The Barefoot Corporate Warrior: Winter 2024
Do You Believe in Linear Progress? Paul Bird ruminates on what this actually means and discovers that he might be a believer.
I remember the first time I entered Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Now a mosque, the impressive structure of today was constructed almost 1500 years ago during Byzantine Emperor Justinian I’s reign.As someone who has spent a fair amount of time wandering through Europe’s Gothic Cathedrals, many of them built 500 to 700 years ago, the awe-inspiring interior space of Hagia Sophia was gob-smacking.
It was full of… air. The structure built centuries ago, and in some cases, many centuries before some of the most acclaimed Cathedrals of the world, had very few columns. Interior light was abundant as Hagia Sophia was able to support its massive domed roof, the largest in the world until the 15th century, by techniques developed and refined during the Roman Empire.
How come? Someone told me it was because the engineering knowledge had been lost to the world in the intervening years.
I am not sure if lost knowledge is true but it seems to make sense. After all, medieval Europe following the collapse of the western Roman Empire was referred to as ‘The Dark Ages’ and all popular cultural references to this period of European history are grim and depressing. The plagues which afflicted the Continent in waves over this period and the seemingly endless warfare surely did not help with the advancement of scientific and engineering excellence.
For all its tyrannical, cruel dominance, which we decry from our modern perspective, the Pax Romana did provide a fruitful, extended period of peace in which arts and literature, science and engineering flourished. Surviving infrastructure like Hagia Sophia attest to the enduring sophistication and ingenuity of the Roman civilization.
The regressive dislocation that followed also seems to reinforce the notion that there is no guarantee of progress being linear i.e. an ever-upward relentless trajectory of improvement. Rapid technological advances (think AI, Quantum Computing, rapid-fire Covid vaccine development and production and thousands upon thousands of other improvements in recent years) give us cause to expect that things will always be getting better.
Indeed, it seems that we almost believe we are entitled to expect an ever-amazing array of new gadgetry designed to make us happy/ier. For some, progress is a given, certainly not something to be questioned or queried. It’s logical and natural isn’t it? Maybe, maybe not.
There are many ways and reasons a linear progress can be interrupted. We acknowledge these reasons and their potential for disruption – war, plague, catastrophic failures in our energy, water, technology, food production systems, haywire AI, cyber-attack and natural disasters, even climate change.
Linear progress believers see the myriad threats as bumps along the road to a brighter future. Bumps for which a solution will always be found. They have a point – Covid-19 vaccines are an obvious and recent case-in-point.
I like to read history. I like to watch history documentaries. (What a sad man I hear you say?) The study of history is supposed to provide us with lessons, useful examples of what people have done in the past, and the consequences of these actions. This study helps us avoid an endless cycle of repetitive stumbles.
That is the theory anyway. A wise friend of mine has pointed out that whether progress is linear or not depends on your timeline perspective. If we look at the progress of humankind since our common ancestors first left Africa then progress is indeed linear and unquestioningly so.
The problem is that, as we only live for around 100 years currently (watch this space for the emerging 130 year-old cohort), our judgement on progress is limited to the span of our lives. Each generation has its own take. And that is to be expected. However, recent grandiose statements that we are “living in the most uncertain of times” or that “it has never been harder to…” do stretch credulity when one has a reasonable grasp of history and some of the circumstances that other generations have had to confront in order to survive with their lives and/or livelihoods intact.
For the peasant classes trapped within a rigid feudal system in the Europe of the Middle Ages, progress would have seemed to them to have been pitifully slow or even non-existent. We are easy marks for post-apocalyptic, dystopian sci-fi with its survival-of-the-fittest devolutions.
We love nothing better than watching humans (eventually) triumph over the chaos and danger of such imagined futures. The problem I think is that for most of us (except the Preppers), we subscribe to the “it will never happen” category allowing our innate human optimism bias to provide the “progress is linear” comfort we crave.
I harbour a great hope that I will still be shuffling around this mortal coil when humans set foot on Mars and, despite the significant obstacles which need to be overcome, this looks like it might happen within the next 10-15 years.
At this moment, I believe it will happen and yes, that I could/should be alive to witness it. I also understand that anything can happen anytime to thwart this ambition. It seems that, informed as I am by the missteps, eddies and catastrophes of history, I have also fallen for the linear nature of progress mantra as I fully expect humans to get to Mars.
So, it seems I do expect a linear progress after all.
