The Progress Paradox

We are used to the twin themes of progress and evo­lu­tion. Life is indeed a jour­ney; things have changed rapidly in our life­time. Whether this is true progress, the evolv­ing of an advanced species, or just another cycle in the greater scheme of things remains to be seen. There is some­thing about us that yearns for accom­plish­ment and a sense of con­tin­ual improve­ment. We build our tow­ers of Babel just in time to be scat­tered in chaos. It seems that what­ever stim­u­lates a civilization’s growth even­tu­ally becomes the same fac­tor that com­pletely undoes it. Real­ity is rid­dled with paradox.

The ear­li­est cars were elec­tric. They were quiet and clean. Some­day we will have to pick up where we left off with that one. We “pro­gressed” with another fuel. It may be the para­dox­i­cal progress that does us in. Lessons learned on a grand scale tend to be cat­a­clysmic. What works for the few may not work for the many.

Moral and spir­i­tual progress is a lit­tle harder to detect. It is easy to con­fuse tech­no­logic progress with eth­i­cal or moral progress. Read­ing the news makes one won­der just how far out of the cave we have come in our spir­i­tual evo­lu­tion. Replac­ing churches with con­sumer busi­nesses may not have been the best move. The sep­a­ra­tion of church and state looks pretty good on paper, but it appears to be more than a bit schiz­o­phrenic in prac­tice. The para­dox emerges. The state becomes the church in the name of not being the church.

I would like to come back in a few thou­sand years to see how this era turned out. Did I eval­u­ate is pes­simisti­cally when I was here? Did my intu­ition warn me of some down­ward slope? Am I get­ting worse while think­ing I am get­ting bet­ter? Is there para­dox to my own imag­ined progress?

Let’s meet again in a few cen­turies and see how this one turned out.