Progress and love

In 1989, Peter Case released his second solo effort, the memorably titled “The man with the Blue, post-modern, fragmented, neo-traditionalist Guitar.”

I was completing a heady freshman year in college, actively trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to become. I couldn’t realize it at the time, but this album would have a role in that becoming that has stretched across decades.

In particular, the couplet at the end of this section of the ballad “Poor Old Tom” wormed itself into my brain and has reasserted itself regularly:

Now the radios blare nusak and musak

Diseases are cured every day

The worst disease in the world is to be unwanted,

To be used up and cast away

So as we make our way towards our destinations

Fortunes are still made with flesh and blood

Progress and love got nothing in common

Jesus healed a blind man’s eyes with mud

To question progress was sacrilege to these American ears. The Reagan years had just ended, and economic optimism hadn’t yet waned. I’d volunteered for Jack Kemp, who’s championing of economic progress seemed to genuinely come from a place of love and a desire for human flourishing for all.

I was running back and forth between my Austrian School-leaning economics advisor and my Marxist-leaning sociology professor. But in both cases, economic welfare was an unspoken primary goal (welfare for whom is another question).

I’d never stopped to question the point of progress.

The truth is that I mostly still don’t. My life — like pretty much everyone’s, as far as I can tell — is consumed with the mundane. I’m not sure we could handle it otherwise.

But it’s frequently punctuated by the desire for progress. I want to push myself to “grow” (what that means varies). I want my work endeavors to “push the envelope.” I want societal progress on social, scientific and economic fronts (especially right now).

But every so often, this little couplet from Peter Case crawls up from somewhere deep inside, and I have to ask myself what progress and love have in common.

Sometimes I find the question hiding in plain sight and in random places.

I was surprised to find historian Yuval Noah Harari begin the penultimate chapter of his monumental “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind” with an elaboration of this very question:

The last 500 years have witnessed a breathtaking series of revolutions. The earth has been united into a single ecological and historical sphere. The economy has grown exponentially, and humankind today enjoys the kind of wealth that used to be the stuff of fairy tales. Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology.

But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss? Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?

I hear the question in my parenting class, where the Positive Discipline proponents proclaim that our misbehaving children are really saying, “I want belonging and significance, connection and contribution.”

I hear echoes of it when we talk about how email has made us more efficient at many tasks but just resulted in being buried in more tasks. It consumes our days and becomes its own end.

I hear it when I listen to my JSK teammates talk about the interviews in their communities to determine their information needs. Beneath the desire for government accountability, news about your neighbors and neighborhoods and conversations around key issues, I sense a desire for belonging and significance, connection and contribution.

I think about it as I read Buddhist literature (and Harari does an excellent job applying Buddhist thought to his version of the question). I wonder what a scientific/materialist view would be of the drive behind the question? Is it merely an evolutionary drive toward tribal support? What about instincts that cut against tribal and self-preservation?

I wonder how modern evangelical Christianity has done its Ayn Randian mental jujitsu to replace love with the pursuit of cold, technical, “free”-market progress.

I wonder what our politics would look like if we didn’t conflate love and progress and sought human flourishing in all its dimensions.