Some people feel a compulsion to be on stage, to preen and perform in the public eye. Others develop what strikes me as a closely related drive: to have opinions and to express them publicly.

The average contemporary opinionator a.k.a. public intellectual wouldn’t frame his vocation this way, of course. If you were to suggest to him that he is a compulsive, fame-seeking performer who, at best, benefits his fellow man by providing light entertainment, he would react scornfully. A public intellectual sees his work as a semi-altruistic kulturdoktor service aimed at diagnosing and prescribing treatment for all variety of social maladies.

Moreover, to be clear, all healthy humans express opinions with the aim of influencing—for their and/or others’ benefit—the course of events, at least within their families or other social microenvironments. The public opinionator would say that his aim is essentially the same, though his audience is larger and his opinions are more polished and thoughtful.

That said, we might ask: How’s it going? How is our society—or really the society-of-societies we call the “West”—faring under the guidance of its thoughtful and polished public opinionators?

Surely it is hard to make a persuasive case that things are going well. There are measures of societal health that seem relatively objective—measures such as mental disorder and suicide incidence, total fertility, social trust, satisfaction with the present and optimism about the future. By these metrics and many others, the West appears to be in the middle to late stages of an apoptotic process of civilizational dissolution.

It might seem strange to worry, amid this Fall-of-Rome-scale disaster, about the role of newspaper columnists, influential bloggers and other public commentators. But if they are really as important as they think they are—if they are not merely subprime entertainers, of the same broad ilk as OnlyFans strippers and subway buskers—then we should wonder at their lack of efficacy, which, by the way, contrasts starkly with the effectiveness of other professions, e.g., chemists, computer scientists, physicians and aerospace engineers.

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I think at least part of the answer to this mystery lies in the basic difference between the systems that concern opinionators and the systems that concern more successful professionals. The systems that concern opinionators are very large nonlinear systems consisting of (among other things) millions or billions of humans, each of whom is, in his or her own right, an unfathomably complex, quadrillion-synapse system. In contrast, the systems that concern chemists, engineers, doctors and biologists are, though “technical,” much more tidy and comprehensible. If we really thought that opinionators were up to the task of modeling, designing, critiquing and modifying human societies, as engineers and other technical professionals usually are for the objects of their own skill-sets, then we would train them much more rigorously and hand them much more power. Or perhaps we would give that power to the formal professions (“sociology” and “political science”) that are supposed to study, model and optimize societies and their governing structures in rigorous, scientific ways.

But of course we take neither the self-appointed opinionator nor the professional social scientist very seriously—indeed, the latter’s domain is of interest now chiefly as a striking cautionary example of institutional capture by women and consequent wokeification.

As for the typical “successful” public opinionator, he draws a much larger audience, compared to purely academic thinkers, but has only the vaguest (if any) long-run policy and cultural impact. Typically he is someone who started out with an undergraduate degree in something like English Literature or History, then got some journalism experience, then managed to get enough opinion pieces published in the right places, and was personable enough to editors and fellow writers, that he was accepted into the club so to speak. His takes are often popular. They strike chords and draw clicks. They seem cutting edge—without, of course, straying beyond the Overton bounds or otherwise alienating the subscribers of the journals that publish his stuff. Sometimes those takes are borrowed from lesser-known writers, and sometimes they reveal all too clearly the opinionator’s youth and inexperience. But he seems right much of the time, and perhaps more importantly, provides his readers with opinions light enough to carry, like an interesting bottle of wine, to dinner parties. He may end up doing very well for himself, fame-and money- and status-wise. Alas, though, he must share the attentional bandwidth of the public with a vast number of sharp-elbowed rivals, including fellow opinionators, politicians and political activists, actors, social-media influencers, and various others whose ability to infect the collective mind with their opinions is roughly proportional to their celebrity. Thus, his pronouncements on the whole are functionally lost amid an overwhelming cacophony, and his long-run impact on the course of human events is either infinitesimal or indeterminate.

More to the point, if we consider what public intellectuals’ output in recent decades amounts to, we must acknowledge that it has either contributed to the West’s present predicament or signally failed to prevent it.

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So public opinionation, at least as a genuine culture-improving service, appears in recent history to have been an exercise in futility—at best—even if it has been useful to some of its practitioners for private, selfish, money/fame purposes. And the main reason for this futility or even net harmfulness is that humans collectively are unable to understand, to an adequate degree, how a high civilization works, let alone direct and maintain that civilization sustainably. If even a small proportion of the human population were able to perform, with evident competence, this function of civilizational leadership and maintenance, things would be very different. But at present there is no profession that meets that definition and is taken seriously enough to be granted the necessary powers. And, of course, if there were such a profession, there would be little or no need for public opinionators in that space.

