Is relative progress actually progress at all? We would all agree that arranging for better food on the buffet and more beautiful music in the ballroom on a sinking cruise ship is not rational behavior let alone progress for the on-board community. Priorities, priorities!
Can having relevant insights or being somewhat prescient be helpful in planning for the future of the human community? For example, in 1862 Henry Adams revealed that he was somewhat of a visionary in a letter he wrote to his brother Charles who was an officer in the Union Army. “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. Not only shall we be able to cruise in space, but I see no reason why some future generation wouldn’t give it another rotary motion so that every zone would receive in turn its due portion of heat and light.”[i]
Have we used the vast scientific knowledge acquired since the Civil War to create a community in which everyone has been provided the dignity that comes with acceptable shelter, clothing and a reliable supply of food?
We have come a long way in raising the standard of living in the U.S. since the time of Henry Adams as a brief look at the city of New York shortly after the Civil War makes clear. The following paragraph contains a description of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, Five Points, the Bowery and Mulberry Bend in the 1880’s. “Here were whole blocks of tenements so squalid that even a conservative description of them leaves one wondering how any resident managed to stay alive as long as one month. Here were streets where no man dared walk even at midday—places where the police themselves would not go, except in threes, with their weapons ready. Here were gangs of an untamed viciousness that make modern gangsters look like Sunday school boys; a web of civic corruption so widespread and all-embracing that it could not conceivably be cleaned up, or even mildly deodorized; a miserable carnival of murder, graft, prostitution, rampant rowdyism and general unadorned nastiness that would seem by any rational standard to have been completely beyond redemption.”[ii]
Fast forward to New York today and there certainly seems to have been progress but look more closely past the material world that engages the senses. New York has been “cleaned up” but no one can afford to live there except the oligarchs and a new class of international criminals laundering their money and those pandering to them, the “fools,” the “toadies” who cook their food, launder their clothes and entertain them. Hell’s Kitchen is expanding to all five boroughs and the smell wafting off the streets of the New York we all love is ever more odious.
How about the relative progress of the human community at large? The standard of living for people in the Global Village has risen, with less starvation, less abject poverty, less disease, etc. However, should western nations be working together to launch rockets toward Mars, create self-driving cars? Should we send up drones that launch Cruise missiles that destroy ill-defined enemies along with creating “collateral damage” – a chilling label for innocents who happen to be in the neighborhood? “The greatest trick of war is that, like a virus, it manages to stay one step ahead of humans. There seems to be no end to its ability to fool people into believing that violence is the answer to our problems.”[iii] Are these priorities compassionate for those “cruising” on the planet earth when many of us have come to realize that we will all soon be floating toward the bottom of the sea?
The focus of this essay up to this point has been our experience in a Paradigm-B context – a version of “Hell’s Kitchen” where we fool ourselves into thinking we can make progress. In truth, that will never happen. However, we have another choice. If we wake up and realize the unreality of our nightmare, then we can choose a Paradigm-A worldview and the perfection of Creation.
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Supplemental Reading:
Paradigm-A, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
Paradigm-B, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#4 The Buffet or the Lifeboats?
[i] Catton, Bruce. “Reading, Writing and History.” American Heritage, October 1955, p. 112.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 108-109.
[iii] Ricks, Thomas E. “War Stories.” The New York Times Book Review. May 24, 2020, p 13.
