The Case For (and Against) Progress

What is progress and have we experienced it in a meaningful manner? Have we made life better for ourselves, or improved the planet? Or have we bankrupted our environment and cursed our progeny to a life in the Stone-Age?

The short answer is: Yes.

There is ample evidence for both arguments. Human welfare has most definitely improved, epecially in the last 100 or so years. But with improvements in health, quality of life, and longevity, have come new problems — lifestyle diseases, over-population, environmental degredation and rampant inequality. For a doctor on Madison Avenue, for example, the world has never been a better place. For a Lybian fleeing war in a rubber boat in the sweltering Mediterranean… well, not so much.

There are many starting points for a discussion such as this, and I’ll consider more of them in later essays. But a good place to consider both sides of this argument is in historians’ assessments of imperialism. In the nineteenth century European powers expanded their sphere of influence dramatically. What ensued once Europe went global were bloodbaths and progressive revolutions in equal measure — the making of the modern world in all its guts and glory.

Britain, for example, having originally made inroads into India in the eighteenth century via the East India Company, came to control…