The Myth of Progress
- Thread starter Thomas
- Start date
I realize you are.not talking material benefits
...
I believe people are more compassionate, more loving, more caring, more.concerned for each other and our planet.
...
I believe people are more compassionate, more loving, more caring, more.concerned for each other and our planet.
I believe there have always been the more compassionate, etc.
While we can point to the more caring and concerned, we can also point to the more overtly tribal - MAGA, the rise of the right... Everyone talks about the environment, but few are actually willing to pay the price.
So one might posit these are local, and sociopolitical rather than pointing to a spiritual evolution.
And, sadly, I think the process can be reversed.
Most sadly, anecdotal experience is outweighed by current politics and the drift towards extremism.
And the situation in Gaza condemns us all.
While we can point to the more caring and concerned, we can also point to the more overtly tribal - MAGA, the rise of the right... Everyone talks about the environment, but few are actually willing to pay the price.
So one might posit these are local, and sociopolitical rather than pointing to a spiritual evolution.
And, sadly, I think the process can be reversed.
Most sadly, anecdotal experience is outweighed by current politics and the drift towards extremism.
And the situation in Gaza condemns us all.
Study settles the score on whether the modern world is less violent
A study by mathematicians has used new techniques to address the long-running debate over whether battle deaths have been declining globally since the end of the Second World War.
www.sciencedaily.com
Again ... material benefit ... a Eurocentric study ... derived from a situation that could reverse ...Study settles the score on whether the modern world is less violent
A study by mathematicians has used new techniques to address the long-running debate over whether battle deaths have been declining globally since the end of the Second World War.www.sciencedaily.com
Just to reaffirm the OP –
The idea of 'progress' is a sociological one, and not religious. Religions tend to speak of a worsening situation as a precursor to 'the end'.
I see no evidence that we, today, are any more 'spiritual' than our ancestors – in many ways some would argue less so.
In sociological and material terms, the West has made profound changes, some for the better, some for the worse – the Industrial Revolution was a major event, and introduced a new epoch – which may well, as a result of that same revolution, be our last, or might very well plunge us back into a new 'Dark Age' for the survivors following what one might classify an 'extinction event'.
The idea of 'progress' is a sociological one, and not religious. Religions tend to speak of a worsening situation as a precursor to 'the end'.
I see no evidence that we, today, are any more 'spiritual' than our ancestors – in many ways some would argue less so.
In sociological and material terms, the West has made profound changes, some for the better, some for the worse – the Industrial Revolution was a major event, and introduced a new epoch – which may well, as a result of that same revolution, be our last, or might very well plunge us back into a new 'Dark Age' for the survivors following what one might classify an 'extinction event'.
Last edited:
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
Anybody want to discuss David Bentley Hart? Back to that in a moment . . .
You really believe there is no room for overlap there? You have a tendency to make many of your ideas mutually exclusive.
To provide an example of overlap, consider that advancements in healthcare within many Christian denominations can be seen as a way to fulfill the teachings of Jesus, or you can even consider how moral development is reflected in literature throughout the ages.
I will use an unlikely example: David Bentley Hart. Why unlikely? He himself agrees with the idea that unrelentless moral progress is a myth in Atheist Delusions. He wrote:
"The idea that humanity relentlessly progresses toward ever more 'rational' and 'ethical' forms of life is a modern myth, which we use to flatter ourselves for being what we are and to justify every altercation we make in our moral preferences."
Now taken in isolation, I would conclude that he is contradicting himself if it weren't for the word relentlessly there. Earlier he stated that Christianity's appearance was a form of moral progress. He even stated it in the sentence immediately following what I quoted earlier above:
"Over the course of many centuries, Christianity displaced the reigning values of a civilization with its own values, and for a time its rather extraordinary idea of the human, illumined by the unearthly radiance of charity, became the shining sun around which all other values were made to revolve, and in the light of which the good or evil of any act had to be judged."
Stopping here . . . DBH concluded that any civilization adopting Christian values in the beginning must be better than whatever past reigning values were in place. So far so good from a Baha'i perspective in my opinion.
