Progress is a Comfortable Disease

“Progress is a comfortable disease--” an excerpt from a piece by E.E. Cummings.

In literary survey courses it has been said many times that poets and science fiction writers are our modern-day prophets. Despite all the economical, political, social, and religious leaders and experts of our day, it is the writers who have so perfectly painted our future with the grim and mysterious certainty of a Grecian oracle. Stories such as Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde are just a few works that come to mind. These writers didn’t portray the future with statistics, logical predictions based on current trends, or even on biblical apocalyptic chapters. No, instead they spoke of the deep underlying truths of the human condition, of the values and ideologies that set our species apart from the rest of existence. To put it more plainly, Maya Angelou once said, “I’m not interested in facts, but truths.”

The human race has come a long way since the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages, since the primal cultures, since the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even the Industrial Revolution--allegedly. We study the bones and archaeological ruins of ancient cultures, with the self-inflated presumption that we are the most superior of all creatures to walk the earth because we exist and they do not. That is faulty thinking, in my opinion. To illustrate the point I’m getting at let me say this: rats might also exist in the bottom of a dank and slimy pit, but just because the rest of creation isn’t stupid enough to go into the pit, does that make the rat superior in its seclusion? No, I’m not suggesting alternative dimensions or some sort of parallel existence. That type of thinking gives me a headache anyway. But what I’m saying is simply because we exist at a time another creature does not, is that really ground enough to assume we are superior? Or could it be cause to suggest we are in fact inferior because we are still here?

In the age of primal cultures, beasts were hunted with respect and honor and only the ones who gave themselves to the hunter were ever caught. Following, was a ritual of sadness and thanksgiving for the beast that had sacrificed itself. Today farms raise livestock by the thousands, in deplorable conditions, then slaughter them by the thousands. Yet world hunger is rampant. Today cancer and AIDS are uncontrollable, and obesity claims more than half the industrialized world. The number of oxygen-burning, carbon-belching factories and machinery multiplies daily, while the vast forests of the Amazon are being decimated.

We killed God and in his absence we decided that we must be gods. I recently heard an atheist mocking Christianity: “When I hear from the Bible the words of God saying ‘I am,’ I simply smile and say, ‘I am too.’” It is this stifling egoism and short-sightedness that prevents us from seeing the universe as it actually is--infinite. We surround ourselves in our own little bubble, blind ourselves with our pride so we cannot see anything outside of our sphere, then declare that we must be gods since there is nothing greater than us in existence. Yet we are destroying our planet, clogging our arteries, and dying before we’ve reached the age of 80. We walk outside and are mesmerized by the starry hosts above and are vexed by the moral low within this world. We have progressed to the point that we proclaim ourselves gods, yet cannot explain our world.

The irony of our predicament is further realized at the end of E.E. Cummings piece when the narrator becomes so sick of the human condition of existence that he ends by lightly saying, "There's a hell of a universe next door, let's go."

Could the problem then be a human problem? What if we were the ones left behind to wallow in our misery because it was we who were inferior? Could there actually be a condition called sin? Is this actually beyond our control? Are we living in the midst of a self-created destruction?

Every year the human race grows smarter while leaving wisdom at the door.

Thus the saying proves true for another generation: "Progress is a comfortable disease..."

But that is only half true. Progress is also a terminal disease.