avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-04-14 09:43 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2014-04-14 09:43 pm
Progress?
Nal komerex, khesterex.
That's Klingon. Not the real Klingon you hear in the movies, but John M Ford's Klingon, from The Final Reflection. Roughly translated, it means, "That which does not grow, dies."
This is of course a very popular sentiment among humans as well, and is used to justify all sorts of things: imperialism, hostile takeovers, any operation whereby one entity gets more of everything than the others around it. If you don't grow, you die. Never mind the fact that most living creatures, having reached their optimum size, stay that size quite happily, often for years, before they die. Never mind the fact that "enough" is enough to sustain life for most people, that they don't in fact sicken and die if they don't continually get more. Never mind the basic facts of nature. If you don't grow, you die. It sounds frighteningly plausible, especially if you want it to.
Here it is in another form: "If you don't progress, you stagnate."
What is progress? Literally, it's forward motion, motion in a desired direction, towards a known and designated goal. A story progresses towards its end. A child progresses through its education till it has learned enough to become an adult, ideally. A tractor progresses across a field till it has finished ploughing. The search for a cure to a disease progresses till the cure is found. There is such a thing as good and necessary progress.
But some humans apply this to everything. Everything must progress, or it will stagnate. Art must constantly look for something new to do, something better than what it is doing, or it will stop being art somehow. Technology must progress continually; finding the best way to do a thing is not enough, it must find another best way, and another, and go on for ever, because if it does not it will cease to exist. We must all progress, all the time, so as not to stagnate.
I see two problems. One is that no two of us can agree on what direction we should be progressing in. And the other, from which the first arises, is that we have forgotten an essential element of the meaning of the word "progress," which is that when progress has reached the desired goal...it stops.
Sharks are usually brought in as an apt analogy here. People will tell you that a shark must keep swimming, constantly, or the flow of water through its gills stops and it dies. So we must always keep moving in some direction, or we will die.
I mean...this by them is a good idea?
I see this as a very serious problem. We're human beings, not sharks. We don't need to be constantly moving. We have physical and mental limitations which mean that if we constantly move, if we constantly think, if we do any one thing constantly, our systems collapse. We have limitations on the amount of information we can comfortably handle, on the amount of sleep we can do without, and yet this need to progress keeps us finding new ways to batter and bombard ourselves with more and more data, more and more information, more and more to do and to think and to care about, and we wonder why stress is spiralling out of control and more and more people are burning out or just giving up.
I say stop.
I see, in our near future, always assuming we survive at all, a grand reconsideration. I think if we are to take control of our lives, of ourselves, we have to stop running, stop grabbing for the new, stop listening to the voices that tell us we'll die if we slow down. I think we have to decide what is enough for us, aim for that, progress till we reach it, and then stop. We won't stagnate. We won't die. If we do, it will not be because we stopped. It may be because we didn't stop soon enough.
Art and music are to stir the mind, touch the heart and please the senses. Any art or music that doesn't do all three of those things for somebody--preferably for lots of somebodies--has progressed beyond the point where it's art or music at all. Technology is to serve us, not rule us. Any technology that controls our lives has progressed beyond the point of usefulness. Social progress is still a crying need, but it must have defined goals and a deadline, like yesterday. I predict that if we take control this way--cut out the pointless headlong race in random directions, end the dependence on a "progress" which no longer has the meaning we gave the word--we may yet become a wiser species, and learn to find new goals that we couldn't see because we were going too fast. At very least we'll become a happier one, and a better steward for what's left of this planet.
If we don't...well, I know what to put on our grave. The great lie that doomed us to exhaust our resources, exploit our fellow humans, and extinguish ourselves.
Nal komerex, khesterex.
That's Klingon. Not the real Klingon you hear in the movies, but John M Ford's Klingon, from The Final Reflection. Roughly translated, it means, "That which does not grow, dies."
This is of course a very popular sentiment among humans as well, and is used to justify all sorts of things: imperialism, hostile takeovers, any operation whereby one entity gets more of everything than the others around it. If you don't grow, you die. Never mind the fact that most living creatures, having reached their optimum size, stay that size quite happily, often for years, before they die. Never mind the fact that "enough" is enough to sustain life for most people, that they don't in fact sicken and die if they don't continually get more. Never mind the basic facts of nature. If you don't grow, you die. It sounds frighteningly plausible, especially if you want it to.
Here it is in another form: "If you don't progress, you stagnate."
What is progress? Literally, it's forward motion, motion in a desired direction, towards a known and designated goal. A story progresses towards its end. A child progresses through its education till it has learned enough to become an adult, ideally. A tractor progresses across a field till it has finished ploughing. The search for a cure to a disease progresses till the cure is found. There is such a thing as good and necessary progress.
But some humans apply this to everything. Everything must progress, or it will stagnate. Art must constantly look for something new to do, something better than what it is doing, or it will stop being art somehow. Technology must progress continually; finding the best way to do a thing is not enough, it must find another best way, and another, and go on for ever, because if it does not it will cease to exist. We must all progress, all the time, so as not to stagnate.
I see two problems. One is that no two of us can agree on what direction we should be progressing in. And the other, from which the first arises, is that we have forgotten an essential element of the meaning of the word "progress," which is that when progress has reached the desired goal...it stops.
Sharks are usually brought in as an apt analogy here. People will tell you that a shark must keep swimming, constantly, or the flow of water through its gills stops and it dies. So we must always keep moving in some direction, or we will die.
I mean...this by them is a good idea?
I see this as a very serious problem. We're human beings, not sharks. We don't need to be constantly moving. We have physical and mental limitations which mean that if we constantly move, if we constantly think, if we do any one thing constantly, our systems collapse. We have limitations on the amount of information we can comfortably handle, on the amount of sleep we can do without, and yet this need to progress keeps us finding new ways to batter and bombard ourselves with more and more data, more and more information, more and more to do and to think and to care about, and we wonder why stress is spiralling out of control and more and more people are burning out or just giving up.
I say stop.
I see, in our near future, always assuming we survive at all, a grand reconsideration. I think if we are to take control of our lives, of ourselves, we have to stop running, stop grabbing for the new, stop listening to the voices that tell us we'll die if we slow down. I think we have to decide what is enough for us, aim for that, progress till we reach it, and then stop. We won't stagnate. We won't die. If we do, it will not be because we stopped. It may be because we didn't stop soon enough.
Art and music are to stir the mind, touch the heart and please the senses. Any art or music that doesn't do all three of those things for somebody--preferably for lots of somebodies--has progressed beyond the point where it's art or music at all. Technology is to serve us, not rule us. Any technology that controls our lives has progressed beyond the point of usefulness. Social progress is still a crying need, but it must have defined goals and a deadline, like yesterday. I predict that if we take control this way--cut out the pointless headlong race in random directions, end the dependence on a "progress" which no longer has the meaning we gave the word--we may yet become a wiser species, and learn to find new goals that we couldn't see because we were going too fast. At very least we'll become a happier one, and a better steward for what's left of this planet.
If we don't...well, I know what to put on our grave. The great lie that doomed us to exhaust our resources, exploit our fellow humans, and extinguish ourselves.
Nal komerex, khesterex.
no subject
no subject
(I would disagree on one relatively minor point: you wrote "Art and music are to stir the mind, touch the heart and please the senses. Any art or music that doesn't do all three of those things for somebody--preferably for lots of somebodies--has progressed beyond the point where it's art or music at all." I would amend that to "any art or music that doesn't do at least one of those things, preferably two", rather than requiring all three.)