The best modern parable of progress was, aptly, ahead of its time. In 1861 Imre Madach published “The Tragedy of Man”, a “Paradise Lost” for the industrial age. The verse drama, still a cornerstone of Hungarian literature, describes how Adam is cast out of the Garden with Eve, renounces God and determines to recreate Eden through his own efforts. “My God is me,” he boasts, “whatever I regain is mine by right. This is the source of all my strength and pride.”
Adam gets the chance to see how much of Eden he will “regain”. He starts in Ancient Egypt and travels in time through 11 tableaux, ending in the icebound twilight of humanity. It is a cautionary tale. Adam glories in the Egyptian pyramids, but he discovers that they are built on the misery of slaves. So he rejects slavery and instead advances to Greek democracy. But when the Athenians condemn a hero, much as they condemned Socrates, Adam forsakes democracy and moves on to harmless, worldly pleasure. Sated and miserable in hedonistic Rome, he looks to the chivalry of the knights crusader. Yet each new reforming principle crumbles before him. Adam replaces 17th-century Prague’s courtly hypocrisy with the rights of man. When equality curdles into Terror under Robespierre, he embraces individual liberty””which is in turn corrupted on the money-grabbing streets of Georgian London. In the future a scientific Utopia has Michelangelo making chair-legs and Plato herding cows, because art and philosophy have no utility. At the end of time, having encountered the savage man who has no guiding principle except violence, Adam is downcast””and understandably so. Suicidal, he pleads with Lucifer: “Let me see no more of my harsh fate: this useless struggle.”
Things today are not quite that bad. But Madach’s 19th-century verse contains an insight that belongs slap bang in the 21st. In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed.
I have never read that work, but the ending reminds me of the ending of the classic HG Welles’ book the Time Machine, when the traveler goes all the way to the end of time and there is nothing left but a bunch of gigantic crabs on a beach.
Brilliant! Thanks for the pointer Kendall. The essay highlights the fundamental Girardian insight that the world is ultimately built on violence if it is human centered.
It is only by the transformation of ourselves, effected by the workings of the Holy Spirit that we have any hope of finding joy.
I wonder if I can work this into a Christmas sermon?
Thanks, Kendall. And thanks to the editors at [i]The Economist[/i] for bringing this text out of obscurity.
Went to Amazon and ordered a reprint of Madach’s work.
Madach and the Economist miss the big picture. In the Europe (and the US) for the past three centuries the ideological struggle has supposedly been between faith and reason. More recently we have allowed ourselves to be distracted by Dawkins and other atheists but atheists who largely share our Christian values. Impoverished perhaps but not really so different on matters of democratic government, the equality of all people, etc.
The new debates are with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Islam overtly challenges our ideals of separation of church and state. Islam and Hinduism deny the equal value of all human beings and Buddhism challenges secularism and Christianity because it denies the value and significance of this world and claims that everything we experience is due to our own fault or merit.
Islam is the worlds second largest religion and India and China represent Hinduism and Buddhism. This is not just over there somewhere. In the technical field in which I work I (gladly) encounter people of these faiths every day. Atheists and Christians entertain each other with our old debates but do Atheists have an answer for Islam? Can they argue for the equality of every human being from a purely atheist position? From what I have seen of three different versions of the so called Humanist Manifesto I agree with about 2/3 of the values because they are Christian values but if you take away the context of a Christian culture what do you have left?
Of course secularism is impoverished but western secularism itself is becoming increasingly irrelevant as we live and work more closely with people from the world’s 2nd, 3rd and 4th largest religions.