It's Getting Better

Progress. That's our word for it. "Progress" refers to forward motion. We think that "forward motion" is good motion, that progress is making things better. We think of progress as advance, as improvement, as correction of error. We think of more enlightenment, more freedom, more happiness. It is obviously "change," but we unilaterally think of it as positive change.

As it turns out, of course, nothing in the concept of "moving forward" requires positive change. Just as a silly example, if your "forward movement" walks you off a cliff, it's not positive. So it should be obvious that it is important to evaluate progress rather than merely applaud it.

Recently Germany's highest court voted to overturn a legislative ban on euthanasia. Progress! But is it positive? In a Christian worldview, humans have value that exceeds the intrinsic; they have value assigned by God. Human life is valuable because we have been made in the image of God (Gen 9:6). Exit the Christian worldview and substitute the secular. Progress! So killing babies in the womb is not an issue because we're not limited to some Christian value judgment. Killing the sick and the old is not a problem because we're not limited to a valuation from the Divine. We can still stand firmly on those in the middle, perhaps. Don't kill children; don't kill adults. Just the two ends, mostly. But on what are we still standing firmly? Thin air. I recently read an article published in the BMJ -- the British Medical Journal -- that made an argument for eugenics as a moral option. I read an article some time ago from a doctor explaining the ethical removal of body parts for people who suffer from BIID -- Body Integrity Identity Disorder. This is a condition in which a person believes that some healthy body part should be amputated because it is not theirs; it is alien in some way. The doctor's conclusion? It is ethical to remove such a part because the person just might be right.

This, we think, is progress. We've moved beyond the mistreatment of the black people as slaves and we've progressed past the massacre of millions of Jews in Germany -- positive progress -- and we've gotten to the place that the number one cause of death for human beings in 2019 was ... abortion. The World Health Organization estimates there are 40-50 million abortions per year in the world. Compare that with the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust or the 3 million killed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 or even the 60 million killed by Stalin or the 70 million under Mao Zedong. Those last two were over 30 years each. Our "progress" allows us to eclipse that in two years and the count continues. Progress. Sure, but not positive change.

What we think of as "progress" in the sense of improvement is often just "progress" in the sense of change. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it appears good but isn't. Sometimes we think it's good but it is, in fact, the opposite. "It's getting better" is our general notion of "progress." I think, more often than not, it isn't.