The Myth Of Progress

Jeremy Blincoe titled this series ‘The Myth of Progress.’ It is unfortunately an apt title, for the word ‘progress’ suggests improvements or developments, a ‘myth’ indeed when one begins to take for granted a world in which the very climate seems hell bent on global devastation due to human indifference to the world in which it lives. As Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontents, the “fateful question” for Humanity is whether the instinct for aggression and self‐destruction” will dominate, noting that: “Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent… [that] they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” Freud hailed this as the cause of a general “mood of anxiety,” and there is indeed a degree of anxiety in Blincoe’s work, albeit expressed with poetic beauty. – Ashley Crawford