Progress

     The common blather that "you can't stop progress" is a classic example of equivocation, arguing one thing while seeming to argue something else. Actually, we aren't going to live long enough to find out (and it doesn't matter) if progress, meaning just continuous movement in one direction, can be or ever is incurably inert, but that's irrelevant to the kind of progress that means at least constructively deflecting and channeling the course of human events, and at best actually originating and progressively molding social evolution to make life better.
     In fact, human governments are forever clumsily stopping and half-ass altering progress. So the problem with progress isn't unstoppability. It's that the word progress, like the word freedom, is ambiguous. The predictable idea, in this nation of bookkeepers and shopkeepers, that progress, to be progress, has to be quantitative, or that even qualitative progress, once in motion, is, for some moral reason, inevitable and always desirable, is a careless idea that needs some analysis under a brighter light than you get from religion, sales brochures, or a mathematically based ethic.
     Rico's ideal of progress as spit-flying "M-O-O-RE!"(bigger, taller, faster, shinier, costlier), in a closed ecosystem or a real-world economic system, wherein additions here require subtractions there, should certainly be rejected, along with all the gang leaders and developers who cherish it. And even benign qualitative progress should always be weighed against its consequences, sorted and compared, and constructively culled.

    Progress (to a progressive) means progress away from the jungle toward civilization and therefore away from greedy competition toward social/economic equality.

    A civilized state aimed at making life equally good for all its participants, besides ensuring them more than adequate food, shelter and clothing, and the best health care and education attainable, in the interest of minimizing pain and at least sensibly enhancing (not foolishly maximizing) pleasure, should certainly also provide them the benefits of an intelligent level and selection of technological progress. But only if it's realistically relevant to the purpose of a civilized state. Realism, according to both Epicurus and modern ecologists, entails defensive moderation. Every home may need a refrigerator, a stove, a water heater, a TV set, and a telephone; but it does NOT need a giant refrigerator or deep freeze; a private bakery and grill, a 32 gallon tank that reheats that much water around the clock, a wall size TV screen, or a phone that also makes ice and cooks and takes pictures and plays 5000 songs. Civilization owes everyone a pretty, modern, comfortable, spacious enough home, with a yard and a garden and maybe some fruit trees - but not an estate. Civilization needs excellent transportation and recreational facilities, but like sets of encyclopedias and rototillers, these things can be public and shared.
     All civilized people have the right to comfort , convenience, beauty, health, education, and pleasure; but in the context of a civilized social/economic contract, a growing (progressing) capacity to exploit and dominate others, to have too many kids and cars, and to accumulate wealth isn't progressive - it's ethically regressive to the jungle and barbarism, and destructive to the common good and to the eco-system.

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