progress
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We have been left with the idea that progress is neither natural nor embedded in the structure of history; that is to say, it is not nature’s business or history. It is our business. No one believes, or perhaps ever will again, that history itself is moving inexorably toward a golden age (Editor: it seem that this idea is already partly forgotten, mostly because of our ignorance). The idea that we must make our own future, bend history to our own will, is, of course, frightening and captures the sense of Nietzsche’s ominous remark that God is dead. We have all become existentialists, which lays upon us responsibilities that once were shared by God and history.
Neil Postman -
“In Defense of Poetry”, he (Editor: Perry Shelley) made the arguments that explained why Reason itself was insufficient to produce humane progress. Indeed, when science and technology claim to provide ethical imperatives, we are lead into moral catastrophe… It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to the moral decency, and poetry is the means by which love, tenderness, and beat are best cultivated. It is the poetic imagination, not scientific accomplishment, that is the engine of moral progress… Thus, the “heaven city” that the eighteenth-century rationalists dreamed of is not reachable through reason alone… Progress is the business of the heart, not the intellect.
Neil Postman -
But something had happened, as we know, in the twentieth century. Among other things the idea that progress is real, humane, and inevitable died. As early as 1932, Lewis Mumford thought progress to be “the deadest of the dead ideas … the one notion that was thoroughly blasted by the twentieth century experience”.
Neil Postman -
The idea of progress, then, is one of the great gifts of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century invented it, elaborated it, and promoted it, and in doing so generated vast resources of vitality, confidence, and hope. But the eighteenth century also criticized and doubted it, initiating powerful arguments about its limitations and pitfalls.
Neil Postman -
Nicholas Negroponte envisions a time when we may speak to a doorknob or a toaster and predicts that, when we do, we will find the experience no more uncomfortable than talking to a telephone answering machine. He has nothing to say about how we may become different by talking to doorknob (and he has no clue about how talking to an answering machine s is far from comfortable). He is concerned only that we adapt to our technological future. He nowhere addresses the psychic or social meaning of adaptation. People are quite capable of adapting to all sorts of changes - soldiers adapt themselves to killing, children adapt themselves to being fatherless, women can adapt themselves to being abused. I have not doubt we can adapt ourselves to talking much more to machines than to people. But that is not an answer to anything.
Neil Postman -
.. I genuinely believe that the absolutely fundamental difference between the European tradition and other cultures lies in the different notions of time and that it is fundamental source of the European idea of development and progress. Other cultures, on the contrary, honor the status quo, quietude, leaving things in place, etc., etc.
Václav Havel
