This is in response to this article:
I always find myself a bit worried when people use words like progress and enlightenment like they’re in some sense automatic.
Another example is when people use “evolve” to mean things getting better, where “better” is a value judgement, when all it means is that they get better adapted to the prevailing conditions, which in themselves have no intrinsic value at all.
We haven’t progressed from anywhere. The project to better the human condition is a human construct, not an absolute, and so is enlightenment. This is laudable and I agree with it, but I don’t use progress in what is a naive Victorian way that makes it some sort of moral absolute (sorry Karl).
I did agree with the main thrust of the article’s attack on the silly self-serving abdication of personal responsibility, which is so much a part of life now. It also begs the question, that if I apparently know more than a journalist who specialises in something, what the hell does he or she do all day? If I were an editor I would get someone else! But the culture of “shut up, shape up or ship out” seems to have gone as well.
Seems like a charter for the work shy. Maybe I’m old fashioned.