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Taking a step back
Jun. 3rd, 2012 12:26 pmOne of the thoughts that rebounded off my anti-progressive song a few posts back...
A thing that humans do quite a lot is to invent something and then declare it to be part of the natural order of things, especially when it serves our personal purposes. The one I particularly want to talk about is progress. We seem to imagine it as something almost immutable, a procession in which we're all caught up, irresistibly sweeping us onward in a direction to be determined later, towards a goal we can't imagine, or just endlessly on for its own sake. If something threatens progress, we scream that the only alternative is to go backwards, or to stop completely, and we imagine that if that happens, like sharks, we'll drown. Our own intentions are irrelevant. Progress must be served (why? Is it a god?). You can't stop progress.
I'm one of those irritating people who like to know where they're going, how long it's going to take, whether we have enough fuel to get us there, and what we're likely to meet on the way. It's nice, sometimes, to pick a direction and just set out like Bilbo, but for important journeys that really isn't good enough. And if my journey leads me into bad places, I quite like the option of stopping, going back to the last turning and trying again, or at least looking at the map. I think the journey we're all on is an important one, or rather ones, because it's actually several journeys at once. And sometimes it's good to break a journey just to have something to eat and look around at where we are.
I think that, if we are to survive these multilply-layered journeys, we're going to find it good, more and more often, to stop and take a step back. I think that in some cases we might even find that we've gone as far as we want or need to, and that that particular journey can end. There are technologies that we can improve to a point where they're optimally designed, and any further "improvement" would be superfluous; human reaction times, for instance, are limited, so there's a point beyond which our devices would work faster than we could be sure of controlling them. That, obviously, would be a point at which to stop and take a step back. And there are technologies which are dead ends; the fossil fuel engine is one I'm thinking of, but I'm sure there are others. A good deal of retracing of steps to do there, and to our credit, we're starting to. Whether it's too late or not I don't know. And the technological journey is only one of many.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the element of choice has been underplayed in our discussions of progress. It's time we considered it, because not everything that has been said against the notion of unending inexorable progress is wrong. We can choose to go on till our engines fail under us and we're stranded in a strange neighbourhood where the streetlights keep browning out and there's no phone signal, or we can exercise some control over our journey.
And maybe, once we've come to a stopping place on some of our journeys, looking at the map will show us new directions we can try, that we would never have seen while we were bombing along the freeway surrounded by other cars and worrying about the wavering needle on the petrol gauge.
A thing that humans do quite a lot is to invent something and then declare it to be part of the natural order of things, especially when it serves our personal purposes. The one I particularly want to talk about is progress. We seem to imagine it as something almost immutable, a procession in which we're all caught up, irresistibly sweeping us onward in a direction to be determined later, towards a goal we can't imagine, or just endlessly on for its own sake. If something threatens progress, we scream that the only alternative is to go backwards, or to stop completely, and we imagine that if that happens, like sharks, we'll drown. Our own intentions are irrelevant. Progress must be served (why? Is it a god?). You can't stop progress.
I'm one of those irritating people who like to know where they're going, how long it's going to take, whether we have enough fuel to get us there, and what we're likely to meet on the way. It's nice, sometimes, to pick a direction and just set out like Bilbo, but for important journeys that really isn't good enough. And if my journey leads me into bad places, I quite like the option of stopping, going back to the last turning and trying again, or at least looking at the map. I think the journey we're all on is an important one, or rather ones, because it's actually several journeys at once. And sometimes it's good to break a journey just to have something to eat and look around at where we are.
I think that, if we are to survive these multilply-layered journeys, we're going to find it good, more and more often, to stop and take a step back. I think that in some cases we might even find that we've gone as far as we want or need to, and that that particular journey can end. There are technologies that we can improve to a point where they're optimally designed, and any further "improvement" would be superfluous; human reaction times, for instance, are limited, so there's a point beyond which our devices would work faster than we could be sure of controlling them. That, obviously, would be a point at which to stop and take a step back. And there are technologies which are dead ends; the fossil fuel engine is one I'm thinking of, but I'm sure there are others. A good deal of retracing of steps to do there, and to our credit, we're starting to. Whether it's too late or not I don't know. And the technological journey is only one of many.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the element of choice has been underplayed in our discussions of progress. It's time we considered it, because not everything that has been said against the notion of unending inexorable progress is wrong. We can choose to go on till our engines fail under us and we're stranded in a strange neighbourhood where the streetlights keep browning out and there's no phone signal, or we can exercise some control over our journey.
And maybe, once we've come to a stopping place on some of our journeys, looking at the map will show us new directions we can try, that we would never have seen while we were bombing along the freeway surrounded by other cars and worrying about the wavering needle on the petrol gauge.