Progress

“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”  (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1909—1966)

I recently read The Ancestors Tale, a book by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins.  In it he likens progress, particularly evolutionary progress, to an arms race.  In the world of predator and prey, as predators improve their ability to hunt, prey must evolve in their ability to avoid getting eaten -- hide better, run faster, or taste nastier.  If they don’t, they become extinct.  As prey becomes more elusive, predators must, in turn, become more adept hunters, or they don’t eat. And so on and so forth in a cycle of either progress or perish.

Human progress has often been based in the imperative of progress or perish. From stones we progressed to bronze weapons.  From bronze weapons we progressed to iron. Weapons evolved becoming more lethal. Defenses evolved becoming more sophisticated. Progress or perish, thus we continually needed and got better guns, better planes, better bombs, better rockets, better technology.  But progress came at a price. The enormous resources allotted for the development of weaponry were resources not given to education, infrastructure, health, and environment.

The capitalistic marketplace is driven by ‘progress or perish.’  Companies are predators, competing with one another for their limited prey, the consumer. If one company’s product has an edge over its competitor’s product, thereby capturing a larger consumer share, the competitor must improve its product, or risk going out of business. If that company can improve its product, especially if they can do so with glamourous innovation, the other company must respond in kind, or perish. In the dog-eat-dog world, competition forces product development, and we call this progress.

Medicine has in-part been driven by ‘progress or perish’.  Our immune system evolved to combat viral and bacterial infections, but it was imperfect.  Once, not so long ago, it was common to die from infection. Then, we discovered antisepsis, followed by the discovery and development of the first antibiotics. People stopped dying so much from infection.  However, some bacteria mutated and developed resistance to the first generation of antibiotics, so we progressed to a new generation of antibiotics that could kill resistant bacteria.  However, bacteria continued to mutate and progressed into super-resistant bacteria.  Add to all this, that we are currently living in a world infected by a rapidly mutating virus. And so, we must continue to discover and develop new and more powerful tools for fighting infection, viral and bacterial, in an on-going evolving arms race.  Progress or perish.

Progress is not only about science and technology.  In my lifetime, there has been noteworthy legislative progress in civil rights, women’s rights, and legal protections for the LGBTQ community. But I am unsure that this legislative progress is necessarily a measure of moral and spiritual progress.  Given the climate of these times (no pun intended), I fear we are no closer to the 2500-year-old ideals ‘loving thy neighbor’ or ‘beating our swords into plowshares.’  We need moral and spiritual progress at least as much as we need technological progress.  I believe it’s a matter of progress or perish.