Moving forward. Humanity marching towards a prosperous future. Taking today as the necessary end point of yesterday and the starting point for tomorrow. Tomorrow better than the past, by necessity.
This idea is so deeply rooted in modern western civilisation that there is a literature specifically designed to affirm this verb: scientific popularisation. Those who divulge often know nothing, but they are good at talking and making their listeners dream. Dreaming to such an extent that they slip into taking the piss … but let’s leave that aside for the moment.
Progress then measures the state at time t and compares it with t-1 and, despite local minima, records a continuously rising curve (sometimes it may go down a little but they will tell you that this is a passing thing and that everything will be fine). But, what do you measure? Well, obviously measurable data: GDP, graduates per year, released (“””””musical”””””) ‘records’ , CO2 saved, etc…the list bores us…you get the idea. Then all this data is crunched and out comes that rising graph we were talking about earlier.
It follows that everything is going to be fine, exactly.
Bullshit.
Just as so many good things go up (as does the cost of living) there’s an equal amount of things that go down but are less quantifiable so there’s no scientific graph to show it. And also it’s not progressive so it’s not worth dealing with but we like to bust balls and talk about it instead.
Has it ever occurred to you that when a company relocates production it is indeed increasing its turnover but it is reducing labour in the country where it was founded (because it is more expensive than the country where it is moving to). Have you ever thought that there is a flow of knowledge that is transferred from the initial country to the country where the company relocates production? That is, let’s take an example, not to name names, FIAT: relocation to Poland, Romania etc…before there were workers specialised in welding, in managing production in ovens to cement gears etc. When the company relocates that knowledge vanishes in the short time of half a generation. The result in the long run is that there will be a haemorrhaging of knowledge from the country of departure. If then, opening a parenthesis, that company also relocates its fiscal headquarters… well it is clear: the multinational company lives a life of its own and uses its employees to enrich itself, but at this point the welfare of human matter only counts in the perspective of increasing profit.
What is happening today is really a haemorrhage of knowledge. Europe is filling up with service companies that do not produce anything concrete and real but pretend to design and assemble things that are made by others (for an idea read Achilles and the Bureaucratic Turtle, Storytwisting and Option and lack of Option). Soon we will no longer even be able to design (let alone strategic thinking!!)…because, no matter how much Agenda 4.0 wants to digitalise everything, knowledge is first and foremost practical experience: a hand that moulds, that writes on paper, a thought that knows how to extract the model from the movement of a grave. Without solid practice, abstraction becomes a purely bureaucratic exercise for its own sake. Abstract thought is the maturation of previous practical knowledge (of one’s own thinking or of past generations).
Think of the origin of geometry in the Greek world.
We like to see progress not as a quantity to be measured but rather a quality indicative of the wisdom of a civilisation. When knowledge decreases, we cannot say that there is progress although GDP may also increase: if we all lived to go to the stadium and GDP was measured as attendance, the state (in the current capitalist consumerist regime) would be interested in maximising attendance every year. No matter how stupid the spectacle, the important thing is to maximise!
This is sprogress and this is what is happening in the Occident. Translated into fancier terms, we are a profit-driven society: which flattens everything it puts in front of that flattening steamroller formed by the measurable data we mentioned earlier. The one-sided use and rush of the future takes time away from reflection and superficialises every problem in the typical problem -> solution slogan. Imagine if Renaissance artists had reasoned this way, there would be no Renaissance art. And indeed what art is there today? Scribbles by genderfluid demented people, that’s the result. Great progress! But this art sells!, this year more than the last! Progress! But we’re not buying shit anyway. We are at the dawn of a collapse of Western civilisation, probably the point of no return has already been passed. It’s not easy to pinpoint that point, the amount of data is enormous and in any case we don’t know exactly what the end result will be (especially the evolution as a function of time). Future historians will be able to confirm and, perhaps, better define it. Just as ‘Rome was not built in a day’ in the same way it can be said that Rome did not collapse in a day. The inertia of the system is a decisive parameter and as such cannot be changed except with a great deal of energy. We wonder what and how they could deflect the trajectory. The only thing we can think of is to abandon capitalist consumerism and propose practical and ethical thinking aimed at conservation and the creation of new knowledge without passing through the thermodynamic worm of bureaucracy. It is an appeal to the art of uniting the useful with the harmonious, to the appreciation of time as an unrepeatable instant, to striving for the absolute canons of beauty.