However, he begins to shy away from embracing ever more greater degrees of moral progress over time for the following reason:
"That may all have been a dream, though, from which we have all begun to awaken. There is no reason to assume that this Christian humanism will not now, in its turn, be replaced by another central value, perhaps similar to certain older ideas of the good, perhaps entirely new. Whatever the case may be, though, it seems quite likely that the future that beckons us will be one that will make considerable room, in its deliberations regarding the value of human life, for a fairly unsentimental calculus of utility."
According to DBH, any system of moral values could replace, or now be replacing, our reigning Christian values, and it will most likely be for the worse. Slightly pessimistic. But less pessimistic than what I am reading in your posts.
But I like the Hart that has a glimmer of moral progress and hopefulness. He wrote about Peter's abandonment of Christ and his weeping, convincingly showing moral/spiritual progress in the history of our literature:
"To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving we may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us - Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's imminent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal - is obvious in very part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, all of us - even unbelievers - are 'Christians' in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous complaints of an indolent slave, the self-pitying expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accopaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers - as the great literary critic Erich Auerbach noted half a century ago - that it is only in Peter than one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaen peasant. That is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion."
Even Christianity's care for the sick, according to Hart, constituted a form of moral progress over prevailing norms in the ancient world:
"There was . . . a long tradition of Christian monastic hospitals for the destitute and dying, going back to the days of Constantine and stretching from the Syrian and Byzantine East to the Western fringes of Christendom, a tradition that had no real precedent in pagan society (unless one counts, say, the valetudinaria used by the military to restore soldiers to fighting form)."
He sees Christianity as a moral shift, introducing concepts like universal love and the inherent dignity of every person. These ideas did represent a moral advancement. Would you please tell Hart he is using the wrong lens to look at moral progress? He should be using his sociological lens, not a religious one!
Hart's Atheist Delusions is probably one of my favorite Christian books. I have not read it front to back for many years. I would have to go back and reread it to pick up many of the nuances in his argument. Just working from what I remember with a quick reference to portions of the text I highlighted long ago.
It's a false dichotomy.
You really believe there is no room for overlap there? You have a tendency to make many of your ideas mutually exclusive.
To provide an example of overlap, consider that advancements in healthcare within many Christian denominations can be seen as a way to fulfill the teachings of Jesus, or you can even consider how moral development is reflected in literature throughout the ages.
I will use an unlikely example: David Bentley Hart. Why unlikely? He himself agrees with the idea that unrelentless moral progress is a myth in Atheist Delusions. He wrote:
"The idea that humanity relentlessly progresses toward ever more 'rational' and 'ethical' forms of life is a modern myth, which we use to flatter ourselves for being what we are and to justify every altercation we make in our moral preferences."
Now taken in isolation, I would conclude that he is contradicting himself if it weren't for the word relentlessly there. Earlier he stated that Christianity's appearance was a form of moral progress. He even stated it in the sentence immediately following what I quoted earlier above:
"Over the course of many centuries, Christianity displaced the reigning values of a civilization with its own values, and for a time its rather extraordinary idea of the human, illumined by the unearthly radiance of charity, became the shining sun around which all other values were made to revolve, and in the light of which the good or evil of any act had to be judged."
Stopping here . . . DBH concluded that any civilization adopting Christian values in the beginning must be better than whatever past reigning values were in place. So far so good from a Baha'i perspective in my opinion.
However, he begins to shy away from embracing ever more greater degrees of moral progress over time for the following reason:
"That may all have been a dream, though, from which we have all begun to awaken. There is no reason to assume that this Christian humanism will not now, in its turn, be replaced by another central value, perhaps similar to certain older ideas of the good, perhaps entirely new. Whatever the case may be, though, it seems quite likely that the future that beckons us will be one that will make considerable room, in its deliberations regarding the value of human life, for a fairly unsentimental calculus of utility."
According to DBH, any system of moral values could replace, or now be replacing, our reigning Christian values, and it will most likely be for the worse. Slightly pessimistic. But less pessimistic than what I am reading in your posts.
But I like the Hart that has a glimmer of moral progress and hopefulness. He wrote about Peter's abandonment of Christ and his weeping, convincingly showing moral/spiritual progress in the history of our literature:
"To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving we may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us - Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's imminent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal - is obvious in very part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, all of us - even unbelievers - are 'Christians' in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous complaints of an indolent slave, the self-pitying expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accopaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers - as the great literary critic Erich Auerbach noted half a century ago - that it is only in Peter than one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaen peasant. That is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion."
