…Computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly’s hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.
-Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 117
This quote brings to mind something C.S. Lewis wrote:
How can an unchanging system [i.e. Christianity] survive the continual increase of knowledge? Now, in certain cases we know very well how it can. A mature scholar reading a great passage in Plato, and taking in at one glance the metaphysics, the literary beauty, and the place of both in the history of Europe, is in a very different position from a boy learning the Greek alphabet. Yet through that unchanging system of the alphabet all this vast mental and emotional activity is operating. It has not been broken by the new knowledge. It is not outworn. If it changed, all would be chaos. A great Christian statesman, considering the morality of a measure which will affect millions of lives, and which involves economic, geographical and political considerations of the utmost complexity, is in a different position from a boy first learning that one must not cheat or tell lies, or hurt innocent people. But only in so far as that first knowledge of the great moral platitudes survives unimpaired in the statesman will his deliberation be moral at all. If that goes, there there has been no progress, but only mere change. For change is not progress unless the core remains unchanged. A small oak grows into a big oak: if it became a beech, that would not be growth, but mere change… (from Dogma and the Universe in God in the Dock, Part 1; emphasis mine).
Our constant change leads us to think that we are constantly progressing. But are we? Not only does progress mean that we have to start somewhere; it also means that we are heading somewhere. If you use the analogy of a trip, the car has to start somewhere, stay on the road, and be heading the right direction toward a destination in order to make actual progress (unless you are only running away from something or someone). Along the way you may add a few things for the ride like gas, food, drinks, a cd, or what have you. You might even stop and get new tires, or even a new car. All of that equals change. But none of it equals progress unless you stick to the road and keep heading in the direction of the destination. Change, even good change, even spectacular change, does not necessarily mean that progress is being made.
In pondering the dynamics of change vs progress, one of my first areas of consideration was fashion. And as I considered the less-than-progressive change that occurs in seasonal fashion, I realized that although we may see the new styles in stores and think “they just always have to switch things around arbitrarily,” the change is not infact arbitrary. There is real progress in fashion, whether we realize it or not.
The question lies not in whether we are progressing toward something, but in what way we are progressing. The person who says fashion change is innocuous has failed to identify at what level society is being moved and shaped. On one level, no progress is happening, only change. Different colors. Different cuts of cloth. Different materials. But on a deeper level, we are progressing toward something. We are shaping and expressing our identity.
It is like a man who looks at a tree stump and says “nothing is happening here.” There is infact alot happening. Decaying agents such as mycelium are breaking down the tree from the inside out. The tree is progressing into pulp, which will become dirt. The man simply cannot see to that level- not yet, atleast.
I suppose the question of progress and change is one where we must locate at what level it is occurring, in addition to whether it is occurring at all. There are times when our focal awareness in a particular subject may be blinding us from what is occurring elsewhere in that very subject. And a superficial sight will never see to the level of progress, only to that of change.
A person may look at all the changes to something like cell phones over the last ten years and see human progress. He locates progress at the external level. He is a modern Pharisee, seeing only the changes of his hand and never those of his heart. Postman says technological change does not equal human progress, and Lewis clarifies, saying it is often only “change.”This is true, because the location of true change is not located at the hand level, but the heart level.
I think that technology always means progress, just not always where we mean for it to. Yet how we “progress” is largely contingent upon our own heart-motives in making “changes”.
Clarification:
Lewis says change is only progress if the core remains unchanged. On the moral level, our hearts are never “changed,” (like a small oak becoming a beech), but are only “progressed” (as in the small oak becoming a large oak.) Usually. Therefore, if the heart is always involved in our use of “things” then there is always “progress” at the heart-level- not change.
There is a call to the Gospel in this realization. If we see that in our hearts there is only the ability to progress, and not to change, and we see wickedness in our hearts, then we must assume we are doomed toward that kind of progress. Yet Christ offers a New Birth, with a new heart. Christ offers real, meaningful change. Surface “changes” are just that- surface-level. Real change occurs first at the heart, through Christ. After that, there can be real, positive progress, issuing from the Unchanging One. The core must be unchanged, then there can be progress.
No one can progress naturally in the spiritual sense (that’s what you’ve put your finger on). We need a new nature, and only then can we even begin to progress (sanctification). Modern non-christian culture, however, (and this is Lewis’ point) thinks that we have progressed (following the Neo-Darwin idea of evolving for the better) beyond the need for religion and other aspects of old Western culture. We are saying that can’t happen. Just because you have better tools does not mean that humans are actually progressing to a greater humanity than they experienced before those tools existed. That’s my only point here.