If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
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The ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil — possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.
Life is the most important gift of all, anything which threatens life is not progress, it is regression. And the Church has never been in favour of regression. The Church defends progress which makes use of technology, of which the horizon is a possibility, and of ethics of which the horizon is finality. If we combine technology, science and ethics without control, then we unleash an insane machine which goes in all directions including the destruction of mankind. If instead, we combine bio-ethics and bio-genetics we indicate a path leading to the edification rather than the annihilation of mankind. Ethics alone are able to understand when "progress" will destroy man: ethics accept everything which edifies man and reject all which aims to destroy man.
The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.
His starting place is the paradox of the first Discourse: progress is a bad thing because it is morally corrupting. Human beings were better when their lives were simpler and less sophisticated. Underlying this argument- barely stated but already present- is a further paradox, the paradox of the second Discourse: inequality is the root of all evils. Progress requires inequality because it requires some people to have the time to concentrate on literature, philosophy, or science. Free time is one of the luxuries that only come into existence with inequality, and all intensifies the process.
The progress of science can be said to be harmful to religion only in so far as it is used for evil aims and not because it claims a priority over religion in its revelation to man. It is important that spiritual advancement must keep pace with material advancement. When this comes to be realized man's journey toward higher and more lasting values will show more marked progress while the evil in him recedes into the background. Knowing that material and spiritual progress are essential to man, we must ceaselessly work for the equal attainment of both. Only then shall we be able to acquire that absolute inner calm so necessary to our well-being. It is only when a people strike an even balance between scientific progress and spiritual and moral advancement that it can be said to possess a wholly perfect and complete personality and not a lopsided one.
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Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, —what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come —"As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them."
Was there no possibility of saving mankind from self-destruction? The extinct animal species had been forced unwittingly towards elimination, but in man, life for the first time, had mustered sufficient consciousness to recognise dangerous trends in his development. What were these dangers? Progress of science, man's increasing technical mastery? No, the real danger threatening man lay in those gigantic social and political organisations, being an end in themselves instead of means, using the instruments of education and propaganda to suppress individual judgement by creating instinctive mass reaction. These organisations hinder man's spiritual development, reduce the capacity for moral judgement to a low level, and hand over society to the intense lust for power of a few individuals.
If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.
The sum total of progress associated with the Industrial Revolution has not been wholly for the good of man.
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
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2007