Even Christianity's care for the sick, according to Hart, constituted a form of moral progress over prevailing norms in the ancient world:
"There was . . . a long tradition of Christian monastic hospitals for the destitute and dying, going back to the days of Constantine and stretching from the Syrian and Byzantine East to the Western fringes of Christendom, a tradition that had no real precedent in pagan society (unless one counts, say, the valetudinaria used by the military to restore soldiers to fighting form)."
He sees Christianity as a moral shift, introducing concepts like universal love and the inherent dignity of every person. These ideas did represent a moral advancement. Would you please tell Hart he is using the wrong lens to look at moral progress? He should be using his sociological lens, not a religious one!
Hart's Atheist Delusions is probably one of my favorite Christian books. I have not read it front to back for many years. I would have to go back and reread it to pick up many of the nuances in his argument. Just working from what I remember with a quick reference to portions of the text I highlighted long ago.
Last edited:
Is it ... maybe because of the brevity of statement, yes, but essentially, not.
To again refer to the OP, Gray – an atheist – has suggested there's an idea of progress in secular society which posits an ever-improving journey towards some distant utopia which it inherited from a Reformed Christian idealism. He argues that when the forces of secularism relegated religious belief to the realm of mere superstition, the process nevertheless retained an already flawed religious idea – progress – and carried it forward into its own secular vision.
My own secondary argument is the idea of 'spiritual progress' within a religious context. There is no explicit suggestion of such in Scripture, as far as I know. The sending of the Paraclete and the miracle of Pentecost are all part and parcel of the Revelation in Christ. In theology, my tutors spoke of 'unpacking' of the 'deposit of faith' (to overwork a metaphor) – and as you know, the Christian Tradition, Eastern more than Western, is loathe to introduce anything 'new' or 'novel' without significant scriptural underpinning.
Well, there you go then.
Well the appearance was a Revelation, rather than a progress, in that Christ was not the natural and inevitable product of what went before, nor does DBH think so (see below).
His point is more emphatic than mine: Christ was an irruption into the world from outside of it, and that the history of Christianity from then on has been a series of shifts, compromises, settlings and aftershocks. Had there been 'progress' in the spiritual domain, then Christ and His teachings would be superseded, left behind, but they have not Indeed, if history was inexorably linear, then Christendom would have gone from strength to strength, from good to better ... but it has not ...
But again Christianity is aligned to the atemporal, the vertical pole, and not the horizontal flow of temporal extension. It gives no indication of a 'progress' such as the modern world likes to conceive it. Rather, its view is negative, thaty things will get worse, and that just like the wise virgins (and other analogies), it's a matter of waiting and watching ...
The displacement of those values does not occur all at once, for sure, but the values are there at the beginning, they're not new as we go along ...
And from mine. He's talking about Revelation and the ripple of effect, as it were. There is some evidence that the first Christian communities held all goods in common, were sharing and caring in every regard, that certainly didn't survive the first centuries, and is a long way from view now. We might share and care at a local level, but that's nothing new, that was around then. On the national and corporate stage it's the exception rather than the rule.
(The nation state is perhaps living on borrowed time in the face of corporate power that observes only its own borders – an example of that is how corporate investment has rejuvenated the 'space race', and as one commentator put it, NASA's latest trips would be out of the question without corporate investment ... the state is simply too feeble now, to caught up in other matters, for such gestures. The prospect of another Trump presidency heralds a new era of the worst of fundamentalist tribalism in the US.)
As your citation of DBH says:
Yes, I'm inclined to agree with his very bleak outlook – that the value of human life will be the result of an economic algorithm – it's worth as a unity of production will be the governing measure.
Matthew 7:20 will undergo an inversion – "by their fruits you will know them" will be the mean. Anyone who doesn't bear fruit, that is anyone who scores a negative on the scale of cost-benefit analysis, will face a bleak future... but that's me at my darkest ...
