What is progress? How is it measured? Sometimes the world presents definite quantitative measurements we can use to measure progress. For example, a factory might measure its progress by the number of widgets produced in an hour, or the average profit per widget produced. An increase of these measurements demarcates progress, but only of a narrow kind. Does the widget as such improve human well-being? Human well-being is either impossible or very difficult to measure quantitatively, so whether the widget increases human well-being depends mostly on subjective factors.
Is the widget guns and bullets? An increase in the number of bodies destroyed by systematic means is progress of a narrow kind, but it might represent a regress along other dimensions. A systematic decrease in human well-being might be the result of narrowly defined kinds of progress: certainly World War I represents the culmination of industrial progress, a massive machine of slaughter piling up human bodies by the millions in the span of only several years, an accomplishment only equaled by nature with disease. On the other hand, out of this slaughter was born other kinds of progress such as antibiotics, and not only antibiotics but antibiotic production on an industrial scale. Was World War I necessary to this other kind of progress? As the Daoists say, fortune hides misfortune, and misfortune bears fortune. All the while, an increase in the scope of human production along narrow lines, that of industrial scale material production, progressed. It would seem progress goes back and forth, equally increasing the scope of life and death. Maybe there is something lifegiving to death cults, and deathly about fertility. After all, there is no death without life, no life without death.
If we attempt to ascertain progress in its historical form, we arrive at a form representing dialectic. Life and death, profit and loss, liberation and enslavement, each seems to beget the other necessarily. All the while, each partakes of its own kind of narrow progress, the collective form representing that capital-P motion of history we call Progress. Can Progress go beyond the dualistic dialectic, a force that giveth with one hand and taketh with another? It seems that, if we are being honest, both creation and destruction is inherent to Progress. The same force that creates and sustains the universe might also create its own apocalypse; a vast store of fortune and riches begging to be robbed by nihil.
The collective of humanity composes a historical motion we can call Progress, provided we accept its light and dark sides. Progress, if we consider a force guaranteed by divine providence, is equally illuminated by health and pestilence, peace and war, pleasure and pain. We do not need to consider ourselves “progressivists” of any sort, the force of Progress securing its own motion inevitably in human historical motion for the same reason a rock falls down a hill – it is only its nature to do so.
Principia Memetica 