Not only do I have over 200 blogs now, but this is the 40th anniversary of me leaving school and going to Africa. So it is an appropriate time for another re-evaluation of human progress. I might also mention that I went to Michael Moore's new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story" last night, and I liked it as much as "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Canadian Bacon". And I had to fight may way through all the zombies in the lobby of the multiplex to get to it, but thankfully all the kids were going to "Zombieland" instead. Or maybe they should have been going to "Capitalism", but read this blog and then judge for yourself.Just before I left for Africa I went on a 5 week orientation program in London Ontario, the first place I ever went where the weather was so hot you could not use a blanket while sleeping at night. We never had air conditioners in my home town of Baie Comeau, but maybe they do now, and maybe with global warming, they might even need them.
While in London that summer, I went to a movie called "2001: A Space Odyssey" with some other CUSO volunteers. The movie was oddly fitting, because the entire idea of CUSO was the development of third world countries, which I think at the time the politically correct term was "Developing" countries. Development and progress meant about the same thing. Development meaning more technology and science, more industry, more health care and education. In layman's terms, everybody gets a house with a TV and a car and enough packaged food to eat, then a clean hospital when you have your first heart attack from eating the packaged food.
From watching the movie "2001", it was obvious that in the future we would be flying to the moon regularly, as part of global development. And we expected that Africa would one day (maybe by 2001) also develop to a point where they had universal education, industries with jobs, roads everywhere, hospitals, schools, telephones, cars, and TV's. In that hope, I think we were disappointed. Africa today is in most ways worse off than in 1969. Not only is the wildlife endangered, but people are starving, wars are raging along with potential for holocausts such as Rwanda, and diseases such as the AIDS epidemic are killing millions. So that didn't actually turn out so well.
What about here at home? It seems that we have not really done too badly, but we are obviously nowhere near where we thought we would be by 2001. So was it all silly dream?
To help explain our progressive thinking, I will go back to my own childhood and put development in perspective. When I was born, Baie Comeau did not have a road to the outside world, not that I cared, as my pedal powered car could not reach the outskirts of town anyway. But everybody (not just the super-rich) had a hope for the future, mainly that the road from Quebec City would one day reach our little community, and we could be part of North America, and just drive wherever we wanted, especially Florida. We knew the road was coming. Every year, the road construction got closer. And every year, people in Baie Comeau bought newer and better cars in anticipation. We knew the cars were better because each year the tail fins were higher. In fact the only doubt that the road would ever be completed was because some people thought the cars would start flying first, and as soon as that happened we wouldn't even need roads. Those people were wrong, obviously. Today (is it 2009 already?) cars are still firmly planted on their rubber, the closest they come to flying is the SUV's flipping over. Just to show how we have given up on the hope for controlled automotive flight, there are no tail fins any more. The road reached Baie Comeau when I was in my early teens, just when I started taking an interest in gasoline powered cars. Now the road extends another 598 kilometers past Baie Comeau. Although it is still a dead end, one day it may be extended to Newfoundland and become a new Trans-Canada Highway.
What about progress in the rest of the world? Well, obviously in America, we are losing almost all our manufacturing jobs. While this helps China, in the long run it means a profoundly different Canada and United States. What about health care and education? Canada has a system of Health Care, the USA is still working on it.
What about education? If 25% of high school students in Oklahoma can't answer George Washington was the first president of the USA, I guess I don't need to say much more. But I will, of course since it's one of my favourite topics. When I was younger I thought superstition and black magic would gradually give way to reason and science, but just look at the Evangelical Christian movement in the USA and now spreading to other parts of the world. They don't believe in evolution, they teach that the end of the world is coming, and they believe in faith healing, they believe in praying for prosperity. It sounds like the Cargo Cult in Polynesia, but they are not some isolated cult that can be easily joked about: they have their own universities, and their own political party ran the USA for eight years, 2000 to 2008, causing untold harm to science and human rights. I use the term "Christian" in a loose sense, as they worship the pro-war Jesus, contrary to the historical perceptions of Christianity.
What about civil right and racism? I think we can put that down as a close win, with Barack Obama as the first black president of the USA, and South Africa's Apartheid dismantled. Not to mention the fall of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China into an economic power (although we can't tell if it's communist or capitalist, but we know for sure it's not democratic). But on the down side, Israel has adopted racist policies, and the USA has become the first democratic country to ever engage in an illegal war. So that's disappointing.
Scientific progress is the one real bright spot in all of this. We never even guessed that our kind of computers or the Internet could exist back in 1955. And scientific knowledge is expanding exponentially. This week alone we have had announcements of the oldest ever human fossil (Ardi) and the first discovery of a planet like Earth.
We always knew in our hearts that science would advance with time. It has always taken the lead in progress and development. Where we went wrong was thinking scientific knowledge always leads to progress in other ways. There are far greater forces shaping our future than scientific knowledge, and it's time we found out what they are before we all end up back in the dark ages burning witches and running around with pitchforks chasing zombies.
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