(A friend of ours is a nurse who works on a ward for children born with limited capacity, to such an extent they require constant medical intervention. The monthly cost of care was a five-figure sum, with no prospect of improvement ... a time will come when someone will ask why we are spending so much and would those (limited) resources be better spent elsewhere ... )
Are you sure? He's eschewing the idea of progress, and furthermore suggests the outlook is worse ... ?
Surely this makes my point – "Erich Auerbach noted half a century ago - that it is only in Peter than one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.'" – in 2,000 years that image has been unwrapped, expanded upon, mined, refined, explored, repeated ... but has not been surpassed ... where's the 'progress'?
]He sees Christianity as a moral shift, introducing concepts like universal love and the inherent dignity of every person. These ideas did represent a moral advancement. Would you please tell Hart he is using the wrong lens to look at moral progress? He should be using his sociological lens, not a religious one!
I think you're reading Hart slanted towards your argument.
I'd say that 'shift' was a revelation and it was seismic – the call to universal love and the dignity of the person was established then – does the march of history show an inexorable progress towards that end? I think not, and it seems, from the above quote, DBH agrees with me ...?
I've just started 'Tradition and Apocalypse" and 30 pages in would recommend it.
+++
"In this sense, the living tradition, if indeed it is living, is essentially apocalyptic: an originating disruption of the historical past remembered in light of God’s final disruption of the historical (and cosmic) future. One might even conclude that the tradition reveals its secrets only through moments of disruption precisely because it is itself, in its very essence, a disruption: it began entirely as a novum, an unanticipated awakening to something hitherto unknown that then requires the entirety of history to interpret… This is the only true faithfulness to the memory of an absolute beginning, a sudden unveiling without precise precedent: an empty tomb, say, or the voice of God heard in rolling thunder, or the descent of the Spirit like a storm of wind or tongues of fire. In a very real sense, the tradition exists only as a sustained apocalypse, a moment of pure awakening preserved as at once an ever dissolving recollection and an ever renewed surprise." (DBH Tradition and Apocalypse, pp. 142-143)
The reviewer goes on:
“Disruption” is the key word here, even if it is an understatement. If we confess with the Nicene Creed that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who rose from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, we must realize the radical consequences of such a statement. Nothing can ever be the same for a conscientious disciple of Jesus Christ. We can no longer look at our lives and our cosmos in the same way ever again.
The empty tomb is the greatest gauntlet ever thrown down to challenge historicism and its all-embracing, all-determining relativism than which none greater can be conceived. The crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus is the greatest novum of all novorum."
(John Stamps writing in Eclectic Orthodox)
"Even so, it should never be forgotten that Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or sapiential path or system of religious observances, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or any conceivable sequel; an overturning of all the orders and hierarchies of the age, here on earth and in the archon-thronged heavens above; the overthrow of all the angelic and demonic powers and principalities by a slave legally crucified at the behest of all the religious and political authorities of his time, but raised up by God as the one sole Lord over all the cosmos; the abolition of the partition of Law between peoples; the proclamation of imminent arrival of the Kingdom and of the new age of creation; an urgent call to all persons to come out from the shelters of social, cultural, and political association into a condition of perilous and unprotected exposure, dwelling nowhere but in the singularity of this event—for the days are short. (ibid, p. 135)
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
Two quick points.
Even the philanthropic practices of wealthy individuals as a whole have become slightly better, as detailed in Thomas Piketty's A Brief History of Equality. Piketty argues the attitudes and practices of the wealthy towards philanthropy have improved over time. He acknowledges historical periods where the rich prioritized accumulating wealth for their families and dynasties. This led to societal problems. He does suggest that modern wealthy individuals are more inclined to donate to social causes and public institutions, which can contribute to a more equitable society.
Despite the discontinuation of sharing all things in common in early Christian communities, David Bentley Hart Christian argues moral sensibilities still linger with us from the transformation Christ initiated, not that they have all disappeared and left without a trace:
"What is obvious to us - Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's imminent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal - is obvious in very part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail [about Peter's tears] is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity. In this sense, all of us - even unbelievers - are 'Christians' in our moral expectations of the world. To the literate classes of late antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous complaints of an indolent slave, the self-pitying expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accompaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers - as the great literary critic Erich Auerbach noted half a century ago - that it is only in Peter than one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaen peasant. That is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion."
I will try to respond to the rest later.
