Probing the 21st century [1]

Questioning progress

By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

The very notion of progress is an ambiguous one. Before asking ourselves whether the next century will be better than the present one, we should ask ourselves whether this century was better than the one which preceded it. For the twentieth century has witnessed two devastating world wars, the first one claiming 20 million dead, the second 50 million. In the last days of World War II, the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed 150 thousand victims each. Today, the destructive capability of nuclear weapons is hundreds of thousands of times greater than these early prototypes.

Nor were bloody confrontations in the 20th century limited to the two world wars. Wars have been and continue to be a constant feature of our time. So too have horrific massacres like the recent blood baths in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and, on a wider scale, the millions who were killed in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Can we really claim then to have made progress?

True, there are areas in which undeniable progress has been made throughout history, mainly the field of science, that is, of knowledge, as well as the field of applied science, that is, technology. Progress in these areas has encouraged us to believe that progress is a phenomenon that extends to all fields and that humanity is moving forward, in the sense that it is becoming more civilised and humane. This belief comes up against a number of hard facts that bear looking into more closely. For example, the 20th century has not produced a dramatist of the stature of Shakespeare or a composer of the caliber of Beethoven. There are moments in history that stand out for their exceptional human achievement like the age of Pericles in Ancient Greece, the golden age of Islamic civilisation, the Renaissance in Europe, etc. These successive moments did not follow an ever-ascending linear progression. Indeed, certain areas are not governed at all by the notion of progress, such as creativity in art, music, literature, mathematics, etc. -- genius in general. This is a general rule which applies to all ages.

In the case of the 20th century, the situation is further complicated by the ascendancy of ideology. Actually, the 20th century can be called the age of ideology, of closed systems which claimed to use scientific methodology to investigate social and historical reality, even if most of those ideologies originated in previous centuries. A defining moment in the ascendancy of ideology, more significant even than the Bolshevik Revolution, was the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century which laid down ethical values, "liberty, equality, fraternity", as guidelines for the liberation of man. For the French Revolution did not address only the people of France, but humankind as a whole, issuing the first Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 26 August 1789.

But if the 20th century witnessed the rise of ideology, it also witnessed its fall, symbolically represented in the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Previous to that, however, there was the breakdown of Nazism and Fascism in the middle of the century; then there was the collapse of Communism towards its end. With slogans such as Francis Fukuyama's "end of history", western ideologues tried to demonstrate that all ideologies had failed with the exception of Western values, which would now prevail unchallenged.

To the extent that ideology was gradually downgraded throughout the second half of the 20th century, technology was significantly upgraded. The ever growing potency of technology, its propensity to harm the environment and not only transform it to man's benefit, is tending to give precedence to the relationship between man and nature over the relationship between man and man. Class struggle which, in the eyes of Karl Marx, was the driving force of history, is being overshadowed by the need to display human solidarity in face of the threat that man-made pollution can disrupt the eco-system and expose man's natural habitat to critical disequilibria, chaos and disarray.

A key achievement of technology has been to liberate man from the constraints of his size in the universe. Worlds that man cannot probe with his five senses alone, whether infinitely small (the atom, the quark) or infinitely big (the galaxies, black holes) are now open to human enquiry thanks to the remarkable achievements of scientific investigation. But man has also become aware that he is not the centre of the universe and that he does not enjoy any special immunity that will protect him and guarantee that his future will be better than either his present or his past.

Technology holds out the promise of restructuring the environment to man's benefit. But the benefit will always be relative. The real danger is that the technological manipulation of nature can trigger unpredictable side-effects often of a negative nature, whose adverse impact on the future of humankind could outweigh any pre-planned positive effects. If ever those negative side-effects expose the human race to the danger of annihilation, the harm would not be relative but absolute. In other words, the positive effects which, as we have seen, are at best relative, could be offset by the negative effects, especially if the price of relative improvement is the risk of total annihilation. But can humankind give up progress?