several years ago with my idea that European-derived civilization, despite all its talk about becoming star-faring, medically immortal, entering a Singularity of hyper-development, etc. etc. may instead be well along in the process of abandoning its drive for progress. Thus, in my view, whatever ideological or other struggles are kept in play now by the progress-stasis divide will soon be resolved as the last locomotives of progress shudder to a halt.

What makes me think that this could be happening in the progress-worshipping West, the West that keeps inventing stuff like tail-landing rockets and single-cell multiomics? Here are a few signs:

• Science has triumphed over religion, but scientific advances, especially in theoretical physics and cosmology, are confronting humans as never before with a model of reality that completely contradicts their grandiose self-image and need for “meaning.” [link, link]
• Many emerging technological advances, including AI and robotics, also are problematic for human psychology. [link].
• Western civilization—the epitome of progress civilization—has already mostly lost its traditional, vital drive to explore and subdue, has become soft and feminized, has lost its fertility, has burdened itself with enormous welfare systems supporting enormous populations of non-productive citizens, and is beset by epidemics of mental illness and drug use. As one would expect of a dead or dying organism, the West is being colonized by high-fertility, essentially saprophytic invaders from static societies.
• Above-replacement-rate fertility in the world is now concentrated in the most static societies, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which in that very real and tangible sense represents the human future.
• Even in the West—and even apart from political ideologies like socialism—recent rapid technological, economic and social changes have provoked strong enthusiasm for reversions to overtly static modes of living. Examples of this enthusiasm include the “hippie” movement of the 1960s, the popularity of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books (decent static pastoral societies vs. a malignant industrial state), and various contemporary “trad” movements.

If I am right that human societies invariably become static, then we must let go of the popular assumption that humans are impossible to satisfy fully, and—like cartoon characters chasing carrots that dangle just out of reach—will keep pursuing progress in one form or another ad infinitum. Indeed, the advent of advanced weight-loss drugs that non-addictively curb food appetite, but also suppress other motivations, already suggests that the drive for progress can be dialed down even in progress-mindset humans.

The rising popularity of “happiness” drugs like cannabis, and even methamphetamine and heroin/fentanyl, tells a complementary story: Humans ultimately are going to find a shortcut across the long and winding life-path they traditionally have had to tread to achieve enduring contentment. In other words, they may be able, soon, simply to choose, as they choose cars or clothes, lives of deep satisfaction and even euphoric bliss—lives that run indefinitely without interruption, without hangovers, and without any of the blood, toil, tears and sweat that have powered our species until now.

________

*Obviously, female psychological traits are rooted largely in the biology of sex, child-bearing and child-rearing.