I am involved in what I will call a debate for simplicity with some people about “progress”, but debating an issue without defining the core word is like wrestling an octopus in the water.
For my own purposes, then, I would like to define progress.
This summary was at the bottom, but I decided to move it to the top. My thought process is still included below.
Summary:
1) Progress in Meaning system formation is: improvements in moral and
emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual
capacities to feel deep positive feelings.
2) Progress in truth formation is: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.
3) Progress in political governance is: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.
4) Progress in economics: increasing ability to provide both necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.
As I see it, the human cultural domain breaks down into four principle tasks, each of which is improved in its own way. Those tasks are meaning formation, truth formation, political organization, and provision of physical necessities.
The most important cultural task is providing a sense of direction and purpose, which is the principle task of what I call the meaning system. It may, of course, be survival. It may be pleasure.
The defining realities of human life are gravity and friction. By this I mean that we must work to survive. Work is effort, which many will define as pain. It requires volitional energy. We cannot exist indefinitely without food and water. Physical survival involves physical work, which I will define as quantitative effort.
Plainly as economic conditions improve, options open up, after which it becomes possible to ask whether or not life is even worth living, given that it necessarily ends, and involves emotional pain for most along the way. Answering this question requires reflection, and what I would term qualitative work.
Logically, this question is about what end a given person should pursue, which requires answering the question as to what that person wants. If they want sensory pleasure, one path opens up. If they want to live a life of sacrifice and dedication to a cause, another path is required.
In the end, though, what is desired is a FEELING. This point is critical. Our minds support our emotions, not the other way around. Even those who claim to hew to logic alone are hewing to the FEELING of being rational. Morality is nothing but reconciling in advance how certain types of behaviors are likely to make us feel, and either avoiding or pursuing those behaviors.
We are all in my view by nature connected. Hurting others hurts us, even if we have the capacity to deny this fact. And the denial that is required necessitates psychological lying, and disconnection with our core.
Given the foregoing, I would define progress in Meaning system formation as: improvements in moral and emotional connections between people, and enhancements in individual capacities to feel deep positive feelings.
By moral connection I mean principally trust, in which people feel able to be open with one another, leaving both figurative and literal doors unlocked. By emotional connection I mean the ability to enter empathetically into one anothers lives in mutually reinforcing positive ways; to support the emotional growth of others, while allowing them to support your own.
By deep positive feelings I mean deep joy and contentment; peace of mind; tranquility; the ability to easily work congruently towards chosen tasks with warmth and vitality.
I will add that in conditions of deep emotional connection it is really not necessary to have ethical “rules”. Ethics is a topic for pre-or postethical people.
Improvement in truth formation is simple: an increased ability to describe persistent patterns that tend to exist between initial inputs and later outcomes.
I want to be clear on this: I do not believe it is most useful to conceptualize science as something that uncovers “natural laws”, or “causal” relationships. I say this because, first, it is impossible to say that billiard ball one NECESSARILY moves billiard ball two (I am of course following Hume here); but secondly because one of the principle flaws of science as it exists today is the tendency to assume that it deals with “objects”, as in the claim that science is “objective”.
Science is NOT objective, not least because as near as we can determine, “objects” per se do not “exist” in any final way. All existence is contingent upon consciousness. Subatomic particles can come into being and disappear out of a primal energy soup posited by Quantum Physics, called variously the Quantum Vacuum and the Zero Point Field.
More importantly, I think the assumption that science is objective leads to Scientism, which I would define as the creed that everything that can be seen exists in a final way, and that anything which cannot be measured does NOT exist in a final way. People who fall prey to this flaw tend to view emotions as objects. They use evolutionary dogma and theories of neurological response and the like to model emotions, rather than simply observe their own emotions, and note persistent connections between their own actions and their later feelings.
I was in an art museum a while back when I first realized that in the modern world emotions are objects that have no innate validity of their own; that they are understood as artifacts of physical processes, and of no intrinsic interest. This is in part why we see some of the savagery we do in art museums; artists intuitively feel violated and marginalized by our current cultural climate, even if they cannot articulate why.
Consider, though, that emotions are fundamental to meaning formation. In this sense, Scientism is antithetical to meaning formation. It is a doctrine that is principally attractive to people who love power and the FEELING that it gives them.
The political system ought logically to support meaning formation. That system is best, then, which best facilitates the free interactions of individuals. Progress is then defined as: continued atrophy of the need for a State to regulate behavior.
Madison famously posited that were we ruled by angels we would need not fear them, and that if WE were angels, we would need no government. Progress is the reduction in the need for government. By this standard, obviously, “Progressivism” is, like everything on the left, a precise inversion of what is actually sought.
In economics, the goal of course is to provide as much as possible with as little effort as possible, making all work chosen and voluntary. Progress, then is: increasing ability to provide necessary and desired objects with less and less unchosen work.
One must work, to be happy. The question is what sort of work.