 Thank you all so much for coming here and to Peace Action Maine for so graciously inviting me So as you probably know, or perhaps you don't the topic I'll be speaking on progress the idea of progress and specifically What is the measure of progress in everyday language and understanding? Progress is taken to be a self-evident good Desirable by all humanity The very idea of progress its practice its implementation its power has been justified Indeed made a necessity by the conviction that its spread will herald a new era of peace and prosperity in the world Despite the reservations that have been articulated more recently and for all its imperfections and failures It's full realization is the goal to which we ought to aspire If one is to assume then indeed self-evidently that this is true What is it that progress has brought in its wake that is indeed self-evidently good? As many point out of course correctly humankind is today at the historical peak of its possibilities in the sense both of shaping the world and directing its trajectory Economic resources are greater than ever before Material extreme poverty has been substantially reduced in much of the world There have been massive advances in scientific technical knowledge most notably in medicine and its curative possibilities and effects Human rights law universally applicable has for decades granted formal equality between and among individuals of all races genders and among those with other differentiating ascriptive characteristics and Finally though of course not exhaustively relatively seamless communication and engagement with people's all over the world has now been made possible on a scale previously unimaginable So yes progress has been all that of course Yet it has been much else and has brought about much else This lecture will address that remainder the much else which remains largely unspoken the world and most recently and in the present moment what is referred to as the third world or The global south which exists of course also here in the north has been subject to this Imperative the imperative to progress the necessity of progress as a means to Emancipation if not Liberation the term developing countries is in fact an indication of precisely that These countries are developing along a continuum whose ultimate objective is to become developed So what has this involved? What have been its harms hidden and revealed? What has progress brought about for millions even billions of people across our shared earthly terrain as Many will recognize in much of the world the march of progress has also entailed an extraordinary violence across several registers cultural temporal psychic and material This propulsion forward or is it backward has in the most generous interpretation unintentionally led to the eradication of Hundreds of languages societies ways of life cultural practices Simultaneously or indeed as a consequence the peoples of the world now inhabit life forms more uniform almost Indistinguishable on a scale Unprecedented in its global reach though here one hesitates to use the word Unprecedented so banal has it become in its sheer repetition We would do well to recall that progress and its gift Modernity has swept everyone in its wake and the ravages of modernity Precisely in its completeness is made the most apparent in the places of the world where we perceive mostly its absence One thinks for instance of the assumption that parts of the third world remain pre-modern or primitive It is here after all that the majority of the excluded billions live as Though somehow they have not caught up with the time in which they find themselves as though in fact it is possible to live in this time and Simultaneously outside it in a parallel or perhaps even backward temporal universe an Assumption that fails entirely to consider that not a place on earth has been left untouched by contemporary systemic forms of power and coercion intervention and subordination violence and exclusion To take only the most obvious example No, people have been spared the experience or minimally the effects of colonialism or that most modern of forces capitalism So whatever failures or insufficiencies indeed perversions of modernity We witness have perhaps to do with the place to which such areas have been relegated in the contemporary hierarchy of power not in fact their position outside of it and Yet the triumph of progress its conquests and successes are what we are told what is insisted upon Its damages are less evident its casualties even less so Among the least violent instances One thinks of the linguistic hierarchies produced in much of the formerly colonized world Which have resulted in nothing less than class apartheid From Algeria to Pakistan Fluency in the colonial language French and English respectively is a mark of distinction Enabling membership in the elite classes comprising of course only a tiny Minority far above the millions or even billions who speak the native language or even worse The languages referred to with only barely veiled condescension as a dialect or vernacular No longer even dignified with the appellation language or In another instance the designation as native or traditional the garments worn in these societies for centuries as Though to have progressed sufficiently to have become fully modern people must adopt and routinely wear so-called Western attire only Resorting to traditional wear on special occasions the occasions themselves Often the sign of a culture soon to become obsolete the last vestiges of which relegated to those who are doomed to never so to speak catch up To illustrate using one more approximate example in His insightful book radical hope ethics in the face of cultural devastation Jonathan Lear tells the story of the crow nation In giving an account of what occurred when his tribe was confined to a reservation And the buffalo had been led away The chief of the nation says quote The heart of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again He concludes by saying somewhat enigmatically quote after this Nothing happened What does such a phrase mean after this nothing happened How could anything not happen? Did history or perhaps life come to an end even as it continued There is something more to this confession The disclosure possibly of a form of dispossession that empties the world of meaning in This reading progress may be interpreted as a rather cruel desertion an abandonment of those not able to keep up with its pace or demands or not fully inhabit its potential