PROGRESS

I have just recently been through a time of perplexity and complexity. It occurs to me that whatever good we might accomplish in this life is not done by raw intelligence, information, or determination alone. It requires knowledge, skill, and subtle characteristics such as restraint and judgment. Much knowledge, and many of these characteristics, come from our past, handed down through generations. There are at least two forces in our modern world that threaten past knowledge and character development.

In our modern world, run as it is from electronic connections, we value the ‘new and improved’ over the ‘tried and true’. The newest electronic equipment or software package is desired, even when older ones perform tasks perfectly well. Often the promise of the new simply means more applications that are seldom, or never, used anyway. Progress is always seen as forward and upward towards something better. But, of course that assumption depends entirely on what one defines as better. A straight line can also go straight down. Without the past we have no way of knowing what trajectory we are on.

Another difficulty we face today is the question, which past do we learn from? Multiculturalism has clouded this issue by attempting to make all pasts equally valuable. To the individual all pasts may be equally valid. But to a culture it is not so simple. The past that has given us freedom, democracy, order, the rule of law, and economic opportunity is not the same past that is based upon tyrants, social justice, bribery, or the collective domination of community. For example, science, which today is often seen as anti-religious, was born only from Christianity where the habit of reason and critical thinking was actually encouraged for centuries. Science did not arise spontaneously in other cultures where different religions held sway such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. Not all pasts are of the same significance in the modern culture.

At one time, humans were thought to exist in our own sphere, somewhere between the angels and the animals. With this knowledge we were able to act benevolently towards the latter and reverentially towards the former. It generated a thoughtful approach to life and our own proper role. This idea has been mostly abandoned, and modern man sees himself as just another animal. Animals are seldom benevolent towards one another, and have little regard for the future. They do not plan ahead and the capacity of self-restraint or wisdom. That’s progress, of a sort.