I don't know Piketty – but from a quick wiki search I like the idea that the state "increase access to quality health care, education, employment through the progressive implementation of taxation on the most wealthy. He also called for a "decommodification" of certain sectors that have become privatized including education, health, transport and energy."
So a call to – in political terms – a global wealth tax and nationalisation of resources (even globalisation?) – sadly, despite the philanthropy of the wealthy, the disparity between rich and poor is larger than ever and increasing – something like 1% possesses more than the bottom 50% combined?.
So a call to – in political terms – a global wealth tax and nationalisation of resources (even globalisation?) – sadly, despite the philanthropy of the wealthy, the disparity between rich and poor is larger than ever and increasing – something like 1% possesses more than the bottom 50% combined?.
I would hope so ... but as i said, that lingering does not constitute progress.
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
Before proceeding, I am not sure how you are defining progress. Progress simply refers to a movement towards an improvement over time. In this context we are discussing moral improvement, which, for example, can involve a deepening of concepts like fairness or a broadening/expansion of one's scope of fairness. Do you agree? Or would you like to add more to this definition?
I would say twofold:
From the religious perspective, the idea that we are 'more spiritual' now than we were I think is an illusion.
From the secular perspective, the idea of a 'relentless' and 'inevitable' progress towards an ideal state.
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
How do you define spiritual?
Okay. Thanks for the additional details.
Do you agree or disagree with the basic definition of progress I provided in post #131? What is moral progress? What would constitute moral progress in your mind?
"Progress simply refers to a movement towards an improvement over time."
Yes. And there are many examples of 'progress' which benefits humanity, but does not thereby mean that human nature has changed, rather it's the material circumstance surrounding it.
"In this context we are discussing moral improvement... "
Quite – and let me repeat the DBH citation offered above: "In this sense, all of us - even unbelievers - are 'Christians' in our moral expectations of the world" – so moral improvement is in the context of "an unanticipated awakening to something hitherto unknown that then requires the entirety of history to interpret"
Here it gets complex, so progress then is that process of interpretation – but is that process linear and always on target, as it were, or does it rather proceed in a series of steps and stumblings, advances, retreats ... secularism rather sees moral norms in a pragmatic sense, as somethjing negotiable. Progress is one area, the abolition of slavery, say, does not infer moral progress across the board. Racism is still prevalent, and slavery operates under more discreet veils, even at the national and cultural level.
And, the evidence is that moral norms can be reversed ... economic migrants were once welcomed, now not so much. In the West, populist parties are on the rise on a wave of more-or-less overt racist tropes.
My point is, the idea of 'progress' as an absolute is acceptable in a religious context, but to claim so in a secular world is a contradiction.
For progress in the absolute sense means the a priori assumption of an origin and an end, an alpha and an omega. Furthermore, the end must necessarily be prefigured in the origin – in that sense, and only in that sense, can one truly talk about progress as a principle, rather than progress as contingent happenstance.
Without that, without what the Aristotelian world which believed in a Formal and Final Cause (progress swept that idea away, or relativised it to the material), there can be no talk of 'progress' – rather there is just the movement in time of a set of conditions which are shaped by contingency towards an unspecified but somewhat utopian ideal.
Evolution was initially seen as a 'progress', a rather bloodthirsty idea of survival of the fittest in which the better trumps the lesser and via which the Perfect Man would eventually emerge. That view has changed, and evolution is now seen as much more random and chance, with sudden advances, dead-ends and blind alleys, appearances and disappearances, as nature continually rolls the dice, as it were ...
+++
I'm not denying material progress. As a Christian, I look forward to the Parousia, but there is no Scripture telling me that everything gets incrementally better and then the curtain is raised, rather it suggests it's when the outlook is at its most bleak ...
... but what I am saying is that the idea of progress, of an absolute path towards an end, without a director, without someone or something having that end in view and making course adjustments as we go, is a contradiction.
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
You wrote that material circumstances surrounding us have changed, but this does not mean human nature has changed. Are you thinking a change in material circumstances has no impact on human nature or that one doesn't always impact the other?
Even if you don't accept that human nature has changed, I think it is an undeniable fact that our understanding of human nature and how it interacts with the environment around us changes. Advancements in psychology might change our perspective on things.
