The Paradox Of Progress
I’m sitting out on my porch with my laptop. Or is it notebook..? Marketing…it’s so passe.
The other night while sharing drinks with a friend we stumbled upon an important topic. The conversation began as benign as any other; between gulps of pale liquors we talked about our lives as they stand a year after graduating from college, for this particular night was the anniversary of my clumsy stroll in cap and gown down the aisles of adulthood. We exchanged vagueries and platitudinal congratulations at our decency and successes, but their was an anxiety haunting our words that was apparent. We both knew something wasn’t exactly right. The only question was who would voice this disquietude first…
And it would be him.
He took a big splash of beer and wiping his mouth he uttered the words that would launch our beautiful conversation. He said that he feels like he works only to work. He works to buy gasoline, so he can drive to work. He works to buy nicer clothes, so that he can dress for the job he wants, not the job he has. He felt everything he did simply perpetuated everything that he did, an eternal circle of labor and means to labor without meaning.
I agreed, without question. Sometimes as I drive, mostly at night when the city streets are peppered in halos and neon lights, I think, “How did it come to this..?” This concrete cage that we have shackled ourselves to without thought to what it does to our basic humanity–so much hidden beneath the pavement and stone, a world in which we once belonged that resonates with the racial memory passed down by our forefathers. In this system we work and toil only to support a lifestyle in which we feel both entitled to and are desperately dependent upon. We live in a vat of consumerism and material lust, feeding intravenously upon the ease of our own lifestyle. Assuring ourselves that we are progressing, hurtling through time and space and advancing every step of the way until finally one day we reach the apotheosis of a new age.
But this dream is built upon a lie.
I remember attending a class in my senior history seminar in which we were discussing historiography, the history of history. We were discussing various topics, bouncing through the entirety of western history with little regard to linearity or causality–an exercise in postmodern deconstruction if there ever was one. And somehow we found ourselves on the topic of the American Constitution as a historical object, an undeniable truth in the amorphous blob of our own nation’s history. One student commented on how the Constitution, that beautiful undeniable object, failed to address the issue of slavery, which had a causal effect that reverberated through time and eventually caused our Civil War. During the discussion someone made an offhand comment about how narrow-minded and bigoted the authors of the Constitution were, to which I immediately responded that they were truly revolutionary. The very idea of a republican government, where the people voted for leadership and representation, was remarkable, even if their conception of who was worthy to vote was not egalitarian.
“Victims of their time,” I said, “You cannot judge them on values we hold today, society has progressed a great deal since then.”
My professor smiled, that wry quiet smile of a man without a care in the world. He walked to his chalkboard and drew a straight line. Turning back to face us, he asked me if I had to place today’s society and that which existed during the revolutionary era on this continuum where would I place them. I was baffled and asked him for a bit of clarity to aid in my answer. With that same quiet smile, which hid so many truths I cannot begin to tell you, he told me that the word “progress” infers a direction, an end result that is one day, or at one time, achieved. So if we’re progressing, to where are we headed, and where do these different places in time fit upon the great line?
I stumbled a bit. I told him that I understood the point, but things have changed. We have more things. We are more equitable, more tolerant. He simply responded, “Are we?” I fell silent as he returned to the chalkboard and took the straight line and formed a circle. He said nothing more.
It stuck with me, and that night sharing beers with a good friend, bemoaning the cyclical hustle of our lives I found the great truth he was sharing that day. We aren’t progressing, because the very idea of progress within society is a paradox. We erect new pillars of civilization and with a final sigh of the collective voice we whisper, “Progress,” having achieved little in the advancement of the human spirit.
In the end of all things progress doesn’t exist. Processed foods, cell phones, and the internet are not progressions of the human condition, but components in a system of delusion, which make slaves out of us all. Working to deliver processed foods, working to sell and run cellular connections, working to run servers and dotcoms–working for what? The maintenance of the system, a vicious cycle of fruitless labors and material needs. Had society not “progressed” so far as to require a cheap work force to labor in the cotton fields, there wouldn’t have been a slave trade. Had society not “progressed” so far as to require people to sell computers, there wouldn’t be a headset and a cubicle for me to waste away in. An eternal circle of labor and means to labor without meaning.
I often tell my friends that maybe here in the West we haven’t gotten it quite right. In 500 years New York City will be unrecognizable and may not even exist in a way that we can imagine–progress–but the same rice paddies that have existed for thousands of years in Vietnam will still be tended by small children in conical hats, the same as their fathers and their fathers before them.
There is something pure and wondrous about those rice fields in Vietnam. In some ways, I think they are more civilized and “human” than we could ever be. Just a man, his family, and the means to survive the day. Laboring with value and character.
But I should really rest, it’s getting late, and I have computers to sell… how else am I going to afford this website..?
Progress.
2 Responses to “The Paradox Of Progress”
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May 18th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I’ve been sick the past few days, so I just finally got around to reading this. Though I’m about as cynical about the world as the next guy, this post seemed really depressing and a bit out of step with reality. I’ll have to give you my thoughts on it later. But basically, I think you’re looking at it way too pessimistically.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
So says the anarchist who raised me.
You just love money too much.