On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Page A

worldwide.
    So technology with all its drawbacks has changed everything in our lives. I take it you would argue these are just local effects, short-term gains, and that in the long run, despite any of these specific advances, technology is yet going to overwhelm us, even destroy us.
    All the modern assumptions about progress are present in what you just defended. But progressivism has yet to prove itself. Of course, all those things you cited have made life easier. I don’t want to be a bore about this, but nuclear warfare also came along. And we live in a more diffuse state of general anxiety than people did in 1900. People were locked up then in all sorts of terrors, intimations, obsessions, and paralyzing anxieties, but it was all sort of local and particular. Now you have general anxiety, of a very large and pervasive sort.
    The argument: Did we really improve anything spiritually? For instance, were people better off when they had to squat over a hole in the ground and so could smell their own product? Maybe they were a little closer to themselves than they are now. It’s analogous to my argument about contraception. That always gets me into trouble. It’s interesting that women did not seem to conceive as often or as easily in the Middle Ages. And, in that time, many of the babies died in their first year. But the ones who survived may have been hardier than the mass of us now. If we proceed further, we have to get into all the complex arguments over whether modern medicine is a blessing or a vitiator of human potentiality. Because today, it is not only the strongest who survive. Nobody will go near this argument because it’s so Hitlerian. It may be that Hitler was not only the Devil’s greatest achievement but also destroyed any possibility of thinking along the lines he laid out. People shrink the moment you say courage is important. They think, “Believe in that, and you’ll end up a Nazi.” Hitler did more than anyone to spoil the possibility of exploring our time—the world was left with no more than conservatism and progressivism. The more interesting human philosophies, like existentialism, were cut off.
    To this day, people don’t like existentialism. They hate the notion that their philosophical feet cannot always be placed on a familiar floor. Well, keep living in the familiar contexts, and it can prove stultifying. Liberals can be most stultifying. That dreadful remark—“It’s a human life you’re talking about”—as if all human lives are equal, as if no human life should ever be extinguished, this is a staple of political correctness, the fierce, unruly, and manic child of progressivism. So when you present these things, I would prefer to come back with a gentle, broad answer, to say, Yes, life is certainly more comfortable than it used to be, and there are more opportunities for most than there ever were, although, of course, they may be used in more mediocre fashion than similar opportunities a hundred years ago. But lives may also be more drenched in anxiety of a sort we can’t locate, an anxiety that lives in us in such a way that we don’t even have nightmares any longer—what we have are various stretches of poor sleep and uneasiness. I think we’re weaker and more confused. I think we wander all over the place. We’re also louder and more loutish.
    You can ask yourself: Is this society better when it has every creature comfort that’s been developed up to now and has a president like George W. Bush, as, say, opposed to Abraham Lincoln 140 years ago? Perhaps. Or perhaps we have less progress than we supposed.
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    Do you agree that many, if not most, humans have an inherent, or an imprinted or intuitive belief in God as All-Powerful? They can’t think of God in any other way. Lots of people will say, “My intuitions are as good as Norman Mailer’s, and I can’t