on Whose part after all and in the name of which power Should we not be forced then to at least also speak of loss Or at least take a moment to reflect on what costs have been exacted on whom and Where and perhaps to recognize that progress has never looked especially Promising for those who find themselves in its way Indeed the idea that there is no limit to what human beings are capable of may now sound to some More like a threat than a promise All this is not to say before the charge is even made that these other forms of life Indeed other life worlds were idyllic much less an untainted innocent paradise It is however to say that too much remains obscured from view That perhaps to sever some forms of attachment is injurious possibly fatal Including those attachments which appear irrational and possibly even self sabotaging and that this too must be taken into account in any narrative of progress as pure liberation and It is also to say more essentially that these peoples and worlds did not have the hubris or perhaps only the means To inflict or bestow their cultures practices languages traditions on the entire planet and That too in the name of good of universal emancipation It is also to point out that the wiser thinkers of the ancient world did not profess faith in progress as a temporally chronologically determined improvement in the conditions of human life Think for instance of the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca who believed in progress as the human capacity for the Expansion of knowledge, but did not expect from it any improvement in the general community of humankind Such humility if one can even call it that or helplessness is worthy of reflection What makes our moment our world such that we believe unequivocally that the world must without resistance or a resistance made futile submit to it or ideally fall enthusiastically into its embrace with the conviction that such submission will enhance the well-being of all the world Given its dominance and more importantly its implicit hierarchies For the billions left out of this triumphant March Those who remain insistently or without a choice on the peripheries or for those who have Insufficiently moved along this hapless yet quite clear trajectory. We have little left, but derision or even worse pity We can only think or to be certain as a matter of historical fact That those who live in this moment who exist however precariously in this time Do not in fact have a place in it these people the benighted Majority uninvited to join this exalted mission who live in this time Where else indeed would they live? belong elsewhere in a history long lost or relinquished as Though they are suffering from a lack an absence as if they no longer Correspond to this time or that time is hurtling towards an end to which they can never hope to arrive It is to treat living people as if they were their own ghosts as good as already dead Haunting the modern present as if already banished from the world Hoping in the manifest destitution of their condition for their own exorcism The structures of the modern world perhaps like the pre-modern, but we all know how terrible those were Seem routinely to produce such superfluous and marginalized communities These are not exceptions as we often think or are told but rather the consequence of a structure of power that necessitates subordination on the part of majority populations it matters very little what form they take within developed or developing societies as Effects or products of an increasingly voracious capitalism a system itself predicated on Untold exclusions or within broader systems of total control and Given the means at our disposal these people and countless others can be dispensed of in unparalleled numbers in The most spectacular example World War two which occurred principally of course in the most modern and developed of all societies World War two resulted in as many as 80 million deaths 80 million to say nothing of the manner of those deaths as Original and stunning as unspeakably horrifying One would like to say inhuman But sadly they are perhaps and only all to human in More recent memory the Cold War so terribly and misleadingly named is The perfect example of the hierarchy of power and of life that seems so Indelibly etched in our collective consciousness This period of several decades from 1945 to roughly 1990 Widely regarded as a time of peace because the two then most powerful countries Managed to resist mutual destruction and seemed instead content to wage their wars elsewhere Where perhaps the absence of peace was incidental or maybe irrelevant This period was among the most brutal in much of the developing world Against received wisdom and very much on the contrary These decades were marked by widespread and devastating war the so-called proxy wars and not only those Waged between the two superpowers Resulting in millions of casualties even more refugees and displaced persons and Before we dismiss this as ancient history We need to recall the enduring legacy of these wars Consider for instance the landmines that still kill and maim Thousands from Laos to Afghanistan most of them children So how are we to evaluate this period and its characterization? Disgracefully referred to by some historians as the long piece What allows such an appellation and how even in the abstract does this have to do with progress? and its valuations There are other examples One thinks of those who bear the costs of one of the signature if collateral consequences of accelerated progress We are living now in the Anthropocene In other words our present geological age is the first in which Human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment This has had the effects it has with which we are now all too familiar Despite the insistence of some in this country that it is a fiction or to quote one presidential contender Climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese to undermine the US economy Such a dismissal is only possible in a context that is spared the most brutal effects of this scientific fact It is the world outside Structurally and repeatedly consigned to irrelevance which suffers its worst consequences as In India to name only one of literally innumerable examples Where over? 300,000 farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years 300,000 farmers have killed themselves in the last 20 years The causes as with everything are complex But have minimally to do with repeated droughts or conversely excessive rainfall Both