Progress | What is it and are we making it?

We talk a lot about human progress. From subsistence farming to industrial agriculture. From fuzzy telescopes to space tourism. From the printing press to cable news and social media. From small city-states to megacities. From medical leeches to MRIs. But what is progress?

I looked it up. There are two basic definitions. One is progression in a linear path. Moving forward in time. Human society is progressing forward throughout time regardless of what we do. In that sense, we’re making progress no matter what our technological innovations look like.

The other definition is moving toward a goal or destination. Is this the progress we’re talking about? Are we doing that? What are the goals and destinations? What were the goals and destinations?

Was the goal of Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican farmers to get future generations to the place of massive monocultures that overwork the soil and overuse the water sources? Did they envision a future in which seeds are proprietary technologies that require massive quantities of poisons to get them to market and actually cause more hunger and poorer health outcomes along with an incredible overabundance?

Was it the goal of people like Galileo and Kepler and Copernicus when they looked at the stars that someday individuals with more money than many countries…