Title: John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?
Headings: John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?
John Gray: Is Human Progress an Illusion?
Content: Our technologies, after all, are geared around our needs.) Even if we create technologies that “don’t need us” — we are still fallible creators. Gray’s real problem with the idea of moral progress, technical progress, and scientific progress are they, even were they real, would be unending. In the modern conception of the world, unlike the ancient past where everything was seen as cyclical, growth has no natural stop-point. It’s just an infinite path to the heavens. This manifests itself in our constant disdain for idleness. Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so.