PROGRESS

Prog-ress n. 1.[archaic] official journey, as of a ruler. 2. historical 
development, in the sense of advance or improvement. 3. forward course 
of history or civilization, as in horror show or death-trip. 

Perhaps no single idea in Western civilization has been as important as 
the notion of progress. It is also true that, as Robert Nisbet has put 
it, "Everything now suggests that Western faith in the dogma of progress 
is waning rapidiy in all levels and spheres in this final part of the 
twentieth century." 

In the anti-authoritarian milieu, too, progress has fallen on hard 
times. There was a time when the syndicalist blockheads, like their 
close Marxist relatives, could more or less successfully harangue as 
marginal and insignifcant those disinterested in organizing their 
alienation via unions, councils and the like. Instead of the old respect 
for productivity and production (the pillars of progress), a Luddite 
prescription for the factories is ascendant and anti-work a cardinal 
starting point of radical dialog. We even see certain ageing leopards 
trying to change their spots: the Industrial Workers of the World, 
embarrassed by the first word of their name may yet move toward refusing 
the second (though certainly not as an organization). 

The eco-crisis is clearly one factor in the discrediting of progress, 
but how it remained an article of faith for so many for so long is a 
vexing question. For what has progress meant, after all? Its promise 
began to realize itself, in many ways, from history's very beginning. 
With the emergence of agriculture and civilization commenced, for 
instance, the progressive destruction of nature; large regions of the 
Near East, Africa and Greece were rather quickly rendered desert 
wastelands.

In terms of violence, the transformation from a mainly pacific and 
egalitarian gatherer-hunter mode to the violence of 
agriculture/civilization was rapid. "Revenge, feuds, warfare, and battle 
seem to emerge among, and to be typical of, domesticated peoples," 
according to Peter Wilson. And violence certainly has made progress 
along the way, needless to say, from state weapons of mega-death to the 
recent rise in outburst murders and serial killers.

Disease itself is very nearly an invention of civilized life; every 
known degenerative illness is part of the toll of historical betterment. 
From the wholeness and sensual vitality of pre-history, to the present 
vista of endemic ill-health and mass psychic misery-more progress.

The pinnacle of progress is today's Information Age. which embodies a 
progression in division of labor, from an earlier time of the greater 
possibility of unmediated understanding, to the stage where knowledge 
becomes merely an instrument of the repressive totality, to the current 
cybernetic era where data is all that's really left. Progress has put 
meaning itself to flight.

Science, the model of progress, has imprisoned and interrogated nature, 
while technology has sentenced it (and humanity) to forced labor. From 
the original dividing of the self that is civilization, to Descartes' 
splitting of the mind from the rest of objects (including the body), to 
our arid, high-tech present-a movement indeed wondrous. Two centuries 
ago the first inventors of industrial machinery were spat on by the 
English textile workers subiected to it and thought villainous by just 
about everyone but their capitalist paymasters. The designers of today's 
computerized slavery are lionized as cultural heroes, though opposition 
is beginning to mount.

In the absence of greater resistance, the inner logic of class society's 
development will culminate in a totally technicized life as its final 
stage. The equivalence of the progress of society and that of technology 
is becoming ever more apparent by the fact of their immanent 
convergence. "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Walter Benjamin's 
last and best work, contains this lyrically expressed insight:

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though 
he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His 
eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how 
one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. 
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe 
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his 
feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what 
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got 
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer 
close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which 
his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. 
This storm is what we call progress."

