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Progress is an illusion at the social level where it truly matters. Some parts of the world go forward while others go backward. Gay rights is championed in Ame
by mnm1 7y ago
Progress is an illusion at the social level where it truly matters. Some parts of the world go forward while others go backward. Gay rights is championed in America but not in Saudi Arabia. Vaccines save lives except when people refuse them and are allowed to do so. Even on a technological level, it's an illusion. It's highly debatable that the internet we have now is better than the one of ten or twenty years ago. Yes, it's faster, but it's also full of ads, malware, and propaganda that tips elections the world over.
So why has progress stalled? It hasn't stalled because it was never going forward. It was always going around in circles. A few benefiting here, a few losing out there. And those places are constantly changing and morphing. America was indeed making progress, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Now it's going backwards on most of the issues mentioned in the article. We used to be somewhat democratic. Now we are just ruled by oligarchs. Europe has taken up the slack, whereas 70 years or so ago it was in ruins.
To think of progress as some constant driving force is a folly. There is no such thing as progress. Things happen. In any given place, at any given time, sometimes they are for the better, sometimes for the worse. That's the only conclusion one can draw from history, even with a myopic look at only the last 100 years. If you go back further, there is no other conclusion to be drawn. Progress is a dream. It's not reality.
- int_19h 7y agoBy most objective metrics, things are drastically better than they were 100 years ago almost everywhere in the world. People live longer, eat better, die less from preventable diseases, and don't kill each other quite so much.
- mnm1 7y agoExcept that those things are declining, even in America, let alone in most of the rest of the world. Life expectancy is decreasing for many (except for the rich). Food quality has been declining for many decades. Preventable diseases are coming back. Deaths from war have been declining for now, so I'll give you that one. We are not quite at the levels we were at 100 years ago, but with just about everything declining, I wouldn't be surprised if we get there in a few decades given the damage we are doing to the environment. And that's before you even get to social and political issues which have never progressed, for which progress itself is meaningless and certainly immeasurable due to the inability to even define it.
- nl 7y agoThis is just wrong. Life expectancy is increasing everywhere, in every socio-economic group except in the US. That's bad for the US, but we don't say progress has stalled just because of political issues in one country.
- galaxyLogic 7y ago> Progress is a dream. It's not reality. The biggest trick Devil played on mankind was to make us believe that progress didn't exist :-)