Where good and true become synonyms

The illusion of progress is persistent. It is fair to say there are really two illusions in most cultures. There is an illusion of progress propagated by systems of moral and ethical training – progress toward good and away from evil. Churches are the most easily recognized examples of such systems but there are many others that operate in less formal but arguably more effective ways such as the systemic expectations imposed by family- and other social- cohorts. In addition to progress toward the good, there is an illusion of progress toward the truth manifest most clearly in the hegemony of science and particularly in the increased reliance on data collection and its application to a growing number of fields. Correctness can be measured numerically and, with increasing powers of computation, carried to infinite decimal points.

I am no luddite railing against the prospect of progress. You won’t find me living in a hermit hovel refusing medicine or the internet. There is tremendous value in statistics and experimental verification as well as in the moral exhortations of families and churches, communities and peers. Progress happens in various ways. And things certainly change. More often than not things change for the good, or at least toward pleasurable ends. It is easy to confess that living in 21^st century America has advantages over, say, 10^th century Europe. Neither luddite nor naysayer, the ubiquity of such changes and misperceived overlaps in purpose, however, spawn illusions that have consequences for how designing or making occurs and limits the nature of creative ambitions. 

Progress, the sense that every aspect of life is characterized by its potential improvement toward an ideal good or perfect truth, is difficult to deny. Progress is the central message of business, technology, religions, governments, non-profit organizations, self-help books, do-it-yourself webpages, primary schools and university curricula, therapists, overbearing parents, the lifestyles portrayed on television in dramas and reality home shows, movies and beauty products and infomercials. This is not an exhaustive list. Progress is an implicit theme in many evaluations of significant personages: if you, or had you only, worked harder, you too could or could have achieved the musical flights of Mozart or the literary prowess of Shakespeare or the lap times of Michael Phelps, invented forms of painting greater than Picasso or defeated Pelé or Michael Jordan one-on-one or trained your horse to gallop away from Secretariat. This tendency to define everything as progress applies to whole realms of human endeavor. Since Einstein, for instance, physics has essentially been a pursuit of perfection in the form of an elusive grand unified theory. 

These notions are not problematic individually. The danger lies in the pressure of context which, like the forces that turn charcoal to diamond, threatens to convert every form of meaning – love, lust, beauty, justice, etc. – into metrics evaluated comparatively. This pressure causes people to forget that if you are freezing to death or want to draw a picture charcoal is more valuable than diamond. In other words, we give up things we feel for things we measure.

This critique of contemporary culture is, by now, well-known even to occasional readers. The pressure of ubiquity and what it compels us to give up are bad. But a blurring of purpose often results that is even worse. Sometimes intentional, often casual, the blurring is seen in numerous areas of human endeavor. The popularization of engineering and engineering-style problem-solving rooted in efficiency, mantras of self-help groups and five- or twelve- step treatment programs, the rulings of justice systems, the tenets of dogmatic practices including religions, and the pronouncements of taste-makers and cultural critics, to name but the biggest culprits, share a homogenizing impulse. In these arenas, what is deemed good becomes an example of truth or what is asserted as true is declared ipso facto good. 

It is unnecessary to rehearse a litany of instances in which something true isn’t good or something deemed good isn’t literal fact to realize that the homogenizing impulse often leads to false equivalences. With some reflection, examples are self-evident. What is more important but less obvious is that good and true become synonyms to the detriment of both concepts. Where good and true are understood in advance as co-mingled, people are motived to ask half as many questions, to investigate half as long, to reach conclusions twice as fast. Believing good and true are two aspects of the same judgement renders everything determined to be false automatically bad regardless of its potential effect in experience or as inspiration. This has led centuries of serious-minded folk to reject myths and folktales and rites and rituals as so much nonsense.