When I spoke at Columbia a while back, students were utterly convinced that we are making progress. They were specifically talking about gender issues and fashion, and I had to disagree with them, at least about clothes, since there were more ways to play with sartorial gender in the ’70s and especially the ’80s than there are now.
But it cracked me up to see William Gibson, of all people, talking about exactly how much progress we haven’t made:
In the past ten years, we’ve seen incredible advances in nanotechnology and synthetic biology. Does any of it amaze you?
My assumption has always been that at some point we would lock on to a literally exponential increase in human knowledge. That was my best guess, somewhere back in the Seventies. There hasn’t been anything that made me sit back and say, “Golly, I would never have imagined that.” The aspects of recent history that have caused me to do that have been, in every case, manifestations of retrograde human stupidity.
How do you mean?
It’s been an extraordinarily painful decade or so. I just never in my wildest dreams could have imagined that it could get as fucked up as this guy [George Bush]. It still amazes me how dumb so much of our species can manage to be. But that’s kind of like being amazed at life.
There you have it, folks: manifestations of retrograde human stupidity, indeed.