Sustainability

The sea [of] change in the values and patterns of thinking of a whole community of thinkers, which brought about a sustained and accelerating creation of knowledge, happened only once in history, with the Enlightenment and its scientific revolution. An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

But all triumphs are temporary. So to use this fact to reinterpret progress as ‘so-called progress’ is bad philosophy. The fact that reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle. But in reality there is no such thing. Only progress is sustainable. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

We do so by seeking good explanations – explanations that are hard to vary in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation. This, not experimental testing, was the decisive factor in the scientific revolution, and also in the unique, rapid, sustained progress in other fields that have participated in the Enlightenment. That was a rebellion against authority which, unlike most such rebellions, tried not to seek authoritative justifications for theories, but instead set up a tradition of criticism. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform The World

The prophetic approach can see only what one might do to postpone disaster, namely improve sustainability: drastically reduce and disperse the population, make travel difficult, suppress contact between different geographical areas. A society which did this would not be able to afford the kind of scientific research that would lead to new antibiotics. Its members would hope that their lifestyle would protect them instead. But note that this lifestyle did not, when it was tried, prevent the Black Death. Nor would it cure cancer. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

You have to live the solution, and to set about solving the new problems that this creates. It is because of this unsustainability that the island of Britain, with a far less hospitable climate than the subtropical Easter Island, now hosts a civilization with at least three times the population density that Easter Island had at its zenith, and at an enormously higher standard of living. Appropriately enough, this civilization has knowledge of how to live well without the forests that once covered much of Britain. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The Easter Islanders’ culture sustained them in both senses. This is the hallmark of a functioning static society. It provided them with a way of life; but it also inhibited change: it sustained their determination to enact and re-enact the same behaviours for generations. It sustained the values that placed forests – literally – beneath statues. And it sustained the shapes of those statues, and the pointless project of building ever more of them. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

I have argued that the laws of nature cannot possibly impose any bound on progress: by the argument of Chapters 1 and 3, denying this is tantamount to invoking the supernatural. In other words, progress is sustainable, indefinitely. But only by people who engage in a particular kind of thinking and behaviour – the problem-solving and problem-creating kind characteristic of the Enlightenment. And that requires the optimism of a dynamic society. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World