Technology is rewiring our brains, which could lead to changes in human nature depending on how you define our nature. To name one of many examples of how technology is rewiring the brain, I recall the Chinese government's concern about loss of cultural heritage. Why? An increasing number of Chinese teenagers are forgetting how to write Chinese characters because of their reliance on smartphones. Significant amounts of screen time through social media use might decrease attention spans and impact memory. This form of distraction is a double-edged sword. On the upside our brains might become better at multitasking and processing information faster.
Overall, more screen time on social applications might be associated with changes in brain structure according to some studies. If human nature is changing, it would be a gradual process over vast time scales, not something that occurs all at once, so it wouldn't be easy to measure. Whether or not you consider changes in brain structure a slight change in human nature is up to you. Human nature might just be flexible instead of fixed, adjusting itself to different environments, or it could be that certain aspects of human nature (e.g., sleep) are unchangeable. Perhaps technology could reduce the time we need to sleep, but not completely eliminate it. Whatever the case may be, I disagree with the suggestion that the material circumstances that benefit humanity do not ever change our behavior or biology to some degree in a positive direction as well.
Think about the innovation cooking brought. Who was the genius that realized food could be cooked over a fire? My gut feeling
is that this had huge implications for our development as a species in terms of morality or how we treat others. The innovation of cooking likely increased our sense of community since it takes time to cook food. The ancients turned it into a social activity. Our concept of fairness could have also deepened since human beings had to decide how to divide food amongst a group. Morality was likely more focused on survival before the advent of cooking. Also, some historians have argued that the explosion of philosophical schools during the Axial Age might partly be attributed to increased nutritional intake. Material circumstances were changing inner lives and vice versa.This discussion reminds me of the movie WALL-E. Abundance gives way to overweight human beings that do not value physical activity. They are so dependent on technology that they are no longer able to take care of themselves. A change in material circumstances has a negative impact on our behavior in this movie, but the movie also teaches we can make things even better if we learn from our mistakes. Eventually WALL-E's influence inspires them to be more active and take back control of their lives.
Last edited:
No, I accept that. A change in material circumstance (for better or worse) can broaden or narrow, increase or limit the potential, but that does not necessarily change the essential nature.
Indeed ... but these are always subject to change. Freud was all the rage at one point, now not so much ... psychology as a science is a mixed bag.
Yep, and some say the effects so far are positive, and others say negative, and others that the brain has the ability to adapt, which is part of its nature, so it's just within the existing potential – rather than signifying a change of nature, it's a change within nature?
Might ... If ...
But none of this is relevant to my principle point.
To say progress assumes a goal, and a goal established at the outset, which suggests an architect, or sorts.
In a religious context this is almost axiomatic ... in a secular world it's refuted, but somehow the idea of 'progress' remains, even when the principle is refuted?
Aupmanyav
Be your own guru.
We too seem to have many horses (image above).
Ahanu
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 2,191
- Reaction score
- 528
- Points
- 108
So what does this growing disparity between the rich and poor growing larger than ever and increasing prove to you and say about progress?
You can still have growing inequality and progress simultaneously. We should be careful not to equate inequality with poverty. For example, if the bottom half still have the same proportion of the wealth as 50% of the poorest a century ago, they are actually far richer since wealth has grown exponentially, so even if inequality is rising, the poorest half are still better off than a century ago.
Let's remind ourselves of life on the four income levels:
Extreme poverty is in decline, and it may even disappear. For example, in Brazil more and more people are leaving extreme poverty. The richest 10% own 41% of the wealth in Brazil. It is quite high, but it is the lowest it has been in a long time. Also, statistics can hide things. Here's a nice little snapshot from Hans Rosling's Factfulness:
Two hundred years ago the majority lived on income level 1.
Overall, the trend is still towards greater equality over long periods of time. I'm not sure the disparity between the rich and poor is larger than ever. Maybe it appears larger than ever since inequality was relatively lower in the 1980s and has been trending upwards ever since, but emerging technologies could disrupt this trend.
Also, consider Piketty's analysis of concentration of property in France from 1780-2020:
Although he concludes that the progress made for the poorest 50% was "infinitesimal," he still discerns "a long-term movement towards equality."
Last edited: