Progress, Part II

Okay, the key to the solution is one premise, the premise being that a lot of people feel the same way at certain points in their life. By feeling the same way, I mean a feeling of insecurity towards the state of affairs in the not-so-distant future and a complacent sense of security when one looks back in the past, particularly the Dark Ages, where progress was at a standstill, compared to what it is today. The present seems all right, liveable, even enjoyable; but the future? Who knows what that might bring? So many things could go wrong; a nuclear winter might just happen, democracy might be thrown away for despotism, George Bush might not get his head out of his ass and supply some oxygen to his asphyxiated brain. But take a moment to think what the people back then were wondering when thinking of their future. Issues such as the king might be murdered, a gang of bandits might just ravage their town, no rain for the harvest, whatever. All I’m saying is that the future shall always seem uncertain, despite all the progress we make.

And yet we DO progress. And every new stage we reach, we think its just as good or even better to live in. To state an example, if it weren’t for the impending apocalypse, won’t you like living in the present better than living during, say, Indira Gandhi’s rule? Just like that, every age that has past us has been fraught with it’s own insecurities. We might look at a timeline and point out that such-and-such period of time was a golden age in history, but the fact of the matter is that the people living in those times were scarcely in a position to know that. For that matter, the Renaissance was probably one of the most turbulent times to live in.

But at the end of the day, the future will always be revealed to us in a way that will make us accept it: slowly and surely. Take, for example, the computer, probably the most revolutionary invention ever. If people at the time ENIAC was made had realised that it might result one day in almost eliminating unskilled labour from industry, I don’t think they would have embraced it with open arms. As such, I doubt anyone at that time envisioned such things as cell phones or CNCs, thereby resulting in a present world where Silicon, not Oxygen or Hydrogen or Carbon, is the most important element in our life.

Now think about living in a stagnant society, as proposed in Progress, Part - I. Imagine, for a moment, your life BEYOND the peaceful 3 seconds for which you let your imaginations run wild when you DO think of it. You are now living in a world where society is stagnant. There is absolutely nowhere to go and nothing more to be learnt. Your entire civilisation can in fact be condensed into an encyclopaedia which will be absolute forever. You can’t even CONCEIVE of something original, not even a rubber band to better tie up your hair if they're in your face, because its the small things that lead to big ones. For all intents and purposes, you’ll have something in your hand that you KNOW you can better, but you are stopped by the laws of the very society you embraced so eagerly. So next time you feel troubled contemplating the future, just think that it could have been much worse. You could have been living in the past.

(Special thanks to Abha Jeurkar, who bore my rambling nonsense for an hour and helped me come up with this post.)