ARE WE PROGRESSING BACKWARDS?

11th April 2011, 2:31 pm

“A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind”

It is generally assumed that giant leaps in technology lead to the improvement of society. With technology we can do things earlier generations couldn’t imagine. We can travel vast distances in a short time, do incredibly complex calculations, and spread ideas around the world within seconds. Surely these advances make us more able than our ancestors. But is this really the case? For all our forward progress, do we leave something equally valuable behind? Ok. We are making giant leaps but what we often fail to realize is that are we really moving forward?

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianised, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle.

Today man has fallen in the evil clutches of his own creation, thus disabled. Disabled, he can’t move forward. Under the illusion that he is moving forwards, he does not realize that he is actually going backwards. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, some vigour of wild virtue.
Do these same conclusions apply to modern technology? I think they do.

Consider an advance in communication, the cellular phone. We’re no longer forced to make phone calls from a set place, allowing spontaneous communication. As circumstances change, we can make calls from anywhere at any time to adjust our plans. The benefit is clear, but closer examination reveals drawbacks. Now that we have cell phones, we don’t plan ahead anymore. Why bother when you can make a call later? So we wait until the last minute, thinking organization doesn’t matter. The result is confusion. If there is a missed call, loss of service, or malfunction of equipment, we’re left without a plan. Even if everything works perfectly, we still engage in ‘phone tag’ that wastes more time than it would have taken to create a decent plan to begin with. Even if we wanted to go back to the pre-cellular way of doing things, I doubt anyone remembers how. The same could be said of the internet. We can hear a million voices, but have no way of knowing which ones are worth listening to. Millions of new articles are published every day, so we neglect the literary masterpieces passed down to us.

I’m not saying that technology is bad or that society is declining. But we’d be intelligent to abandon our modern vanity. We’re aren’t any smarter than our ancestors. We’re actually dumber in many ways. It’s time to stop thinking of technology as a cure-all and recognize it as a double-edged sword.

Technology isn’t just all-good things. Every loss have its own share of gain. Someone might get disease and as a return, he will know what he must do to prevent it from happening again and to be more disciplined in taking care of his own health. No matter how much our invention we make, we will lose something as a return and global warming is clear example of what humans greed have caused to our nature. The pollution emitted by our so called “progress” is engulfing the pure air and making it contaminated. The ozone layer is depleting, greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere making the earth warmer. Earth’s condition is much, much worse than it was during the time of our forefathers Many of us believe our way of life is easier than it was years ago. In many cases it is, however we fail to see the consequences brought forth by our need to make life easier. Too much freedom has brought about sedentary lifestyles where machines do the thinking and the work for us.

In the near future it should be no surprise if people pay money to breathe clean air and those were short a dime remained breathless. We live in a so called "free" country, but paying to grab a quick breath of air is not my idea of freedom.

The easier life gets, the more destruction we give to the Earth. Our lakes and forests are dying. Acid rain has made these ecosystems unable to support life. Rainforests are being cut down for cattle ranching and farmland. As we cut the forest down we could be losing valuable resources that have not yet been found. The fingerprint of human influence has been detected in many different aspects of observed climate change. We've seen it in temperature, and increases in atmospheric humidity, we've seen it in salinity changes. We've seen it in reductions in Arctic sea ice and changing rainfall patterns.
The HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY shows greater conceptual advancements the further back you look. One of the great advancements of the 20th century is it’s “transportation technology”. I find this hard to believe, the creation of the these forms of transportation are 100’s and 1000’s of years old. The wheel was invented in 4000bc, the rockets in 300CE and the steam engine in 1689. In this regard, our advancement is not really advancement, but refinement. We create nothing, we continue to modify what already exists, through analysis and division.

In our recent modern history all inventions have been to make life more convenient for us. From transport to entertainment to cooking utensils, more and more things are becoming mechanised or computerised. However, this has had an impact on our health. We are not exercising, we are eating too many convenient foods packaged in plastic and stuffing them in a microwave consequently our health is diminishing. As a nation, we are becoming severely overweight. By regressing to more traditional ways of cooking, by going back to traditional forms of entertainment, we will actually see a large progression with regards to our health.


Things go in cycles. We are moving up and out like a particle in a tornado. For example, we seem to be at exactly the same point we were at in the late 1800′s and during the renaissance period, exploring spirituality, developing art, and improving communication. The earth will go back to where it started. They say in the beginning there was nothing but water on earth. The way the ice caps are melting, time is not far when we have nothing but water on earth.
We are thus moving backwards towards the inception of earth, although we feel we are progressing forwards.