Redefining Progress

Our blind faith in the uncontested benefits of technology lies at the root of our current assumptions about Progress. We assume that technology always saves time, makes life simple and keeps us happy.

As many have recognised, technologists are quick to list the myriad benefits of their innovation, but rather less forthcoming about the potential dangers. Nuclear power, asbestos, leaded petrol, GM foods, to name just a few. As Aldous Huxley observed, faith in the locomotive had convinced people that they were travelling ‘at full speed towards universal peace and brotherhood of man’, until it turned into ‘a four-motored bomber loaded with white phosphorus and high explosives’. Ivan Illich once calculated that when you add the time taken to work towards buying a car to the time spent repairing it, maintaining it and driving it, then divide that by the distance travelled, the average car owner is conveyed at an average speed of five miles an hour - the same as a brisk walk or a leisurely cycle. This can hardly be seen as an ‘efficient’ or ‘intelligent’ use of natural and human resources.

It is even harder to see it as Progress. Perhaps the real definition of Progress should reflect the real impact that a technology has on natural systems? For example, if renewable energy systems could manufacture the hydrogen required for the transition to hydrogen fuel cell technology, that could be seen as Progress. However, if we are still using fossil fuels to make the hydrogen, it can hardly be seen as such. We have merely shifted the problem from one area to another.

Similarly, rather than terminator seeds designed to only germinate with a chemical cocktail from the corporation that designed it, the cutting edge science of biomimicry seeks to grow food without ever ploughing the land and disturbing the topsoil. How? By replicating the perennial polycultures of the prairies. Maybe, like the forest gardens of Kerala, the real definition of Progress allows such diversity to thrive?