📈 Is Progress Real? (5/100)
The Lessons of History
Hello everyone,
This week was a test of my resolve and commitment to writing. While I pride myself on building habits. Putting in the hard yards week in and week out is hard.
With things keeping me occupied at work, everything happing in Delhi (farmer protests), and a job interview, I found this newsletter to be lower on my priority list this week than I hoped.
Some personal news - I’m thrilled to be joining Stoa School, an MBA Bootcamp for ambitious folks who want to level up. I’ll be helping out with the learning experience at Stoa starting next month.
This week I want to tackle a strangely open question:
Is Progress Real or an Illusion?
Some of the best books are written by authors that don’t give their readers easy answers but leave them with burning questions. The answers to hard questions are personal and depend on how an individual may perceive things, their worldview, and the experiences that have shaped their lives.
Chap. XIII from The Lessons of History has made me think and reflect about Progress all week. I haven’t been too successful in making up my mind though. Let me know if you do?
In this edition, we share some of the best anecdotes, questions, and musings by the authors’ Will & Ariel Durant. The authors pose several arguments for and against progress and leave it up to the readers to decide whether progress is real or not.
The core idea of their work is that man’s nature hasn’t changed all that much throughout history. Technical advances remain but must be “written off as merely new means of achieving old ends— the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other (or by the same), the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars.”
My goal today is to take you to a place you haven’t been before. Think on a tangent you haven’t thought of before.
A perspective on progress.
What is progress?
Progress is the transfer of heritage through history.
History is the creation and recording of the heritage and progress is the increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use of the heritage.
The authors define progress “as the increasing control of the environment by life.” Whether the average man or woman has increased their ability to control the conditions of their life. If the present stage is an advance in the control of the environment, progress is real.
While reading this chapter, I found myself constantly leaning from one side of the see-saw to the other.
While on one hand, I thought, Yes, we are progressing, but on the other hand I thought to myself Hang on a second, are we really progressing?
Some of my favorite arguments by the Durants and my interpretation of the quotes:
1. Comparison with the Middle Ages
Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology and art rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.
With the technological progress over the last few centuries - “our comforts and conveniences have weakened our physical stamina and our moral fiber.”
2. On Inner peace vs our ancestors
We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.
Life in 2021 seems to be a test of discipline and patience. As a society, we are miserably impatient and completely lack discipline.
3. A few hard questions with no great answers, none that I could answer earnestly.
“Has there been any progress at all in Philosophy since Confucius? Or in Literature since Aeschylus?” (Confucius and Aeschylus are apparently the OGs)
“Are we sure that our music is more profound than Palestrina?” (Listen to Palestrina on Spotify here)
“How does our contemporary architecture compare with the ancient temples of ancient Egypt or Greece?” (Hint: Not that great)
“Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological or racial hostilities?”
“Are our manners better than before, or worse?”
At this point, I felt comparisons are useless. There is a need for context and nuance to make a fair comparison.
4. The Durants were high on sarcasm, nothing like a spoon full of sarcasm
Famines have been eliminated but we’re overfeeding ourselves
From a long-range view, our modern existence is precarious, chaotic, and murderous but the primitives suffered from ignorance, superstitions, violence, and diseases. (My word, we really should be more nuanced in our comparisons)
Role of Education in Progress
Progress may be real or illusionary. But the Durants make a strong case that education plays a pivotal role in progress. The next few lines by Will and Ariel are by far the most impactful lines on Education I’ve come across. Read and savor.
Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.
They managed to explain how the education system is broken the world over in one small paragraph. Makes you wonder - Is progress real?
Conclusion
History allows us to draw any conclusion we want.
History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances. Choosing our evidence with a brighter bias, we might evolve some more comforting reflections.
Progress can’t be continuous or universal.
At any point in time, some nations were progressing and some were declining. The same nation maybe progressing in one field of human activity and declining in another. (I can’t help but think about India, China, the US, countries in the Middle East - so many countries are better off and worse off at the same time)
In the end, the comparison between our modern existence and our rich history seems futile. Truth be told (whatever that means), the rational optimist in me says we’re somewhere in the middle.
Best wishes,
- Vaibhav
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