Is progress real?

[Ludens]

I think the dinosaurian parts ought to be moved to the science forum, in the dinosaur thread.

It does belong there, but I don't think it necessary unless someone really wants to pursue this "discussion".

[oudysseos]

There is a potentially interesting question as to how the people in EBs time frame viewed progress. Did they conflate successive technological and scientific discoveries with a linear advancement from 'primitive' to 'advanced' societies, as some in this thread have done? Did they have any conception at all of their society changing for the better, and for them to be agents of that change? That last bit is they key element to the modern idea of progress, in my mind. Why should you try and stop global warming, for instance, unless you want the future to be better than today? Did people in the Hellenistic era think that way? Or was it all apres moi le deluge?

One thing to look at would be the literary corpus of the time. This is almost all backwards-looking: Vergil wrote about Aneas from ca. 1,000 years before his own time. Appolonius of Rhodes wrote about Jason and the Argonauts from even further back. It was reasonably common for Roman aristocrats to write plays (Julius Caesar did so, although it was suppressed by Augustus), the themes of which were almost always taken from older Greek literature - and people like Plautus made careers out of rewriting the Greek classics in Latin.

So one possible conclusion is that the people who read and wrote books did not look to the future for anything. There is no 'science fiction' of people imaging what the world would be like in a technologically advanced future (Plato's Republic isn't so much about an alternative future as it is about an alternative past).

On the other hand, Aristotle is famous for his system of how types of governments can regress from a good example to a bad one: Monarchy becomes Tyranny, Democracy becomes Demagogy, and so on. The concepts needed for thinking in terms of 'progress' are inherent in that system - but I do not recall anyone saying, "O.K., we start out with Oligarchy and end up with Capitalist Democracies and MacDonalds."

In our own time, the idea of the whole world progressing towards being American-style Democracies is losing validity, although you still hear a great deal of cliched rhetoric in political circles. The economic troubles of the past few years have made capitalism look a little rusty as well- but just look back to the political dialogs of the 30s - as far as they were concerned, capitalism and democracy were gone with the dinosaurs. Who were warm blooded.

Personally, I think that a lot depends on what happens in the next 100 years, which I think will be a hard time for humanity. As global warming puts more and more people under strain, political unrest is sure to follow - the entire population of Florida, for example, will have to be relocated eventually, as will large parts of LA. Do you want them? But the economic consequences go way beyond that kind of immediate cause-and-effect. Currently, the lifestyle of 'The West' is predicated on the cheap labour, costs and resources of the Third World (just look at the labels on your stuff sometime). Never mind if child workers in Bangladesh were to get pissed off at working themselves to a shoeless death in a cesspit just so you can have a new pair of Nikes every few months - if climate change destroys the countries that provide us with the slave labour that makes our lives possible, our own economies will regress to a much lower level. Without the money to pay for CERN or LHC projects, scientific progress will also slow. I think we are headed for a period very similar to that of the fall of the Roman empire.