Word: progressives
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...would be a mistake to abandon the idea of progress because history does not follow a linear path to social harmony or because most progress—though certainly not all—has an embarrassingly Western origin. As logical positivists like Wittgenstein showed, it is a “pseudo-problem” to argue over which value system or civilization is objectively superior, but in empirical terms of human happiness, progress is a fact, one that it would be a disservice to human history and the future to deny...
From the plush vantage of 21st century suburbia, it is easy to forget how much real, substantive progress has been made in relatively little time. Due to advances in sanitation, medicine, and education, life expectancy worldwide has dramatically increased in the past two centuries from 30 years in 1800 to 67 years today, while infant mortality rates have plummeted from 21.7 percent to 0.6 percent in 2000. Diseases like small pox, tuberculosis, and syphilis that once ravaged the Western world have virtually disappeared here. And the development of scientific farming methods, factories, electricity, mass transportation, and even computers has increased...
Although the lion’s share of recent progress has been the boon of non-western countries, the developing world still lags appallingly behind in basic health, economic development, and education. An estimated 39.5 million people were living with AIDS in 2006, while 2.7 million people die of malaria each year, 75 percent of them African children...
...look at the empirical data and deny the existence of material progress, but many contend that there has not been concomitant moral progress—a sublimation of our intrinsic greed, cruelty, and penchant for violence into more a humane social ethos. Once again, as much as it may please us to romanticize the Rousseauian savage and see civilization as the source of all moral and spiritual malaise, an honest account of our ethical development cannot bear out our prelapsarian fantasies...
...regardless of race or religion or creed, has advanced admirably in the West, while in certain areas of the world homosexuals are still hanged, rape victims stoned, and women forbidden to drive a car or receive an education. It would be a mistake, in this précis of progress, to omit the cultural accomplishments that bestowed our civilization its sublimity. From Einstein’s almost mystical insights into the four-dimensional structure of space and time to the discovery of the universal template of organic life in the elegant double helix of the DNA molecule, Western science...