Idea of Progress - Is Progress Always Good ?

    Idea of Progress - Essay

     We’re gonna be talking about the “idea of progress”. Let’s start by defining progress : progress as defined by the Oxford American College Dictionary is the onward movement towards a destination. Something to keep in mind is that the word progress implies that it is possible to regress as well, in other words it implies that there are two paths, forward and backward, the right way and the wrong way. But what progress are we talking about anyways, in our case we’re talking about technological, social and scientific progress. Now we tend to think that progress is always a good thing, but is it really. The question we’ll try to answer today is : wether or not we can say that progress is always good ? Now looking at all the good things that progress has brought to our lives and our societies, the intuitive answer would probably be absolutely yes, not to mention that in and of itself, progress is indeed a good thing, but as we’ll see thats not necessarily the case and there are a couple of things that we must underline :

     Firstly, progress has its drawbacks, its consequences. Some of the areas of progress that haven’t been thought through well enough or maybe have had their issues ignored have created some rather big consequences. For example, with the rise of the industrial age came the rise of the ecological crisis, with factories all of a sudden emitting huge quantities of CO2 and of other wastes, we started to see their horrible effects in the air and water of certain nearby localities, sometimes even affecting great portions of a country which subsequently had horrible effects on its population and ecosystems, endangering people’s lives and destroying entire habitats, killing many plants and animals in the process. For example, a 2015 study from the non-profit organization Berkely Earth estimated that 1.6 million people in China die each year from heart, lung and stroke problems because of polluted air. Factory pollution and waste doesn’t stop there, it also creates green-house gases that drive up the earths temperature which has similarly if not worse devastating effects. In fact, the burning of fossil fuels has increased the amount of CO2 by more than a third since the industrial revolution, the rapid increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has warmed the planet at an alarming rate, the consequences have been devastating and are only getting worse ; ice sheets melting, sea levels rising, coastal regions being flooded, weather becoming more extreme: intense storms, floods, snowfalls and increased as well as prolonged droughts.

     Now this is only one example, but one that really illustrates the point, progress has consequences.

     Secondly, progress has made it easier to regress. When you make progress against certain problems you also create additional problems that can be bigger, the same as or less than the problems you’ve solved. As we progress in technology and other areas the size and the catastrophic nature of the kind of flip side grows exponentially, so for every huge leap you make in an area you also create a huge leap in catastrophic affects that you have enabled to possibly happen. For example, with the creation of the nuclear bomb came the ability for human kind to destroy itself. Never in the history of man have you been able to pull 1 trigger and take the lives of over 100 thousand people, evaporate or rather delete a 1.6km radius of land, create a 15km radius shockwave and leave raging fires that consume buildings, houses and people, that’s sadly what indeed happened in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings of 1945. In 1946, an extensive report by The Manhattan Engineer District was conducted stating over 100 thousand deaths and over 70 thousand injured ; and this was what nuclear bombs were capable of 70 years ago, nowadays just a couple of our modern and a lot more advanced nuclear, thermal, and atomic bombs could easily wipe out life on earth as we know it. Now this is in regards to nuclear bombs the highest form of weaponry, but even if we look at lower levels of weaponry we see the devastating capabilities that man has been given : the total casualties of both WW1 and WW2 combined are of over 140 million (3% of the world population). Aside from war, things like globalization has given us the ability to create a world crisis over night. We all know what happened in the 2008 financial crisis, several banks going bankrupt, over 7 million people losing their jobs (according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers), hundreds of thousands becoming homeless, entire economies slowing down, an entire chain-effect that had, according to a report by the former chief credit officer of Standard & Poor’s (an American financial services company), total global losses as large as $15 trillion (USD).

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