The world does not progress, it merely changes. ppt

The world does not progress, it merely changes. Do
you agree this view?

At first hearing, this seems a strange, almost an absurd
saying. What! No progress? Why, compare the world
today with what it was in antiquity, in the middle Ages, or
even only two hundred years ago. There is no
comparison. Have we not now inventions and
conveniences that were never dreamt of two centuries
ago? What about our railway and steam-driven machinery,
our steamships and submarines, our aeroplanes, our
electric light and power, our telegraph, telephone, radio
and broadcasting, our aseptic surgery and advanced
medical science, our other scientific discoveries and
inventions, and hundreds of other signs of progress? Two
hundred years ago these things were unknown. Had not
the world progressed far beyond the wildest dreams
possible to our ancestors?

No doubt all this, and more, is true. But this does not
disprove this saying. The world has certainly progressed in
knowledge; but has it progressed in wisdom? We know far
more than our forefathers did; but do we use greater
knowledge to any wiser ends? That is to be doubted. As
Tenyson said, “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”

Look at the world as it is today. It is a hundred years since
Tennyson dreamt of “The Parliament of Man, the
Federation of the World”. It is still only a dream. Mankind
has not had the wisdom to learn the elementary lesson of
cooperation on a world scale. Mankind is still divided up

into warring tribes, like their barbarian ancestors. The spirit
of a narrow nationalism still divides men, and makes
anything like a common economic and political system
impossible.

Modern nations are still on much the same low level as
their barbarian predecessors in their relations with one
another. Fearing and distrusting one another, they lock up
a huge amount of their productive wealth in armaments, to
their own impoverishment. They stand armed to the teeth,
ready to destroy one another and their common civilization
with the devilish weapons which their science has placed
in their hands. There is change, certainly. In old days, men
killed each other with bows and arrows, swords and
spears; now they do it with high explosive bombs and
poison gas. But the spirit of envy, greed, hate and pride is
just the same. Only change, no progress. As one
statesman said recently, we live in a world qualifying for
bedlam.

Progress is defined as “advancement towards a higher
and better state”. Has our boasted advance in knowledge
made the world either wiser or morally better than it was
centuries ago?