Views on progress

It is a commonly held truism that the future will be a better place than the past. That the march of human progress into the citadel of epistemological positivism is the intrinsic mechanism that propels history onwards. That progress is evident all around us all of the time, from the heating that prevents pneumonia in winter, to the transport networks that shuttle us to and from work, to the agony of choosing between the different varients of vinaegrette dressing on sale in the supermarket.

It is my belief, however (and I make no claim on any overwhelmingly original thesis here), that the nature of progress is a fallacy. The finest book I have read on this theme is the contemporary philosopher John Gray's 'Straw Dogs' in which he makes the claim that 'progress is a fact. Even so, faith in progress is a superstition.'

It is this faith in the efficacy of the future that has been inculcated in the collective psyche through centuries of religious conviction; principally, that the future (or afterlife) will be a worthy reward for a virtuous life lived in the present. As science and technology superseded religion (in the West at least) from the Industrial Revolution onwards, this faith in progress has manifested itself through the physical and material entities that adorn our lives.

Progress and human nature

Gray goes on to state that, 'science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge but not in ethics'.

Human nature is an accumulus of the same animal strengths and weaknesses, the same needs and wants, the same propensity towards good and evil. Whilst the aggregated wealth of civilised thought and reasoning banks up like a beach of collective wisdom, how we traverse across it is as much a slow struggle as wading through wet sand.

Any gains that are made can also be lost later on. The scales of progression and regression are held in a precarious and volatile balance. A key example relates to the use of torture in civilised society. The banning and deploring the implementation of torture was a progressive step for society. Subsequently, when the Bush administration decided to interrogate Muslim suspects using waterboarding techniques, this was a regressive move in terms of the United States returning to the state of legitimising torture.

It is progress that a black man could be elected President of the world's largest superpower. Regression though is the fact that the endemic socio-economic inequalities within the same nation are still predominantly split across racial boundary lines. Whilst in one country there might be pioneering heart surgery performed, in another, a sectarian fighter kills an enemy and eats his heart in front of the camera as a statement of conviction to a cause.

As many Western countries embrace gay marriage, Russia take steps to further ostracise homosexuals. After a century in which 'failed utopias' bound up with the 'fear of the other' gave rise to so many horrors to progress away from, anti-semitism is on the incline again in Europe, and North Korea continue to decline down the sorry slope to a Stalin-esque genocide.

Progress and the creative arts

For me though, one need only look to the creative arts and the influence of technology on our lives to witness a profound counter-weight to the notion of progress in perpetuity.

Recently, I attended a discussion on whether the app was cultivating or cannabalising published content. The room was filled with techies each trying to stand on the vanguard's surfboard and catch the prime technological wave.

Listening to them hold forth on the exigencies of such and such an app for engaging storytelling and the imperative of harnessing the full potential of publishable content into another app's form, swiftly wore me down into a frustrated malaise. None of this 'digital fluff' has any real intrinsic value, it cannot compete with the artistic heights of Proust's 'Swann's Way' or Dante's 'Divine Comedy'; the medium has, in this context, well and truly become the message, and as such is antithetical to the notion of progress.

This can be extrapolated to the internet as a whole. Undoubtedly, the internet is a hallmark of progress, the interconnectibility, the limitless informational opportunities, the instant satiation of any intrigue or desire. And yet, the internet thrives on ephemera; the very nature of its use demands that this be so. Whilst the 'Mona Lisa' and 'The Last Supper' are still esconced in mystery and awe, the internet so far appears capable only of propagating viral vignettes featuring prison inmates' sychronised dance routines and sneezing babies.

Progress and Work

As technological progression is signified by anorexic television screens and devices shrinking on the surface of the palm, the more fundamental ramifications can be seen to rest in the rendering of ever more fields of work superfluous and redundant.

This has its roots going way back to the Industrial Revolution as the latest machinery made the traditional skills of those like the Luddites obsolete, and now manifests itself in the proliferation of automated services, driverless modes of transport, security recognition systems, and so on. With a large, and ever increasing, population, new forms of employment will need to be created principally as a means of keeping people busy. Undoubtedly, this will take the form of large scale, and probably largely meaningless, data analysis (perhaps then all these 'Big Data' scandals are to be encouraged since they could provide a vast amount of future labour?!)

Any system of production necessarily strives to achieve maximum utility, efficiency and perfection, and the eradication, as far as possible, of error. This iron law in itself woould not be so damaging were it not for the late-20th century economic models that have worked so well to subjugate people to capital and relegate any notion of the worth of an asset or skill to its fungible potential.

Ultimately, this is the crux of the problem facing the human labour force; humans being prone to error and inconsistency, it makes perfect business sense to invest instead in the development of technology, and in the process, celebrate the virtues of progress.

Progress and human emotions

The most persuasive idea that I can deduce arguing, if not against progress in and of itself, but of its primacy, relates to human emotions. To this I take a dubious lead from David Hume's assertion that 'reason alone cannot be a motive to the will, but rather is the slave of the passions'.

It is my conviction that emotionally and perhaps spiritually, individuals are embroiled in a continuum of cyclical highs and lows that on a primal level have far more in common with the true nature of human progress than a naive conviction in a linear upward trajectory to higher and ever more reified plains.

Despite this, the formulaic compartments into which people are encouraged to view and plan their own lives plays into this naive iidea of continual betterment (which again plays into the religious tradition). We are encouraged to believe that if we knuckle down and work hard life will arrange itself as an assembly line onwards to a better job, better prospects, better relationships, a better house, more possessions, a fulfilling retirement, a pain-free death.

Life seldom unfolds in this uni-directional manipulating of sliplanes onto highways of our own determinism, but instead resembles a Gordian spaghetti junction of chance events and accidental circumstance.

Real emotions, universally experienced, such as love and loss, compose the most potent psychological terrain. The emotional framework through which we conduct our lives is all that really matters, since invariably it serves to obliterate or distort the peripheral apparatus of physical reality that we might normally see described as evidence of progress.