Once in a while you hear someone speaking, or even think yourself what was if you lived in a preindustrial world, how good was to live the way our ancestors did, without stress or bureaucracy, in an idyllic rural, middle-age, or even stone-age society. Entire political ideologies, such as Conservatism, Ecologism, Religious Fundamentalism, right-wing Agrarianism, even Communism, not to say about the most retrograde of all – Fascism, are deeply anchored in an idyllic idea of past.
So, no stress, no bureaucracy… But also no medicine, death from pandemics (in the 14th century, an outbreak of bubonic plague killed almost 10% of the world’s population), or from trivial wounds, illnesses you could counteract only with plant remedies. How about malnutrition, with regular famines due to drought, plant parasites and locust invasions. A total dependence on the own agricultural production. Continuous wars and conflicts with no discrimination between combatants and civilians, not even at an ideatic level. Abuses by rulers, aristocrats or the Church, with arbitrary taxes and torture for those who couldn’t pay them.
But most of all, ignorance and fear. A few centuries (or even decades; for some people, right now) ago, your ancestors were living in continuous fear, not only due to real threats, such as famine, diseases, thugs, wild beasts, tax collectors, but also due to superstition, mythological beasts and phenomenons (orcs, trolls, ghosts, vampires are “trendy” as film and game characters now, but they were “real” for various ancient peoples), with a fear of doomsday at every eclipse. People having preindustrial reveries after reading fantasy novels or playing Warcraft don’t think that most preindustrial people weren’t able to write or read, usually didn’t travel beyond the borders of their own village and certainly hadn’t the basic comfort people enjoy nowadays.
But also let’s take a look at the greater picture! A stone age, bronze age, or feudal economy couldn’t support the current world’s population. You can’t feed more than 7 billion people with non-intensive agriculture or just foraging. If all our tech level reverted to stone age overnight, 99.99% of the mankind would starve to death.
Actually, the relation between demography and progress is more complex than that. Demographic growth requests economical and technological advancements, but progress also promotes growth. The more food and medicine available, the less people are going to die prematurely and more offspring will be born. But also consider that demography supports progress. Dense human populations mean more innovative ideas in one place and more intellectual exchange. No wonder all civilizations started in mild climates and not in tundras or dense jungles.
So, we do not progress just beacuse we like to do so, or because it eases our lives, but because we need progress. More people need more resources and a more efficient way to exploit them i.e. a higher technology. Agriculture feeds much more people than hunting and foraging; metallurgy improves agriculture; urban development creates resource (basically food and stuff required by agriculture) trading between distant areas; industry allows intensive agriculture; electronics and cybernetics improve industry, trade and transportation etc.
But it’s not just about food, water, clothing or sheltering, but also your basic civil rights. Prehistoric societies were not communitarist utopias, like Communists thought, but collectivities ruled autocratically by the strongest or better armed, by the wealthiest and by the sliest crook, who convinced the others (and somtimes believed himself) he/she could communicate with spirits or gods, i.e. the shaman or priest. Tyranny was born around 400,000 years ago, with the first Homo sapiens communities. Democracy, freedoms and civil rights were a (very) late innovation. Society needed to become enoughly urbanized, litterate, informed and with decent life standards in order to create democracies. It’s easy to control an ignorant and atomized community, but imagine doing this in the Internet era! If you look at a world map, you will find out that most countries only became democracies during the last 20-30 years.
But don’t think that progress is granted; and not only natural catastrophes can reverse it. Think of a nuclear war. And also think of savage dictators, like Pol Pot or Franco, who turned their own countries to rubble, in order to get and hold power and to realize their retrograde dystopian dreamworlds.
So, that’s why progress is good and that’s why mankind must never stop from its continuous innovation and quest for new technologies, economical and political models. And that’s why we should be circumspect when we are dealing with anti-progress, anti-growth, past-worshipping politicians. Among other sublects, in this weblog, I’ll try to expose such retrograde ideas that are plaguing the modern society.