At a time when anti-progress thought is rampant, we need more voices like Arjun’s and Logan’s. Authors who can argue with straight logic against nihilism and in favor of human prosperity.
Here are some passages that stood out.
Humanity finally kicked into high gear during the Enlightenment, when we realized that progress was both possible and achievable, when ideas that fostered creativity and criticism began to replace those that suppressed them, when we sought to explain the world around us with rigorous theories, both scientific and otherwise.
The pursuit of knowledge is an egalitarian enterprise—whether one is rich or poor, male or female, slave or king, no one’s ideas enjoyed privilege over another’s for any reason other than that they contained superior arguments.
The growth of knowledge is the fundamental driver of progress, the primary weapon in the fight against our problems. With this understanding in mind, we can see in clearer terms precisely why all of the ideologies we discussed are, in fact, Enemies of Civilization: They slow the growth of knowledge and wealth (wealth being the set of all transformations we know how to cause).
For most of our history, our cultures were static. Then, with the philosophical advances of the Enlightenment, the West figured out how to make continuous progress—it became a dynamic society. While the Enemies of Civilization had dominated static societies of the past, they continue to hamper progress to this day. All of them fail to appreciate that problems are due to lack of knowledge—and, therefore, that speed, creativity, and freedom are necessary for progress, rather than political and intellectual tyranny, reducing resource consumption, and ridding the Earth of humanity.
You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.
Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right, the other in the wrong.
If left unchecked, [environmentalism, relativism, and other anti-rational memes] could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We therefore have a duty to not only recognize them for the threat that they are, but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.
It’s taken a few centuries, but we’ve come back to the ancients’ view of the relationship between people and the cosmos. While we’ve rightly abandoned the majority of their beliefs, they were right about this much—to understand Nature at its deepest, we have to acknowledge the special role people play.
If we so choose, we can continue to make the world, the solar system, the galaxy, and the rest an infinitely better and more beautiful place. Human knowledge—our values, scientific theories, political ideals, and culture—can come to be the predominant cause of every physical structure in the cosmos.
The fate of the cosmos depends on the future history of knowledge.
I had the fortune of reading a pre-release version, then preordered the paperback as soon as it was available on Amazon. I want it where I can see it on my bookshelf, next to other inspiring works such as The Ascent of Man, The Rational Optimist, and, of course, The Beginning of Infinity, to serve as a reminder that we can all contribute to the fate of the cosmos.
I hope you’ll give Lords of the Cosmos a chance. If you do, get in touch and let me know.