Progress – What Progress?

When I was younger I thought that human beings were going to continue to develop as a species. I thought it was a matter of time before progress, both scientific and social, would solve the main issues that worried us. For example, when I was in my teens we had a huge hole in the ozone layer caused by aerosol use. The world seemed to get together at that point across the divides to ban aerosols and start to reduce the damage being done. We were, as Queen put it in Hammer to Fall, the generation who ‘grew up tall and proud, neath the shadow of the mushroom cloud’. World leaders of completely different views negotiated to vastly reduce the dangers of nuclear war.

In the last decade or so it has become clear that we are regressing as a species. Science has become a political football where your beliefs are inextricably linked to whether you are left or right wing. Those who disagree with each other no longer talk, they shout and insult. Politicians focus on what they can get not on what they can do. Religious people of all stripes have increasingly retreated to their theological bunkers and typically refuse to engage with anyone who disagrees with them. Society has regressed on matters of equality and tolerance.

When we had children, I thought they were going to see a world that was moving forward, albeit with occasional bumps in the road. Instead they have a world that is going backwards by the day and they are facing a future of increasing and accelerating climate damage. I made the mistake of assuming that people were basically decent and wanted the best for each other. How wrong I was!