What Progress Means | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

John Michael Greer

Feb. 18, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- Last week’s post on The Archdruid Report appears to have hit a nerve.

That didn’t come as any sort of a surprise, admittedly. It’s one thing to point out that going back to the simpler and less energy-intensive technologies of earlier eras could help extract us from the corner into which industrial society has been busily painting itself in recent decades; it’s quite another to point out that doing this can also be great fun, more so than anything that comes out of today’s fashionable technologies, and in a good many cases the results include an objectively better quality of life as well.

That’s not one of the canned speeches that opponents of progress are supposed to make. According to the folk mythology of modern industrial culture, since progress always makes things better, the foes of whatever gets labeled as progress are supposed to put on hair shirts and insist that everyone has to suffer virtuously from a lack of progress, for some reason based on sentimental superstition. The Pygmalion effect being what it is, it’s not hard to find opponents of progress who say what they’re expected to say, and thus fulfill their assigned role in contemporary culture, which is to stand there in their hair shirts bravely protesting until the steamroller of progress rolls right over them.

The grip of that particular bit of folk mythology on the collective imagination of our time is tight enough that when somebody brings up some other reason to oppose “progress” -- we’ll get into the ambiguities behind that familiar label in a moment -- a great many people quite literally can’t absorb what’s actually being said, and respond instead to the canned speeches they expect to hear. Thus I had several people attempt to dispute the comments on last week’s post, castigating my readers with varying degrees of wrath and profanity for thinking that they had to sacrifice the delights of today’s technology and go creeping mournfully back to the unsatisfying lifestyles of an earlier day.

more

http://worldnewstrust.com/what-progress-means-john-michael-greer

[cantbeserious]

1. JMG - Some Of The Best Blogging On The Internet Today

eom

[Tace]

2. cantbeserious: I Agree

He's got a unique, intelligent, long-range, big-picture viewpoint

[AverageJoe90]

3. JMG - One Of The Most Overrated Bloggers On DU. nt

[cantbeserious]

4. Your Opinion Only - Others Would Disagree

eom