Is progress real?

[WinsingtonIII]

You invent Penicillin and save the lives of millions of people...

People have always been trying to better their situation, its certainly not a modern concept.
I suppose the problem is that the term "progress" implies that there is a final goal to be reached which when you apply to human civilization as a whole is a pretty vague ideal of making people safer in the long run, there is no real scale to measure our achievements against.

It is a modern concept in that the philosophical idea of progress was introduced in the Enlightenment. Before that, the philosophy was that God(s) makes society and we can't do anything, mere mortals that we are, to improve it. That doesn't mean change didn't occur and ideas and tools were not invented or used to benefit people, it was just that people didn't really think of these instances as being a progression towards a better society. That part of the idea came later.

The problem is that we are so used to the term "progress" that we tend to use it as a word meaning "change." But it doesn't really mean that. It's an abstract philosophical idea created by modern, Western society that encompasses far more than simply change, it's also the accompanying idea that society itself has been "improved" in the process. What ASM is arguing (and also what I was arguing in my earlier post at the bottom of page two) is that this intellectual position, that technological, scientific, and capitalist economic advancement tends to improve society, is not always true. However, there are other modern ideas of progress (namely the socialist idea of progress towards a socialist utopia) that do not follow this model. But this model (the neo-liberal model) that puts a lot of emphasis on technology, science, individual liberties, and unregulated capitalism as the basis of a better society, is the vastly accepted model in the Western elite (and hence the definition we see in the dictionary), and is driving the movement for globalization and global economic liberalization, which is in turn screwing over small farmers worldwide.

That is not to say that the neo-liberal model of progress does not introduce much good into this world, as in the case of Penicillin. But it also can produce bad outcomes, which is why saying "progress" is universally good doesn't compute. It has its good moments and its bad moments.

The old attitude was something along the lines of:
"Your new method might be better but and we can already do that just fine."

I don't really think that's true ASM. Sure, many ancient and medieval societies were conservative, but others were more open to change, and it's not like new ideas and inventions were never accepted into pre-modern societies. What about the development of the three-field crop rotation in the early Middle Ages? That was certainly the introduction of a new idea, and people (especially nobles) jumped to incorporate it, because it made them more rich. The distinction is that when these introductions occurred, there was no idea that society was going to be improved or perfected by the introductions. That's the difference between modern "progress" and the earlier introduction of inventions and ideas, it's not that nothing new was introduced into society before the Enlightenment, it's just that this idea of social progress did not accompany that introduction.