leading to successive years of crop failure with farmers having no option but to resort to bank and private loans resulting eventually if predictably in crippling debt and For all the talk of India as a rising power of having progressed at a marvelous rate Agriculture remains the single largest employment sector with 70% of India's 1.2 billion people living in rural areas Areas that have long been made uninhabitable for reasons apart from climate change of course But with climate change too as an effect of the rampant modernization spawned and implemented over decades of development policy Then more visibly there's the story now haunting the world of Syria of Iraq Though the latter given our chronic historical amnesia has faded virtually entirely from memory Despite its almost complete ruin In Syria then Aleppo One of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities The mention of which left one third-party candidate utterly mystified in Aleppo then suffering from the misfortune of its geographic location Modern warfare has done what successive invasions failed to do throughout the ages Laying waste to half the city This ancient world heritage site as it was designated by UNESCO is Now threatened with total Annihilation We have come so far that one is tempted to say that this inexorable advance of progress has no end in all senses It will both continue and also have no definable goal We see now some of its less benign effects The proliferation of means making possible the destruction of the world and that too many more times than once Structural enduring inequalities in wealth opportunity inclusion the total conquest of nature The almost complete devastation of social relations communities and bonds a Denuded morality a concept which appears now in anachronism Insistently lingering somewhere in the shadows associated only with the worst conservatism as a relic from another time once Defined by a sense of restraint a time that must urgently be left behind The collapse of any substantive politics or the possibility of participation in the political process No matter how democratic a term itself that has long been evacuated of meaning and yet remains one of the signature marks of progress The hierarchies of life Human life above the world of nature of course, but also of certain human lives certain forms of living above others So in light of this not to mention colonialism total war genocide totalitarianism, etc Is it possible to be consoled by the thought that progress will one day in the indefinable future? Close yet so far Free us all entirely from what apparently constrains our full human potential Should we not instead conclude that the brutal violence inflicted by human beings under any name? Torture slavery genocide Cannot be consigned to the past like exhausted theories in science They simply return in a different guise and Given the means now available to us It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than any significant improvement in it There is also not the ancillary fact that the idea of humanity itself seems a fiction Composed as it is of billions of people for each of whom life is singular unique and naturally final So what would it mean to speak of a general progression of a general progress? Encompassing every single one of the seven billion human lives now present on earth as Appears increasingly true Human beings have been blessed or cursed depending on the moment with a seemingly limitless capacity for enhancing knowledge While being chronically incapable of learning from it or from experience One such edifying realization might be that there can be little progress only an Unending struggle with our own obstinate nature Paranthetically psychoanalysis which is both an intellectual project and clinical method has largely fallen into Disrepute no doubt in part because of its avowed admission of the limits of human agency Nevertheless psychoanalysis wisely though in what now appears to be a wholly futile gesture Tried to inform us that human beings can scarcely be masters of their destiny We might instead come to view the idea of resignation as a virtue Though resignation has long been considered a form of weakness and even worse submission as if through sheer will Itself hardly a constant or even definable force We might alter the conditions of our own existence or even more brazenly Imagine that we can change those of humanity at large Freud suggested that we come instead to understand the determining role of fate and history in our lives While also affirming a more modest ambition Namely effecting a minor change in our orientation Toward that fate as also toward our place in the social world Finally a Few words on the link between progress and peace if indeed there is one or maybe one Quite apart from this only very partial chronicle of warfare and dispossession Peace is invoked by everyone Not least those governing affairs of state national and global who repeatedly tirelessly profess an absolute commitment to peace while inflicting the worst atrocities in its name There are of course countless others with less cynical more benevolent intentions but given the ubiquity of the word in the mouths of everyone Should we not be at least a little suspicious at every moment of its enunciation Should we think instead in light of what has occurred and more of the same likely to come That even if we assume human progress is an evolutionary process a movement of space within time of time within space of which peace may be a part that Progress is a process that may well be going nowhere and Still as John Gray reminds us in his remarkable book the silence of animals To suppose that the myth of progress could be shaken off would be to ascribe to modern Humanity a capacity for improvement even greater than what it ascribes to itself I'd like to end with one of the canonical readings of progress Which seems only to become more prescient with the passage of time Though it was written at the very pinnacle of human debasement the mid 20th century The German Jewish essayist and philosopher Walter Benjamin writes then of the angel of history Whose face quote is turned toward the past Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single Catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet The angel would like to stay Awaken the dead make whole what has been smashed But a storm is blowing from paradise It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned While the pile of debris before him grows skyward This storm is what we call progress