Progress should be for greater good

“Progress” is a word liberals grabbed to avoid the “liberal” label that those on the right have soiled so effectively. Feel free to call me either; better that than to embrace the stagnation of conservative thinking.

The reality is, we all want progress. OK, there are exceptions - like the Proud Boys, who prefer supremacy to equality and anything over liberalism - but for the rest of us, we want our society moving forward. The divisions come when it’s time to talk about what that really means.

By definition, “progress” is simply “forward motion” - but surely we can agree that we should be working for progress that’s good for the human condition.

Progress needs to serve the greater good.

It is, however, a double-edge sword, with an upside and a downside. Progress cuts both ways.

Consider, if you will, the “progress” that came with the invention of social media. At first, Facebook (one of the earliest social media platforms and now the biggest) connected us with each other. It took the miles between us away; suddenly the world became a lot smaller. I call that the good kind of progress.

But it wasn’t long before we began to let our religious and political viewpoints divide us, and Facebook began to feed our tribal instincts with algorithms that drew us into echo chambers of incomplete thinking - and the gullible among us bought in. Now, those we disagree with are not just wrong, they’re demonized, because, well, they simply don’t think and act like we do.

That’s not the kind of progress I want.

The internet itself is another mixed bag of progress. Using personal data collection, click bait temptations, pop-up ads and other intrusions, the internet has become an unabashed marketplace for buying and selling goods and services, misinformation and nonsense.

Sure, you can still search for and find credible and truthful sources of information, but even those sources are ladened with cookies and other hidden features that you can’t really see and shouldn’t trust.

There’s hardly a website that exists anymore without links that attempt to manipulate and captivate those who happen to drop by.

The World Wide Web was revolutionary progress when it began. Now it’s more like an obstacle course. You must navigate your way through shallow waters to get to any sort of depth at all. What has become our primary source of information now plays mind games with us. Perhaps it was inevitable, but it certainly isn’t my idea of progress in the right direction.

“You can’t fight progress,” is an age-old refrain I’ve heard all my life, and to an extent it’s true. We’re never going back to the horse-and-buggy days, just as someday we’ll decry the years of the combustible engine as we let our electric cars drive us around.

But we can’t let our own inventions get the best of us; restraints must be placed on them or else we’ll lose control. If you doubt that, consider a world run by artificial intelligence. We could let that happen by our own complacency, but it isn’t inevitable.

Progress, after all, should be what we make of it, not what it makes of us.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]