What Does Progress Mean? - The Sequel
All of us Radio 3 bloggers began our ruminations with this same question. Some comments came back yesterday. Roberto C. Alvarez-Galloso commented on my post:
How do we think about time? Is it true that history is shaped by a force called “progress” whose “negative aspects” we are bound to tolerate in the name of an undeniable good?
In John Gray’s “Straw Dogs” he writes:
“[The] belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions. Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.”
I think what he means here, and I’m inclined to agree with him, is that there is no overarching meaning to history. There is no metaphysical force that acts on history and ensures that it gets “better”.
Like biological systems, societies display growth and degeneration at the same time, and it is difficult to give an overall label to it all. Some energies may be expanding and intensifying – such as science, or marketing. Others may be dwindling – such as storytelling, or traditional knowledge. “Progress” does nothing at all to describe the ambiguities and complexities of this process.
Instead it is a kind of blindness. It implies that "the good" is singular and identifiable and that history "knows" how to move towards it. It asks therefore that we ignore everything that seems to be getting worse in the name of that final objective.
Many people will say: “Penicillin!” – as if it clinches the deal. But it is a mark of a society that values science and marketing more than other things, that scientific achievements will seem so overwhelmingly, almost religiously, important. People who valued, say, storytelling, above anything else would look at the last century of European cultural history and see total devastation.
Why am I spending time on this issue?
Some people see the denial of the idea of progress as a pretty poor show. A whining rejection of everything good about the world, and a recipe for depression. My feeling is quite the opposite. If we are to ever feel good about the world, we have an absolute obligation to give up “progress”.
Without “progress” as a pre-programmed account of reality, we will have a much richer experience of what is going on around us. “Progress” as a description of the passage of time flattens it out with pre-existing meaning; but time is more ambiguous and more exciting than that.
Even people who advocate strongly the idea that history is “progressing” admit that the “negative aspects” are often traumatic. Everyone has their example; here's mine: centuries of folk culture and knowledge have in a few decades been consigned to a few eccentric cultural shows and museums. Hasn't this left us all coldly modern and severely doubtful about our ability to develop an authentic relationship to the universe? But it is difficult to reflect deeply on such losses if we see them just as regrettable by-products of "progress". They become incomprehensible, as things that should not exist. Suppressed, they erupt again into other kinds of discourse entirely: superstition, paranoia and apocalypse.
At the dawn of the last century, “progress” still had a radical, progressive force. By now, I would say, that has become lost. The idea of “progress” has ceased to be an idea at all, and can give us no assistance in deciding our future. “Progress” now means simply the intensification of modernity: more speed, more gimmicks, more dazzling piles of waste, more wealth, more poverty, more extraction, more exhilaration, more despair.
“That’s progress!” has become a wry shrug in the face of this bewildering complexity. It has become a mechanism for producing assent to extraordinary things because it assures us that their seeming inhumanity/destructiveness/horror is only a part of a general progression towards glory.
Time to give it up.
The city I live in, Delhi, is going through a time of enormous upheaval. Great wealth is being created, and, as in other parts of the world, that process is called “progress”. In a later post I will describe what effect this word has on the turbulent reality of the city.
I agree with the sequel.
Progress? To move towards something?
Whether progress is good or bad depends on your destination, and I don’t get the impression mankind has any idea were it’s going... do you?
I am not sure you can deny the idea of progress entirely, measured by something that one values, such as freedoms, political, cutlural or economic.
'progress' is a word - an abstract thing that attempts to describe something we wish to achieve and it means different things to different people. The poor living on the streets of Indian cities see what some of us have in the west on TV and want the same. That is their description of 'progress'
The person lying in a hospital bed dying from AIDS, hears about a miraculous cure and wants to recieve it that is his 'progress'
The novice monk or nun practicing his/her meditation longs to achieve 'nirvana' - that is their 'progress'
It would seem incorrect and meaningless then to use it to mean the same for all.
If you read any of Donald Neil Walsch's books in the "conversations with God' series you will find that God's definition of progress is another thing altogether and more akin to the novice monks.
so for me there is nothing essentially wrong with the word 'progress' I use it to define what I want to achieve in life and not what others think I should. But words do change over time and maybe we could substitute another word that would describe 'how we are trying to better ourselves and our families and our lives'
so instead of me 'making progress' with my life I could be " wisdoming my life"
or "intuiting myself"