Reject the Premise
We could save ourselves a lot of trouble by rejecting the presumption that mankind is inherently righteous, or indeed that he is born innocent. The Bible instructs us otherwise, and all the proof you need to bear witness to this truth is to observe an infant throwing a temper tantrum when he doesn’t get what he wants. We are, beyond all doubt or debate, born with a sin nature.
In the same way, it is also helpful to reject the presumption that all progress is inherently good or even inherently benign. Progress is neither of these things.
Let’s think it through.
Exploding the Ideology
Electric cars are an example of progress-at-any-cost that can be ripped directly from current events.
There’s a huge push underway—in pop culture, in government, and in certain industries—to make electric cars the new standard of personal transportation, and the foregone conclusion subtly interwoven into every story is that all progress is good. Is it perhaps especially so when certain people stand to make gobs of money? But I don’t want to be accused of cynicism.
Of course progress is good! Isn’t that only logical?
On the surface it may be, but we happen to live in a corrupted world, and even our reason has been subjected to this corruption. There’s a lot of debris to be swept under the rug in the name of progress, even if we’re only using the "holy advent of the electric car” as an example.
It is an environmentally filthy business to strip-mine for lithium and the other raw materials both electric cars and hybrids require. Are they really a viable substitute for gasoline powered cars? Are we meant to ignore the hit electric cars are going to make on our infrastructure? I’m not just talking about our already-maxed power grid: our roads will take a hit too because electric cars are really flipping heavy, with all those batteries. Then there’s the danger of thermal runaway in the event of a severe crash. If any of the battery’s thousands of cells becomes damaged enough to catch fire, there simply isn’t a way to put it out with water (which makes it worse), so specialized fire suppression equipment and training is required. Am I to believe that every fire department in America has access to this equipment and training? I don’t think so. Then there’s the cost of developing new infrastructure to be able to charge the things, and never mind that quite a lot of the power generated in the US is dependent on fossil fuels like coal, which kind of makes electric cars either completely pointless or a wicked greenwashing lie. And never mind the fact that all this breathless progress is going to destroy jobs if it goes forward as planned (or as regulated).
Never mind that Porsche has developed a carbon neutral method to synthesize fuel for the cars we already drive, which uses existing fuel delivery infrastructure. Why is this progress somehow invalid?
I don’t require you to agree with me about electric cars, I’m just trying to make a point that blindly following the pied pipers of progress is something we ought to think through a little more thoroughly no matter where we land on the issues.
Have you ever experienced a power outage? It’s not convenient when you need that power to do things around the house but can’t. But have you ever experienced a power outage in an all-electric house? You can’t cook, you can’t keep warm, you can’t even open the garage door. And that’s not just inconvenient, it threatens to become a legitimate safety issue.
Perhaps the most ominous development enabled by electric cars and all the progress their champions shout about is the ease with which our privacy can be breached, our free movement constrained, and our rights trampled. All it takes is a software update or a power outage (real or feigned) and we’re going nowhere fast.
Are you prepared to trust your government that much?
Science and Progress: Religion?
Progress might carry certain benefits, but pretending it doesn’t also carry with it destruction is absurd. Its adherents have been arguing since about the time Woodrow Wilson was in office that it everything will be fine if we just trust them. If we restrict our gaze to the surface alone, we may be inclined to get in line.
Air conditioning was a great step forward, right? Consider that, before its invention, houses were built with front porches in neighborhoods that were conducive to interpersonal interaction, and it wasn’t unusual for neighbors to spend evenings in conversation in the breeze on the front porch, where it was cooler. These days, if a house has a porch, it’s a token for decorative chairs that are almost never used. Nowadays we sit in isolation in our climate controlled bubbles. This is progress.
Smart phones have been awesome, right? If we’re honest, they have made life a lot more frustrating too. Seems like a lot more people weave down the road like drunk drivers as they scan the screen for something that just can’t wait. How many accidents have they caused? How many relationships have they damaged and broken because of the addictions they enable? We are alone in every crowd we inhabit now, isolated by technology that, in spite of all the damage it has wrought, protests that it connects us. This too is progress.
Then there’s war. I could easily argue that progress is to blame for just about every arms race in history, and I don’t care if you’re talking about the superiority of iron weapons over bronze, the development of the Greek phalanx, the invention of the sail, the rifled barrel, Napoleon Bonaparte’s brilliant and unprecedented use of cavalry and artillery, Hitler’s blitzkrieg, the breakthrough of American nuclear power at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Cold War.
Then there’s morality. Progress has destroyed the family, erased commonsense gender roles, obliterated biblical right and wrong, and imprisoned Christian faith within a vault of oppressive government regulation. In the wake of all this progress is the desperate single parent, unborn children murdered for convenience, legalized immorality masquerading as marriage, and so much identity confusion that truth itself, at least under the terms of this progress, can no longer be known.
It isn’t unreasonable to say that the slaves of progress are a death-obsessed cult of fear driven relentlessly toward the arbitrary location of their goalpost, at least until they move it again. If that isn’t pathetic and hopeless, I don’t know what is. Yesterday’s progress is never enough for these zealots. It isn’t a straight line with a clear objective, it’s an endless cycle of dissatisfaction that looks an awful lot like hell.
Progress steamrolls the dead on battlefields, it makes whole industries and the people who depend on them redundant for no real reason, and it leaves in its wake the debris of every societal guardrail it nukes to make straight paths for the caprice of a few influencers whose thinking is utterly broken.
Crucifying the Flesh
Progress is an illusion, which is why human nature runs to it, prostrating itself. We love the shiny and the new. But illusions are just as enabling to falsity as slipping a mask over the face, and they’re just as easy to fabricate. When we hail our progress, especially when we use it to self justify, all we do is underscore our lack of character and understanding about what really matters.
Bowing to progress is about as offensive as it gets. It doesn’t matter how much progress I make because the gap between God and me is infinite. I cannot bridge that gap by anything I earn, do, conceive, steal, co-opt, or manipulate. The infinite gap can only be bridged by God in the person of Jesus Christ, and I can only make the journey to the Father by grace through faith in Jesus. And while it is true that He has left us with His Spirit to indwell and empower us, that we learn obedience through the things we suffer, there is a war each of us must wage against our own duplicitous human nature. We cannot hope to win it, much less stand and fight in it, without supernatural weapons and the supernatural power to wield them.
Human nature’s love of the illusion of progress is particularly ugly because it is particularly difficult to drag it into the light of confession and repentance. Really the only thing for it is death. The only thing that will silence the lie is to submit to being crucified, and not just once but again and again, day in and day out, until we are free at last.
Progress? No. I don’t believe in it. I believe in Truth, which is absolute because He is a Person. All this other nonsense is lemmings chasing after wind.