Myth of Progress in the Modern World

By Omar Javaid

It is generally believed that scientific and technological revolution under free-market capitalism has made life better (easy, safe, productive, comfortable etc.) for humanity through constant innovation and improvement in standard of living of its inhabitants. The public in capitalistic societies are allowed to own property and receive incentives for contributing toward the society. The more the contribution is valued by the public, the more the incentive. The employed class receives salaries, the business owners receive profits depending upon how their contribution is valued in the market. There is a debate over the disproportionateness in the incentives received by the business owners, board members, CEOs and/or investors versus the employed class, however this debate is more academic in nature. Generally if the public has enough ways to distract itself (cinema, amusement parks, bars, night / strip clubs, porn, alcohol, cellphones, TV, gaming consoles, etc.), then society remains stable despite the disparity and extreme inequality.

The appraisal is only a myth as we will see in this post, fundamentally because the western civilization which is predominantly capitalistic in nature assumes man to be a material being, descendants of apes, with no soul (see Thomas Hobbes), and no accountability to any Higher Being / God / Deity. Despite being predominantly Christian, teachings of Christianity are not followed in the public sphere. Karen Armstrong in her book 'The Battle for God' while quoting Paul Sartre (French existentialist philosopher) explained that a 'God shaped hole' exists in modern civilization. The purpose of life which is idealized in the west is no more defined by the success in hereafter, rather exclusively in material terms, i.e. the purpose of life is to maximize wealth, freedom and pleasure. Spirituality when subtracted from life leaves mankind incomplete, this cannot be realized unless this incompleteness is experienced. Either this gap is filled by those who experience it (by reverting to Islam, as Christianity has already failed to do so), or they tend to distract themselves through various means mentioned above.

On top of this, desire for worldly pleasures and personal freedom can only be tamed with an individualistic lifestyle which is also defended, its known as individualism. It is a little surprise why such a way of living would force the institution of family to die and would force an individual to live alone whose primary commitment would be with the market, hence his identity would also be defined in the same context. The trends of out of wedlock births, percentage of marriages and percentage of divorces in western world, the percentage of people admitted in psychiatric hospitals or are facing clinical depression, are just a few pointers to confirm the above point.

Now such a spiritually & emotionally deprived society (thanks to scientific rationality) has created various products and services to cash on the problems created due to the said vacuum. Thats another distinguishing feature of capitalism, as it treats every problem and abnormality in a society as an opportunity to make money. Therefore as a system it doesn't really want to solve any problem, rather only eliminates the symptoms, while creating more side effects. Also getting to the root cause of various socioeconomic, psychological, problems isn't always possible thanks to the empirical limitation of scientific method, i.e. you can't see/experience everything with your 5 senses, even if the capacity of these senses is enhanced with binoculars, x-ray machine etc. This provides yet another excuse to capitalize by providing cosmetic solutions to wipe out only symptoms instead of the root cause, hence keep the opportunity (problem) alive to make money. Some examples are as follows:

• Take the entire pharmaceutical industry as an example, there is hardly any medicine which actually treats the root cause of a disease, and yet has side effects, where each side effect is another profit making opportunity for the pharma industry... 
• To kill loneliness (a resultant of individualism) various products are invented like social media, cell phones, gaming consoles, which does nothing but to create an illusion that the problem of loneliness has been solved...
• Lonely kids created a need for day care centers, and lonely elderly created a need for old homes, sexually deprived men created the need for prostitutes and porn, and pepper sprays to self-protect women when they are attacked by those sexually deprived men for whom porn isn't enough... 
• Various chemicals used in a variety of products cause cancer, but cancer treatment is yet another opportunity to make billions of dollar in the name of diagnostics, medicine etc. 
• Fast paced life made people look for fast food, and fast food consumption made them look for ways to burn fat or cure obesity related disease.... 
• Fast internet, fast cars, fast trains, all in an attempt to get ahead from others in a wild race to accumulate more and more, but to do this fossil fuel is burnt and pollution is created (not just in the form of greenhouse gases, toxic chemicals which are drained into the sea while extracting copper, aluminium etc are need to be accounted for)... The disease caused in turn are another opportunity to make billions of dollars...
• Furthermore genocide is committed in those countries who resist selling their oil or natural resources on terms dictated by their capitalist masters, and when the victims of such genocide fight back they are labeled as terrorists, which in turn creates another trillion dollar opportunity for military industrial complex to create all kind of weapons to fight the war against terrorism... 
• etc...

This is the myth of progress. Modernism gives temporary cosmetic solutions to mankind for problems itself has created, and the vicious circle goes on and on. The main stream media does an excellent job to highlight and apprais only the so called solutions while completely turning a blind eye toward the root cause of the underlying problems. Perhaps it is believed that the progress of the modern world is along the natural path of evolution (an idea in which the modern secular world have a blind faith), or social darwinism to be very precise (see Herbert Spencer) therefore the way things are moving is believed to be quite normal. However some wise people know otherwise, i.e. existence of modern western capitalist civilization is like a cancer which is eating up the body (planet earth) from the inside.

Animals has lived on this planet far more longer than mankind, in fact, mankind has also been here since at least 10,000 years, but the destruction which has been caused during last 200 years has no match to any damage done by those who came before. Previously mankind was living very much in harmony with nature, and consumed only what was needed. Greed was considered a bad thing, however capitalism turned it into something moral and a very powerful motivator toward so called growth and progress (its a long story how this happened). All religion consider Greed to be bad, and discourage it, Islam for example has warns its followers that they would be punished in hellfire if they are diverted with the concern of accumulating wealth more than their rivals in the material world (see Quran, Surah Takasur).

The purpose of this article finishes here, that was to bust the myth of progress in the modern world. The readers may post questions or highlight any discrepancy in the comments below. What needs to be done to cure this cancer at individual and collective level will be discussed in a separate post in future InshaAllah.

Author is a Gold Medalist in MS in Islamic Finance and has translated Phd thesis of Dr. Mufti Ismatullah sb which has been published in book form  titled 'Money and Its form: An analysis in the light of shariah' by Darulishaat. Author is also a reader on Islamic and western history, philosophy, and political theory and frequently writes on the subject as well. He is also Vice President of a modest Interest free Microfinance organization called GEAR (www.gear.org.pk).