#10 Progress: Meditations for a New Year

Folks will tell you that “there are two kinds of people in the world.” But it’s unlikely they’ll agree on what these types are.

Angry versus Calm?

Generous versus Selfish?

Venus versus Mars?

Deplorable versus Respectable?

I usually define my two types as: Those Who Received Unconditional Love From Their Parents versus Those Who Did Not.

All of these dichotomies include a certain amount of truth and, like most sweeping statements, a certain amount that can be debunked.

But for the purpose of meditating on the subject of Progress, I would suggest that there are two other kinds of people in the world — the Glass Half Full crowd and the Glass Half Empty crowd. In most things, and especially when it comes to Progress, I count myself in the Half Full camp.

When I was a kid, most of the families on my block had black and white TVs. We didn’t question our reality and just figured that TV, unlike the movies, was black and white. But then one family got a color TV, the first on our block. So on Friday nights we crowded into their small living room to watch The Flintstones because we’d all heard that Dino, the family dinosaur, was purple. We had to see this for ourselves.

In my 60 years on the planet, we’ve come a long way from marveling at the site of Dino, or finally getting to see the green of the Emerald City (as well as the face of the Wicked Witch) when the Wizard of Oz was broadcast each year.

Now we can pretty much walk around town with our color TVs nestled in the pockets of our jeans or in the folds of our purses, ready to show us movies, sitcoms, or music videos at the touch of a screen.

Remember mimeograph machines and carbon paper? Heck, remember typewriters? The “picture phones” we marveled at when I attended the 1964–65 World’s Fair that was a ten minute ride from my home in Queens were actually the primitive prototypes of the iPhone’s Face Time app and Skype. Now my son’s Bangkok-based in-laws can watch their grandchildren grow up before their eyes even from thousands of miles away.

From time to time I’ll see something on the internet that compares an artist’s rendering of the future with the reality of today (think Jules Verne). A lot of this occurred at the turn of the Millenium. Sometimes these predictions amaze us with their startling accuracy (“you’ll be able to one day read a newspaper on your home computer!”) while others are either humorous or just maybe premature, hard to say which. We’re not yet flying to work on a network of elevated roads like George Jetson, but the future of commuting by auto is about to be turned upside down over the next decade with the introduction of driverless cars.

This is a subject where the two types of people in the world retreat to their respective corners. Are driverless cars the answer to global warming? Traffic congestion? Income inequality? Or do they instead auger in the first wave of a robotic takeover that leaves humans powerless against our electronic overlords? And are they really safe? Didn’t someone die in one? (You mean like they do every 16 minutes in human driven cars?)

So now the time has come to ask an important question: Does the kind of technological advancement I’ve been talking about equal Progress?

I guess if you revere the era of Dashiell Hammett then you will not let anyone pry your manual typewriter from your cold, dead hands. And if you like having ink stains on your fingers then carbon paper and mimeos are the way to go.

While my natural glass half-full optimism does view technological advances as progress, I’m also realistic that every new, shiny object comes with a certain amount of risk. Everyone loved Windows XP but no one could abide Vista, its successor. The jury is still out on Apple’s iWatch. As new technologies are introduced into the marketplace, there’s always going to be an Edsel, and we hope that those who are working on the Next Big Thing will learn from these failures.

Even in my own field of philanthropy we talk about “continuous improvement” and “iterating,” buzzwords that essentially mean “if at first you don’t succeed….”

My view is that reaching back or standing still are not solutions. If progress causes problems, then more progress will be needed to solve them.

Of course there is still pleasure in receiving an actual written letter in the mail or a greeting card. There is also pleasure in being able to use email or messaging apps to respond quickly, especially if you’re trying to clear up a misunderstanding.

While many of my friends still prefer the weight of a paperback book in their hands instead of an e-book, I am grateful that I can own over 200 novels on my Kindle because I live in a small one-bedroom apartment already crowded with paperbacks, and I’m not ready to part with any of my books, real or virtual.

I don’t know for sure if one day my driverless car will pull up in front of my building and then drive me to work. It will then travel on its own out of the city or spend the day driving others in my owner pool until I’m ready to summon it for my return trip. It will not need to park on the street or in a garage. In fact, there will no longer need to be so many parking garages in Manhattan. They’ll all be converted to moderately priced housing. And because so many of us use the same vehicle, the emissions problem will be less serious.

Sound good or sound too good to be true? I guess it depends on how you look at that glass of water in front of you.

These meditations are inspired by the Prepent series by Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of the Lab Shul which consists of 40 daily letters to himself as a lead up to the Jewish New Year.

Here’s the full list:

Mindfulness & the Year Ahead * Family * Children * Grandchildren*Spouse* Love * Writing * Tikkum Olam * Social Justice * Community * Faith * Judaism * Curating * Ideology * Progress * Friends * Movies * Reading *Division * Politics * Class * Israel * Aging * Body * Food * Money * Charity & Philanthropy * Gender * Shoah * Forgiveness * Worship * Education * Introversion * Sexuality * Accountability * Sin