Somebody Somebody wrote:
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> Somebody: Do people really believe this? There literally isn't a single country in the world, not even in HIV blighted southern Africa, where people don't live longer, healthier lives than in the past. And there isn't a single nation where literacy rates and education levels aren't much higher than they were three centuries ago. Aren't these the sorts of metrics we refer to when praising, for instance, the achievements of the Cuban Revolution? And frankly, even if we want to replace capitalism, isn't the fact that it's supposed to have laid the ground for socialism a kind of progress?
One could quibble, but let's accept this paragraph as absolutely true. There has been great progress in the last 300 years.
So what? That is irrelvant. The argument is not over whether progress has ever occurred or over whether it might still occur.
The argument is whether Progress is built into history. I argue that neither progress nor regress (both of which have occured numerous times in the last 40,000 years) is built into history. That whether either will occur again depends BOTH on human effort and intelligence AND on unforseen and unforseeable events the effect of which is wholly as unpredictable as are the events themselves.
Victorian notions of Progress, which seem still to be the spontaneous ideology of the 21st century, turned Darwin's theory into a Theory of Progress, arguing for example the absurd theory that the dinosaurs died out because they could not adapt, and there arose the myth of the big but small-braineddinosaurs. Of course they died out because of a perfectly unpredictable contingency: an asteroid hit the earth.
Theories of Prgress and Theories of Regress are both simply silly.
Carrol