Miles to Go Before We Sleep
Complacency is threadbare comfort.
Progress is good. I listen with respect when my conservative friends point to what you might call “civilizational progress,” that is more freedom, less hunger, better medical treatment, more productivity today than in the past.
I am willing to accept most of the metrics they cite. And, given that serious conservatives do acknowledge that we have not yet achieved all our goals for a better world, but are getting closer, i.e. moving in the right direction, we might just sit down together with a good cigar and a glass of wine and take a well-earned break from guilt.
But, alas, moving in the right direction is not enough. It may not even be progress, if you consider one additional factor.
At present the faster we run the further away the finish line.
This is not just about climate change and nuclear threat and the robust nature of viruses. They are also moving the finish line.
I’m considering the extraordinary pace of scientific and technological change.
In the past we have only had a limited ability to meet global problems. We picked the low hanging fruit and that has been the greatest part of our success. Good, as they say these days, for us. But if the possibilities of what we could do is vastly expanding, then our current degree of success seems less praiseworthy. We set, as a finish line, the practical, and view it as the best substitute for the unreachable goal, an ideal world. But what is practical, when the achievable is changing.
It’s like the finish line (the goals that we set in each generation for doing as much as we can), is moving away from us, at a pace much greater than our rates of achievement.
For those of us who choose to see a sort of destiny in doing all we can to stabilize and integrate human life with the nature and resources of this planet and ensure a foundation for imaginative human striving in good health and peaceful intercourse with each other and the larger ecosystem, the task is getting harder because we are discovering how much more progress is possible.
What we have been calling, satisfaction with a job well done, is now better seen as complacency. You may feel good about chopping a few cords of wood in a day with an axe, but not I suspect with a chain saw.
Robert Frost and his horse are just finding out how much further they have to travel before they sleep.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.