earning a lot of money or driving an expensive car implies that one is a more
valued member of society. Sociologists routinely find positive correlations
between income and happiness. Over time, however, and in an absolute sense,
more may not mean happier. Americans believed themselves to be less happy
in 1970 than in 1957, and still less happy by 1998, yet they used much more
energy and raw materials per capita in 1998.^15
The 1973 oil crisis precipitated the new climate of opinion, for it showed
America’s vulnerability to economic and even geological factors over which
we have little control. The new pessimism was exemplified by the enormous
popularity of that year’s ecocidal bestseller, The Limits to Growth.^16 Writing
the next year, Robert Heilbroner noted the new pessimism: “There is a
question in the air... ‘Is there hope for man?’”^17 Robert Nisbet, who thinks
that the idea of progress “has done more good over a 2500-year period...
than any other single idea in Western history,”^18 nonetheless agrees that the
idea is in twilight. This change did not take place all at once. Intellectuals had
been challenging the idea of progress for some time, dating back to The
Decline of the West, published during World War I, in which Oswald Spengler
suggested that Western civilization was beginning a profound and inevitable
downturn.^19 The war itself, the Great Depression, Stalinism, the Holocaust,
and World War II shook Western belief in progress at its foundations.
Developments in social theory further undermined the idea of progress by
making social Darwinism intellectually obsolete. Modern anthropologists no
longer believe that our society is “ahead of” or “fitter than” so-called
“primitive” societies. They realize that our society is more complex than its
predecessors but do not rank our religions higher than “primitive” religions or
consider our kinship system superior. Even our technology, though assuredly
more advanced, may not be better in that it may not meet human needs over the
long term.^20
Another key justification for our belief in progress had come from
biological theory. Biologists used to see natural evolution as the survival of the
fittest. By 1973 a much more complex view of the development of organisms
had swept the field. “Life is not a tale of progress,” according to Stephen Jay
Gould. “It is, rather, a story of intricate branching and wandering, with
momentary survivors adapting to changing local environments, not approaching
cosmic or engineering perfection.”^21