In the last embarrassing installment of the “The Conversation,” the New York Times’ pandering online ‘dialogue’ between columnists David Brooks and Gail Collins, readers overheard David and Gail chatting philosophical on the progress of humanity. Regardless of the deplorable state of American, well, everything, they assured each other in alternating heaves of optimism, at least the present is better than the past.

Not that we should be surprised. David Brooks could find the silver lining of industrial capitalism in a radiation cloud. Nuclear technology, after all, is clear evidence of economic growth and human creativity. No, we shouldn’t be surprised that this country’s supposed intellectuals are finding new ways to dumb down discourse with rancid chestnuts about progress. But we should be disappointed.

The old progress versus decline debate is usually an impoverished one, especially when the parties end up cheering for the upward march of history based on the greater availability of nifty telephones. Case in point, Brooks:

Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure living standards will continue to surge, as they have for everybody for a century or more. Gizmos will get cheaper. New technologies will sprout. Luxuries will be considered necessities.

I cannot understand what qualitative measure of progress is gained when luxuries become necessities. The equation of human progress with technological development rests on the assumption that more sophisticated ways of manipulating our environment and organizing knowledge amount to an increased ability to satisfy human need. But doesn’t the transformation of what was previously a luxury into a necessity increase human need only further?

Contrary to what advertisers want us to think, sprouting technologies will not make our lives better. They will simply change the circumstances in which we lead our lives.  And that transformation can be felt as a loss or a gain, depending on what one values. I see no hope for a resolution to the problems facing America and the world in the fact that “gizmos will get cheaper.” If anything, our tendency to convert luxury into necessity will make those problems more acute. But David Brooks, like so many Americans, is too enthralled with the warm glow and supple buttons of his BlackBerry to notice. I expect this kind of delusional pap from the people who line up three days early to buy the first batch of iPads. But should I really expect to read the same idiotic sentiments in the pages of a respected newspaper?

In an earlier “Conversation” column this year, Brooks attempted to refute the idea of America in decline, claiming that theorists of the disintegration of Western civilization have always been mistaken because, voila, look what’s still here, Western civilization.  In his muddleheaded conflation, America’s status as supreme global economic power and the continuing existence of that unwieldy cultural-historical entity we call Western civilization were one in the same.

Forget for the moment the hot topic of America’s decline in the world order and consider instead Brooks’ underlying denial of the idea of decline per se. “Every previous bout of declinism has been disproved,” said Brooks. He failed to elaborate, but even if we accept that talking about decline in any objective sense is unreasonable, then shouldn’t we say the same about progress? Isn’t the very idea of a single all-encompassing directionality to history absurd? History is human activity and the interpretation of said activity. How could the movement of such a phenomenon — either the activity or the interpretation — be anything other than flux in all directions?

Just because we still consider ourselves nominal heirs to a cultural tradition called the West — a myth of identity whose origins we often place in the eighteenth-century nexus of Enlightenment, French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, with Renaissance and Greco-Roman antecedents — doesn’t mean the values of that tradition actually persist.  Increasingly, our sense of historical identity, and with it our sense of historical trajectory, is a facade, a rhetorical gesture intended to disguise the fact that an abyss separates our present from the past that we call our own.

This feeble rhetorical spackling is on display in “The Conversation” where columnists masquerade as men of letters. Gail Collins refers to Voltaire’s novel Candide as “that play.” David Brooks and Dick Cavett, in an abortive attempt at comparing America to Rome, can only guess at what Edward Gibbon must have said in that big old dusty book of his. The best Cavett can muster is that he knew one person, Gore Vidal, who had actually read it. It becomes painfully clear that if we want to read anything incisive about American politics and culture in relation to Rome, we’d better get the hell out of this ‘conversation’ and go find Vidal.

In the meantime, until they have a better grasp on the past and are capable of measuring human well being in something other than gigabytes, pundits ought to refrain from reckoning either the progress or the decline of civilization. 

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