17 August 2000, 807 words
It is one of the favourite concepts of bad thinkers: the idea that human progress is a mere illusion.
Second-rate intellectuals usually argue the case by pointing to the great civilizations of the past which invariably collapsed and to 20th-century horrors such as Hiroshima and the Holocaust.
Pseudo-intellectuals, on the same hand, argue their case without even this veneer of logic, typically suggesting that all the knowledge of the modern world, from nuclear physics to astronomy, was already known by the ancients (who invariably belong to the same ethnic group as the person making the argument) several millennia ago.
It is all rather tiresome. There are few things more obvious in life than the reality of human progress. Just look at the number of people inhabiting the planet today, for example. Homo sapiens took about 50,000 years to attain the one billion mark some time in 1840. It took a mere half-century to reach the next half-billion, and only a hundred more years after that to reach six billion.
This population explosion didn't happen because people were suddenly having more sex. It happened mainly because science allowed farmers to produce greater yields from smaller areas of land, keep the land fertile and control pests better, and breed plant strains greatly resistant to disease. The world was only then able to feed and care for billions of human beings.
It is, in fact, science which makes comparisons between 20th-century Western civilization and any past civilizations, including the most recent ones, a largely bogus exercise. Historian J.M. Roberts, in his book Twentieth Century, holds that "...in the most 'western', developed societies, we are less like the men and women of 1901, and further distanced in our thinking and behaviour from them than, say, were they from their forbears of a century earlier."
While it is true that the past affects the present, the dominance of science in this century, plus the sheer complexity of our societies, means that nothing in the history of past civilizations can predict what will happen to the present order in the future. It is not merely that the world is more advanced than it has ever been: it is that the world is also more advanced in ways it never has been.
But what about world wars and genocide and AIDS? the bad thinker shrieks. Historian Gwynne Dyer, whose excellent column is syndicated in the Express, points out that, even counting the mass deaths caused by Stalinism, Nazism and Maoism, "the 20th century was not an outstanding killer of innocent people. The total number of people who died as the result of deliberate actions by other human beings in the past hundred years is at most 250 million, out of over ten billion who have lived in this century: at worst, one out of 40. That is certainly no worse than any previous century, and a good deal better than most."
Indeed, Dyer makes the telling point that, when you factor in the efficiency of technology for killing in this century, the above ratio is remarkably low.
And, contrary to what second-rate and pseudo intellectuals typically argue, human beings are also probably happier now than they were in previous eras. It can't be proved, of course, happiness being entirely subjective (but unprovable arguments are always favoured by bad thinkers). It seems likely, though, that better health, more material comforts, and more control over the environment makes for a more contented human being.
Roberts remarks that "the twentieth century was almost certainly the first which opened with many people believing that what they might expect from life was change, rather than a continuation of things as they had been". But in Trinidad and Tobago, as the 21st century approaches, there are many people at many levels who do not want real change. This is because real change always requires energy, boldness and intelligence.
Such conservatism is most obvious among the ethnocentrists who, though they like to portray themselves as courageous revolutionaries, are the most frightened group of all. It is pure terror, plus political ambitions which depend on ignorance, that really lies behind all these calls to cleave to ancestral traditions.
And, almost as perniciously, a similar resistance can be observed among persons who, although claiming scholarly status, are either ignorant of, or unwilling, or simply unable to apply humanity's best methods and knowledge to deal with the problems of our society.
If this were purely an intellectual issue, though, I wouldn't have wasted any ink on it. But I have long felt that nearly all T&T's problems are rooted in attitude, rather than practical limitations. That is why a belief in progress is so important: because if you don't believe in it, it can never happen.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh