People have this almost overwhelming desire to feel as if events are building toward something, hopefully a sum greater than its parts- and more than this they want to be that sum. Even people whove never read Hegel and dont know what a teleological view of history is. You see it expressed all over, in conversations, in film, in poems and art and in literature. Im reminded of a quote from Chuck Palahniuks novel Lullaby, “Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they cant understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generations clothes and hair suddenly retro.” You see it expressed in people who fantasize about the singularity, always with a slight hope that they might live to be part of it. You see it when people express a desire to never be forgotten, because if theyre remembered then at least they must have played so integral a part in the guiding of our history toward something great that they cannot be forgotten, and so they live on in our progress, in the debt we will forever owe to them and which we continuously pay, for all time, with our memory. God forbid we just died without even the interest in our legacy to serve as some sort of afterlife. This is not progress. Firstly, progress is subjective. I mean, its certainly not something we can objectively measure, and surely even if we could do so today we would progress beyond such a scale eventually. Secondly, progress doesnt end. The only thing that ends is ones ability to value it as such or, in other words, to see it as progress. Progress, in turn, continues to progress for so long as there are people there to perceive of it as such. And, thirdly, whatever progress might be it isnt something that eventually grants us a grand sum of itself. We reap the fruits of it when we take pause to note discoveries, and then we use these to persist in our vision of progress, to light the way forward to the next bit. The proper attitude toward progress is already given to us by one of the relative few who has managed, thus far, to live on through their good work: A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. -Oscar Wilde Progress is not a tangible object and we should not treat it as such by trying to turn it into a person or persons or into an object we can hold, and by extension we can then own. Progress is a journey, it is velocity, speed in a given direction aimed toward whatever we might imagine Utopia to be. And the whole point of Utopia is that you never get there, its not a space you try to occupy in time. One realizes this rather quickly the moment they ignore this fact and think theyve arrived. Every commune was once someones Utopia, and then faded on a long enough timeline to become something dreadful and oppressive. Progress is the unending pursuit of Utopia, and is always a liberator and never an oppressor. The moment we dawdle too long on the journey our respite ceases to be a liberator, then it ceases to be Utopia, and thereby it ceases to be progress. In just the same way as when one stops walking they are standing still, and are by extension no longer walking. Progress is not getting trapped within a working paradigm for the rest of your life, and if one is really progressing they do not work within a given paradigm long enough for it to be a status quo. There are no status quos in Utopia- and precisely because Utopia is always evolving where status quos can only exist in stagnation. A paradigm, in the scheme of the journey toward Utopia that is progress, should be us pausing only to catch our breath and no more.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 07:09:56 +0000
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