Progress isn’t always a good thing for people living through periods of rapid change. Nonetheless, history is a record of change that happens in spite of attempts to stop it. Furthermore, resisting technological progress – although possible – leads inevitably to cultural stagnation and disadvantage relative to other cultures (take for example the Amish), eventually resulting in the extinction of the resistant culture.
Normally, technological development is discussed in terms of whether it is a good or a bad thing. This is a mistake. Progress is not a moral choice; it is an inevitability. Once nuclear fission was discovered, the creation of an atomic bomb became an unavoidable outcome. This does not absolve the creators of nuclear weapons from their responsibility. The point is that refusing to develop such weapons does not prevent others from developing them.
The relevant quality of technological progress is that it increases our powers over time, as individuals and as societies. Power does seem to have a morally corrosive effect, as we have discussed elsewhere. This presents us with a dilemma: if technological progress causes an increase in personal and societal power, and power is morally corrosive, is it not true that the only moral choice is to reject the progress?
As usual, the question is misleading in its simplicity. It acknowledges that human technological capacity evolves, but ignores the possibility of human moral evolution. It is true that an increase in power (at the personal or the societal level) is difficult to navigate without becoming ensnared in morally questionable – or outright evil – situations. There are levels of power which no single human being can sustain responsibly; billionaires cause enormous collateral damage even when acting with the best of intentions, simply because their goals are more limited than the effects of their decisions, and fail to take the cascading global effects into account. But on a smaller scale, the normal human experience includes growth in power – for example, the transition from childhood to adulthood. This is always a critical transition, frequently also traumatic and, only too often, disastrous. But given reasonably favorable conditions of community support and a sufficiency of resources, the outcome is predictably stable (with equally predictable bouts of turbulence). Whether adolescents learn to wield their growing power in response to conformity with social norms, or from a genuine understanding of the necessary balance between power and responsibility, most of us travel through life without wreaking large-scale mayhem.
One problem is that most questions of properly using power are addressed by traditions from a time when the average person could never expect to gain a great deal of it. Historically, the capacity of a normal individual to effect change has been limited to the scale of a small and local community. Traditional culture (largely represented by religious orthodoxy) seldom offers more than conformity to simple and rigid codes of conduct, ill-suited to the moral demands of an increasingly complex real world.
Rejecting technological progress is a losing proposition: to maintain a static level of power while one’s individual or societal peers pursue growth is to resign oneself to triviality and obsolescence. The only reasonable and sustainable course is to assimilate new powers as they emerge, and simultaneously to learn how to use them so as to provide long-term sustainability, without sacrificing the agility needed to deal with future change.
This solution can only be achieved through public education – not in its present American manifestation of industrialized processing of unique young individuals into standardized, versatile and interchangeable workforce units, but in a form designed intentionally to empower the organic development of individuals with a living, growing moral sense. This system anticipates individual as well as societal growth in power and inoculates against its abuse by doing away with the idea of the “Great Man” as the driver of progress. Exceptional individuals, without exception, depend on the community for any kind of success – even the development of the self. Community participation in processes at the societal level must be the basis for a society able to grow in power while evolving the capacity for harnessing that power sustainably.