Notion idée de progrès

The notion of progress touches  upon the idea of technical, scientific or social evolution which may contribute to making the world a better place but also may jeopardize human fundamental rights or pose environmental, health related threats and ethical issues.

In the sequence “Utopia and Dystopia”, we have been concerned by one major issue: “According to this theme, we could wonder to what extent can progress in our society echo to the literary themes of utopia or dystopia?”

First, we will see how progress can echo to the literary themes of utopia and then we will add that it can also lead to dystonia situations.

        An utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens.
Progress can improve human living here on Earth. May issues could be resolved.
For instance, eugenics. Eugenics are practices that try to upgrade the genetics quality of the human population, especially through gene selection and genetic manipulations. This practice could end some diseases, create more appropriate people to certain job and correct social inequalities.
DOC: in the document “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, we can see that this practice could be leading to an utopia because it is a “major instrument of social stability”.
Also, scientists have been thinking about cloning. It means that they could create a genetically identical copy of a human. Thanks to this improvement, there could be organ donation, issues could be cured and reincarnation would be possible!
Moreover, the scientific world has worked on surrogacy. It is the process of giving birth as a surrogate mother or of arranging such a birth. It mainly helps sterile or homosexual parents to have children. In Friends, Phoebe gave birth to triplets to enable his brother and step sister to have children. They can’t have some because of there age gap so Phoebe proposes to help them be a family.

Finally, specialists have mentioned the possibility of developing cyborgs. In that order, they could create beings with both organic and barometrically body parts. It would help disabled people or replace dying body parts.
All this improvements could lead to an utopia because people could live longer and better.

        Further on, a dystopia is a community or society that is undesirable or frightening. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments or other characteristics associated with a decline in society. Progress can also echo to the literary themes of dystopia.

First of all, many reasons could encourage the population to be against the several scientific projections we have previously spoken about. When it comes to eugenics, we can speak about ethical issues, a dangerous ideology, inbreeding issues for instance. Most of all, it is not a natural process. Cloning includes that only rich people could be able to have a clone, that there would be many inequalities and discrimination and obstacles to human rights because clones would be nearly considered as objects. Also, many countries are against commercial surrogacy because it could lead to human trafficking and because rich people would tend to master poor people’s bodies. And for cyborgs, we could lose our humanity by mixing with machines and using mechanization, we could require heavy resources and produce pollution.

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