Time and Progress: A Reflection

Is one of the problems we have in our society is that we confuse the flow of time with progress? 

While the most obvious source for this question is the decision to overturn Roe v Wade in America - because it's 2022 not 1822 - its something that we can apply as easily to our own lives. Why does a 60 year old man still find fart gags funny, for example? Or why does a woman in her 40s insist on collecting comics memorabilia? Both these examples suggest people of what at one point might be called a "childish" temperament. Another, drawing from my own life, is a feeling that I "should" have worked out a career and be enmeshed in it rather than flailing around and wondering what I'm actually good at and what will actually interest me for longer than five minutes. It begs the question of, why? One does not equal the other.

First, let's establish that both time and progress are illusory. Yes, we age, yes there are days and nights, but time is largely humans have constructed for our own convenience (and then like everything else used to enslave ourselves). It isn't real in the sense we use it, anymore than any other human created concept is. We use it because its a part of our social package, and is one of the Tyrants we have created.

Progress is a yardstick to measure how "advanced" we are on a scale of savage to civilised and is scarcely any use for anything but measuring how big our tellys are or teaching gullible children how to be good little patriots. We assume the two go together - that as time goes on so we will progress, but I've seen tortoises who are rather older than I am who would question that basic idea.

Progress is a mendacious, and rather selective idea, one that focuses on how great it is that Isaac Newton discovered gravity without muddying the waters with his rather longer experiments with alchemy. It also charts something that's rather meaningless because it equates the sophistication of our material goods with the development of us as a sophisticated people. I feel this rather ignores the fact that human beings haven't really changed for millions of years. At heart we're still those people who founded Rome, or trekked across what must have seemed like eternal tundra during the last major ice age. We haven't changed at the most basic level of our hardware, while our software has been poked and edited a million times in the name of "progress". The problem, it appears, is that one of the older iterations of software has gone rogue and turned into a virus.

Progress is also a somewhat racist concept, I feel. We're all clutching our pearls over the Supreme Court decision, and will surely continue to do so as contraception and same sex marriage settle into the Court's crosshairs, but not a word is spoken about Uganda and Botswana's attitude towards LGBT rights. Perhaps as African nations they haven't "progressed" enough for us to be offended? This also relies, of course, on the fact that from Europe America looks like a myth - a form of Camelot - to many. It's the shining beacon on the hill, the land of the free and the home of the brave, everything that the Hollywood propaganda machine has told us it is. That narrative brushes so much under the star spangled rug, that the whole thing is something of a cat's cradle - no cat no cradle. While America is undoubtedly a military and financial leader, I'm hesitant to say that the reality of the country is the same as the Hollywood opium dream that's been exported relentlessly around the globe. It would be fairer to say, I suspect, that it's a mixed bag and to start tending to our own fences.

Of course, we rely on both ideas to give us the illusion of change and development. "Every day in every way I am getting better and better", and all that stuff. It's just that they are illusions. Men and women, for example, remain to be a mixed bag, and to treat each other in much the same way as they always did. Of course, laws have changed, but I don't suppose that changed very much.