A whole lot of people talk about progress. They see progress as an increase in material wealth and a higher standard of living. This was indeed needed by a great many people. It is still needed by a great many more.
But the true nature of progress does not lie in the material world alone. It must be accompanied by a similar increase in our moral and spiritual development. By moral and spiritual, I do not mean religious teaching, though I do not exclude it as a means for such development. I mean the understanding of our existence as human beings who live with lots of other human beings, not to mention all the other living things on the planet.
The essential meaning of progress is moving from where we are to somewhere better or further along a trajectory. A corollary is education, of moving from a state of ignorance to one of knowledge and understanding. The ultimate purpose of education should be the development of wisdom.
But there are two ways of saying the word progress. There is 'prägres and there is pro-GRES'. 'Prägres is the general notion of movement whether abstract (as a concept or ideology), or, concrete (as in making progress). Pro-GRES' tends to refer to actual movement along a path or trajectory.
The deal is, growing up from childhood to adulthood is itself a progression from one state to another. We often think of the latter state as the better of the two until we reach a certain point in the aging process and then we nostalgically yearn for an earlier time.
Societies do the same thing as they grow, reach their peak, and then get old, ossified, and infirm. Our own society has moved from the more communally integrated and agrarian, but rather sedentary, ways anchored to the land, the seasons, and each other to a highly mobilized, fractured, industrial way of life wholly based on abstractions that are falsely taken as concrete realities.
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Wow! This is so ancient I have no idea when I wrote it. It was when I was still at my dad's in MN so before 2009 and who knows how long before that. Still, it was the start of a decent essay. Continuing on tho... [Update: it was sometime in 2006.]
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This industrialism is considered progress by many. But is it really? Sure there are some material comforts we didn't have before and some of it is indeed an improvement. But the rest of what that has entailed at the cost to our planet, to the lives we share it with, and to our own health has been severe, if not fatal.
The problem is that human thought was taken over with the advent of mass media, especially television. What could have greatly accelerated the expansion of human thought and understanding around the globe became a tool for propaganda and social control for very narrow, selfish, and ultimate destructive, ends. As a result, rather than having moved further along a given trajectory from a state of ignorance to one of wisdom, we have regressed into an even more primitive mental state resembling the horrors of Medieval superstitions. It seems all many of us can do these days is to keep the demons at bay and hope our financial situation doesn't bottom out altogether.
It's time to take serious stock of where we are, where we're currently headed, and where we would rather go. If we are to PRO-gres' at all, we will need to rethink the meaning of 'prägres.
