Does the quickening pace of progress justify optimism about our future?

In my view social—economic—political progress does not by itself justify optimism about our human situation or our future. The basic human condition remains largely unchanged. We still experience pain and suffering—and we die.

In my books Optimism One (1969) and Up-Wingers (1972) I wrote: "So long as we are hopelessly doomed to finite life spans and trapped within a small speck in Space all our social economic political freedoms are limited and ultimately meaningless."

I went on to suggest that something new is unfolding in the human condition—something unprecedented—something beyond historical progress—something potentially full of hope.

"Suddenly the barriers are coming down. Suddenly humankind's situation is not circumscribed or limited . . . We are no longer confined to this tiny planet. Soon we will no longer be confined to our fragile mortal bodies. We are on our way to becoming universal and immortal.

"This is precisely the distinction between the new optimism and the optimism of the visionaries of the past. The optimism of a Goethe a Nietzsche or a Marx was necessarily a limited optimism based on his­torical progress. It was an optimism within a basically pessimistic human situation.

"But the optimism I have been advancing (since the early 1960s) is not based simply on historical progress. It is primarily and ultimately predicated on our evolutionary breakthroughs.

"To miss this central point is to miss the meaning of this late twen­tieth-century optimism.

"In our preoccupation with daily domestic problems we tend to lose sight of these transcendent dimensions now opening up to us. It is therefore not surprising that we persist in our traditional pessimism.

"But the philosophy of an age cannot and must not be derived from daily newspaper headlines ... An age cannot be defined by the detail of everyday events. The broader currents are what finally mark an age.

"These broad and ever-broadening currents mark ours as the First Age of Optimism."

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 805