Progress

In considering the destiny of the human race, the concept of progress is inimical to memory. The assertion of progress, or of a progression, a going forward, implies a vector to human events that is independent of the implacable vector of time. It is not just that we have endured, or survived, or that we now stand at the end of the chain of events: it is that we have somehow bettered our condition, materially, socially, existentially. There is no question of ultimately verifying this objectively––the past and the present moment are qualitatively different, beyond comparison. Each is lost to us, each is inaccessible to us, but the mode of this inaccessibility is profoundly different. To assert progress is to subordinate the past, and to subordinate the past is to justify the present. It is, of course, a suspicious symptom that we feel the need to justify the present. It is a symptom closely akin to the necessity of justifying that we are alive instead of dead. From the moment that we first demonstrated a need to understand and symbolically represent death to ourselves, from the very first burials or ceremonies of the dead, including the preservation of dead bodies so that they might continue in the belief that they are still alive, we have felt the need to propitiate the dead, to worship the dead, to fear the dead, to suffer their presence in our dreams. Canetti writes eloquently of the metaphysical implications of the condition of surviving, though, of course, survivorship is a temporary condition. Our past, the chain of  overlapping lives and of intertwined terminations, is a history of errors, and now, finally, in this generation, we have learned to correct ourselves. Or, in the past, we were little more than phantoms in a dream. Now we have awakened, and taken possession of ourselves? . Can this way of thinking stand against the challenge of its alternative, expressed in Genesis in the mythology of the fall and duplicated by the great flood and the catastrophe of Babel: a descent or succession of falls that began outside of history, beyond memory, and expressible only in the pre-Babylonian language now lost to us in which we found our thoughts in the clarity of a perfect form?