The Human Progress Myth

Our greatest collective superstition.

What Is Progress?

If you happen to page through the Oxford English Dictionary and looked at the definition of progress, you would find the following: "advancement to a further or higher stages successively, growth, development, usually to a better state or condition, improvement, applied especially to manifestations of social and economic change."

On the face of it, this definition seems to describe the modern world as we know it. Our average life expectancy is longer than ever before, we are eating more calories than before and our incomes are at record highs. The cellphone, internet and travel are connecting more people around the world than ever before. Not only that but the wage gap is falling and even the poorest people have access to refrigeration and piped water. All in all, one might say that progress has made our world a better and more habitable place to live in.

In a technological sense, that is undoubtedly true. Technological progress is real and evident - it has eradicated diseases and has fundamentally changed the way humans interact with their environment. But, does technological or scientific progress create human progress? As in, does humanity evolve to become better beings thanks to technology? Is human progress is real? That is a much more difficult question to answer. But to answer that, we need to ask - what is human progress anyway?

What Is Human Progress?

So what is human progress? It is the assumption that civilisation is something that improves over time at scale, that we will live better lives than our parents and anyone in the past. Human progress is the belief that the growth of knowledge and the advance of the human species go together in tandem forever in time. The more we improve our technology and living conditions, the more we improve ourselves as the human species. Human progress argues that human being themselves become a better, kinder species as we move through time. There is a utopian quality to it, that at the end of the day, we will reach nirvana and become the enlightened beings that we are destined to become That may be obvious to some of you but is it actually true? Are humans better today than they were 100 years ago? 1000 years ago? The answer is of course no.. Human progress is a myth.

Why Human Progress Does Not Exist

To understand why human progress is a myth, we need to understand the contemporary philosopher, John Gray. He published the book Straw Dogs in 2002 which dug a massive dagger to the heart of modern culture. As Gray argues, the growth of knowledge is culminative but human life is not a culminative activity. What we gain as a generation may be lost in the next. There is no evidence to suggest that human beings actually change as a species. Our ancestors had many wonderful practices and modes of thinking that have been lost to time. Who, watching this video, can grow their own food or live without electricity? Some may argue that, since we are creating the technology that makes our lives better, it is inevitable that the technology will move human progress to a higher plane but they are simply ignoring history. Technology is not something that exists in a vacuum for the express purposes of the inventor. The steam engine was created to drain water from mines. The telegraph was created to send messages at a faster rate. But the engine and the telegraph was also used to murder millions of people during World War 2. As Gray states, "without railways, the telegraph and poisonous gas, there could be no Holocaust." Human well being is entirely separate to human knowledge. Technology can be use for good or bad, it depends entirely on the people who are using it.

This is more evident in our current, connected age. The internet has given us unparalleled ways to communicate and gain knowledge about the world but the internet is also the greatest tool of surveillance the world has ever known. Every website we visit, every click on a photograph and everything we purchase on the internet is tracked and used for a variety of purposes that we did not sign up for. The internet is used to control us, not the other way around. Thanks to the internet, our attention spans are getting shorter, we are lonelier than ever before but there has never been more child pornography in the world as there is today. To repeat the message, their is no progress only trade offs.

Capitalism has given the world rising wages, technological innovation and cheaper good but, it has also given the world more slaves than ever before. Officially, slavery has been abolished for close to 250 years but, there are more than 40 million slaves in the world today. These slaves makes the clothes we wear, mine the minerals for our smart phones and "sell" their bodies for sex. We don't perceive slavery as existing because it is hidden from us or exported to the third world, out of sight from the very people who are that human progress is real. So, capitalism has given us whatever we desired but it relies on literal slavery to make that a reality. Once again, there is no progress, only trade offs.

Plastic, that phenomenal, synthetic material, has revolutionised many aspects of our lives. Plastic is used to store food and package goods but has also created new ways to make building materials, textiles, toys and electronics. Plastic is cheap, durable and resistant, and is the defining material of the 20th century in terms of its application and uses. But, there is a massive trade off at hand. Plastic is the biggest pollutant of the natural world. Since plastic is extremely durable, it is resistant to any form of natural degradation. It is estimated that close to 80% of waste in our oceans is plastic, from the poles to the equator. It is estimated that close to 370 millions tonnes of plastic is floating in the ocean as we speak, killing wildlife and ecosystems that have existed for millennia. Once again, the trade off is clear. Plastic makes our food safer but it is responsible for the genocide of marine life.

Through these examples, we can see that there is no progress. There is no invention or good that is restrained by its own values. Humanity creates things and then bemoans the trade offs of that invention. For example, the car has revolutionized transportation but has destroyed our cities and town centers, making them areas for transportation as opposed to areas where human beings congregate. In response to that, we create suburbs where loneliness and atomization only increases. Trade offs are the rule for everything. Humans use that technology for their own good or bad desires. The greater our technology, the greater our ambitions. Therefore, technological progress does not coincide with human progress, it merely give more tools for human beings. What they do with those tool may or may not be progressive. Scientific and technological progress does not augment human progress, it merely allows the human to be more destructive.

Receding Civilization

As John Gray writes, "genocide is as human as art or prayer, mass murder is the side effect of progress in technology." Between 1492 and 1990, there were at least 36 genocides which claimed hundred of thousands of lives. Since 1950, there have been twenty genocides, with three of them claiming over a million lives. What makes the 20th century 'special' is not that it is littered with massacre but it is the scale of the killings which were predicated on progress itself. The Nazis wanted to kill the Jews to make society better. The Soviets needed to kill the middle class farmers to bring in the communist utopia. Pol Pot needed to kill the middle class to achieve the agrarian revolution. The genocide of millions of people was effected because the leaders of the violence believed that progress was inevitable. All they confirmed was that technology could be used to make evil more effective. Civilization is a thin layer of of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness but civilization can also recede during a time of stress. One of the greatest myths of our time is that civilization continues to evolve progressively but the last two years of the covid pandemic shows the frailty of our civilizations. Today, Europe is at war once again, inflation is at its highest since the Second World War and Covid has destroyed the bonds between citizens. Civilization is receding before our very eyes. It might spring back, or it might not - we do not actually know.

Conclusion

As it has been demonstrated throughout this video, human progress is not the same as technological progress. We design tools that make our lives easier or gives us greater autonomy or that solves a problem but, it is as useful as the people who use it. Technology has no autonomy of its own, it is a slave to our desires. And in the name of progress, we have used technology to destroy our environment, kill our opponents and deracinate most of the human race. In pursuit of progress, we have and are creating trade offs that our descendants will have to deal with. But at the same time, we human animals are not progressing, we remain the same. We remain beholden to the whims of our desires with this faith that we are progressing as a species. But it is just not true, human progress is nothing more than superstition.