Is this lack of a true “social engineer” class really all that bad? Until recently, the problem of the direction of societies was handled by something like a professional class, namely aristocrats and other social elites. In the West, these elites presided over societies of at least modest civilization, which ultimately bequeathed to us unprecedented physical comfort and safety, elongated average lifespan, low infant and child mortality, widespread literacy and cornucopias of market goods. This progress has continued to some extent even in the present, post-elite era of democracy and media cacophony.

The problem is that the areas of unambiguous progress in Western life—in engineering and medicine, for example—can be credited to competent professional classes. By contrast, the critical areas relating to social management and governance lack competent professional classes, and seem to have little near-term prospect of developing them, or even of reaching agreement on what competence in these areas would mean.

Even math-heavy economics, which poses as a settled, scientific, Nobel-worthy discipline, stumbles again and again, because, like the “softer” social sciences, it faces the so-far-insurmountable complexity and mutability of human society. The conduct of economics debates in op-eds and blogs, often by non-economist public opinionators, is above all a sign that economics remains an immature field of study and practice.

In other words, public opinionators are markers of areas where humans remain collectively incompetent.

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Western civilization in its essentials owes its development chiefly to automatic processes of biological and cultural evolution, and much less so to the rational designs of elites. These evolutionary processes occurred largely beneath individual awareness, and were never adequately understood and codified. In principle, conservative governance—conservative in the small-c sense of conserving cultural traits and traditions—could have maintained that civilization and its benefits even as its elites and common folk remained ignorant of how it all worked. In reality, Western societies became less and less conservative, and more and more overconfident and hubristic, over the past half-millennium at least. By the mid 20^th century those societies were thoroughly infected by cultural ideas—enthusiastically promoted by prominent public opinionators—that were bound to destroy their enviable way of life.

The worst of these ideas has been the notion that human civilization itself is just an abstraction, an “app” that can be downloaded to any group of humans via a written constitution or code of laws. A particularly powerful driver of this notion’s public acceptance has been the insistence that the contrary idea—that modern civilization is an emergent property of specific human populations with requisite genetic and cultural features honed over millennia—is not just incorrect but evil and punishable. (The spread of post-nationalism, multiculturalism, contractual nationalism—whatever you want to call it—has thus been critically enabled by the threat of harm to those who resist it, much as Christianity was spread in late antiquity.)

I could continue with examples of bad ideas that have infected modern societies, but most of the big ones I’ve already covered in prior essays over the years. In any case, it seems to me that in this grim situation, the only truly helpful public opinions would be those that make people more aware and accepting of their shortcomings, and thus more humble and cautious, especially about sociopolitical matters.

A humbler, more cautious West seems very unlikely, of course. Grandiosity and hubris appear to have been powerfully adaptive traits for Westerners during the critical period in which they achieved global dominance. Western peoples, most obviously in the United States, still tend to see that evangelistic overconfidence as good—“a feature, not a bug”—and self-doubt as bad. That attitude also underlies the Western reverence for “democracy” with its implication that the common people are the ultimate repository of wisdom. To tell those people, especially Americans, that their accumulating problems are the consequences of their own stupidity—“it’s the stupid, stupid,” one might say—is to tell them precisely what they don’t want to hear and will always reject.

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Human societies today occupy a bewilderingly vast range of social complexity and technological development, from spear-shaking paleolithic clans with bones through their noses to very large, tech-worshipping, early-stage-spacefaring countries. 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 high-tech ones, 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; and any “society” usually is connected to and influenced by others, and may be snuffed out or absorbed by one of those neighbors/rivals long before it matures. There is also a substantial genre and history of academic theorizing about civilizations and their supposed life cycles, vulnerability to climate change, etc.

But sometimes even a simplistic hypothesis can illuminate and clarify—and I think it’s fair to say that my amateur take here is at least 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 substantially 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.

Stasis as equilibrium

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 had only an early Bronze Age level of metallurgy, 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 it seems that 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. But the general picture suggests that there is something about European heritage especially that makes one much more 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. In fact, 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—i.e., undergoing the usual flattening-out against a ceiling of stasis. Thus, according to that hypothesis, 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—they generally dull the brain’s reward system—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 artificially induced 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.

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