In the midst of current trends there is a wealth of information about the progression of mankind through the centuries. Our rise from humble beginnings many thousands, millions of years ago, until our present state of existence. The growth of mankind and our progress are phenomena which seem to go hand in hand. As if every step forward was a progression to some ideal living scenario where all humans are living like the stereo typed middle class. But what is this thing we call progress, and how we can manage the exponential growth of modern hyper technology against the slower adaptations of our ancient anatomy?
prog·ress (prgrs, -rs, prgrs)
n.
1. Movement, as toward a goal; advance.
2. Development or growth: students who show progress.
3. Steady improvement, as of a society or civilization: a believer in human progress. See Synonyms at development.
4. A ceremonial journey made by a sovereign through his or her realm.
Each of these definitions warrants further commentary, but on this occasion I want to focus on the effects of progress on humanity. Both the positive and negative. Progress seems to be all pervasive in our modern dialectic, its importance always ever-present in the business, technical, sociological publications of our kind. But is progress always a good thing and does the race to this seeming perfection have any negative side effects. Lets choose a case study that we are all familiar with and see how the idea of progress can be corrupted and misused by those who would profit from selling a false ideology based on corrupt morals.
Charles Darwin was a big thinker, he managed to crystallise and focus the ideologies of many a scientist, philosopher and critical thinker into a tangible and readily understandable set of rules about life. He came up for a reason about why life progresses forward, why we change. Adaptation! We will see that adaptation is a critical faculty in progressive systems. Driving progress is the need for change and making systems flexible is fundamental to allowing change to happen. Darwin understood this, he saw the world around him and interpreted the subtle variances in species and attributed these variations to the inherent flexibility in life to adapt. Now, certain variables will always remain the same, but some will change. The strength of a successful system lies in the flexibility to change but also in its rigidity to extraneous variables. Take the strength of DNA against the damaging factors in the environment. Flexible yet rigid.
Think now to the misuse of grand ideas for those who would profit from distorting the truth of real progress and misusing the knowledge to create regression in humanity. Think Eugenics. It fits very neatly into the Darwinian ideology space and offered those with a preference for bigotry, arrogance and racism to generate realities which are wholly negative to true progress. This type of progress hijacking is an example of when a good idea is misused. Therefore we must be mindful of what we class as progress. Thankfully Eugenics is only practiced by those on the margins of humanity.
What can we class as positive progress?
I think the answer to this is easy and I will hazard a sentence at this ‘When the change in system of reality directly benefits most, if not all people in the system and leads directly to growth of humanity and the principles of life which connect us to each other’ your comments on this are welcome and I am certain better definitions can be created. Directing our energy to creating life affirming progressive scenarios would seem to be the thrust of positive progress. History is strewn with elegant and romantic statements such as the American Constitution, that eschew the very best of what we can imagine a society to be. Human Rights bills, successful vaccinations, the discovery of penicillin…all these things and many more are examples of positive progress. But take a close look and one can see that behind each is a veiled appetite for misuse.
The biological side of us is a highly advanced biological information unit, unimaginable biotechnology combined with the proclivity for self awareness is what we are. Here’s the big difference, our biology is more advanced than our current selected ideologies!
I have to leave this topic for today but I will continue to explore the ideas in subsequent posts.
Tags: darwin, philosophy, progress, XTM
