Progress is easy to question. Crises are featured in the newspapers every day, while our progress – real and permanent ones – is often in the background, where it is easy to forget it. Today’s technologies have their dark side: smartphones keep us in touch with others by increasing stress, social media makes politics more evanescent, our rockets launch missiles and satellites, and our fuels and plastics put the planet.
29-30 September
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by Pier Luigi Pisa
It’s easy to be bitter or lose hope. The feeling of the apocalypse is natural. But it is not new. Voltaire too was worried about no-vaxes; Cesare Beccaria of religious violence; Shakespeare wrote that fake news had invaded the streets; and in 1506 Ercole Bentivoglio urged Machiavelli to write more Decennali because he feared that, without good historians, future generations would never know how terrible those years were – the years that produced Michelangelo’s Mona Lisa and David. Many eras that we now see as examples of progress were actually filled with fear. And this should give us hope.
Many find it strange that I, as a historian, write science fiction, but nothing resembles the future more than the past: a long period in which societies change and technologies transform the world. Nothing helps us to understand the future like studying the past, just as nothing makes the progress we have forgotten so visible. In the Uffizi, in Florence, there is a 1627 painting by Giovanni da San Giovanni, the Venus combing Love. If you look at it closely, Venus uses a particular comb to remove lice, because at that time everyone had lice, and therefore even the gods were thought to have them. We do not. Lice treatments are a twentieth-century invention, an achievement that was a dream in centuries past, but which we have forgotten.
This is the classic kind of progress – huge, improving people’s lives – that we most easily forget. Sewer systems, business books, x-rays, MRIs, public education, refrigerators, anesthesia, even comfortable chairs – all of these treasures improve and save lives every day. And they show that progress exists.
We often judge our world by what we want it to be. Science fiction is a stimulus, like an annoying gadfly, it shows us other ways the world could be: chilling dystopias and wonderful cities on the moon. Science fiction is very different from the past and the present: because it makes us judge the present on the basis of thousands of imaginary futures that question the status quo. But when we begin to doubt that humanity has made progress, and if we can make more, we must remember that the real comparison to be made is with the past, with the world before. The distribution of Covid vaccines – like that of head lice treatments – was not as fair and fast as we would have hoped. We should have done better. But we have vaccines, and the technology that made them possible is already accelerating treatments for other diseases, and will do so for the next few decades. Perhaps our handling of Covid, especially in the US, was only 70 percent of our chances, but in the past, defeating a pandemic was considered a miracle (and 70 percent of a man-made miracle is progress. which is beyond the hopes of our ancestors). In 2020, I too, like many others, reread Petrarch’s letters about the Black Plague, and I saw how he felt helpless, terrified, while we in 2020 were making ourselves strong knowing that there were laboratories where vaccines and treatments were being developed. . Even that hope, an armor against despair, must be considered progress.
Technology accelerates. It has been transforming our world for millennia and will transform it more rapidly in the coming years. And some of the dreams of Voltaire, Shakespeare and Beccaria have not yet been realized. But we did things they hadn’t even imagined because they had no idea that humanity would ever be capable of it. In Florence, in the historic Spedale degli Innocenti, Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Magi, from 1485/8, shows the children killed in the “massacre of the innocents” so that the orphans, looking at that painting, could prepare for the fact that many of them would not lived a long time.
This is no longer the case for our orphans. Neither Shakespeare nor Petrarch ever dreamed of a world in which most children would one day live long. When we ask ourselves what technologies will do in the next 50 or 100 years, we must remember the little big gains that have improved our lives forever, even if, so far, they have only fulfilled 70 percent of our hopes.
* Historian and writer