I’ve been trying to understand the nature of human progress.  What drives it?  Where are we headed?  Should we try on something else?  It’s turned up some interesting stuff from a debate 5 years ago or so (See Bryan Appleyard ‘Waiting for the Lights to Go Out’ and Robert Adler ‘Entering a Dark Age of Innovation’) much of it prompted by a possibly dodgy but still thought-provoking study undertaken by Jonathan Heubner.  I’m getting this second-hand, but apparently he compared the number of innovations catalogued each year in a standard reference work to population, calculating a rate of innovation over time.  It turns out that the rate peaked in 1873 and has been declining steadily ever since.  By 2024 the rate will be what it was in the Dark Ages.

Huebner offers two explanations for this.  Either we’ve discovered most of the technologies that are economically viable or we already know most of what we can know.  Human innovation is either limited by economics or something like brain bandwidth.

The latter is an intriguing possibility.  I know that Colin McGinn argues that the answers to several philosophical problems are beyond us, but I wonder if something else might be true about philosophical innovation as such.  Maybe we’ve gotten as far as our monkey minds can get us, technologically – Velcro and iPhones are, deep breath, among the final human technological achievements.  Perhaps philosophy peaked in the 19th century too.  It gets said a lot that we can’t really tell who the great philosophers of our generation are because we’re too close in time and thought to judge honestly.  But what if there aren’t any?  What if all the good ideas are taken?  What if the best thinkers in the last 2,000 years grabbed all the low-hanging philosophical fruit and there’s just nothing good left to say?