## 36 About Progress

There's a question that's been bothering me for decades: is progress really necessary? When I talk about progress, it's very vague. There are many kinds of progress in human life. I'm not saying that we should go back to living like the first Homo sapiens in the cave. I'm not saying to go back to the Middle Ages. Scientific progress is great, but sometimes there is a downside. We're very happy to travel by car and plane, but it's bad for pollution, for the planet, for the animals. We are very happy to have nuclear power to produce electricity, but there are also nuclear weapons. Does progress make us happier? I'm always thinking about tribes that have been kept very far away from our modern world. No progress for years, but aren't they happy? They lived with nature, with their own values, their own way of trading, etc... Often our progress has destroyed them, not only with diseases.

When I'm doing genealogy, I wonder about the way my ancestors lived, the harshness of their lives, their hope. They worked in the fields, they were craftsmen, they produced what they needed or what their village needed. My grandfather was poor when he was young because his father had died in the First World War. But he was a happy boy, ... until he had to work in difficult conditions at the age of 13. He did sports, was happy to discover France in 1936 with his first holidays, but felt that a war was coming. He fought on the streets for social progress with the trade unions. He saw so much progress in his life, but also a hard life after the Second World War, when everything had to be rebuilt. I don't know when he was happiest in his life. It's a difficult question for me too. Maybe it's after 35 or 40 years? Maybe when you don't have so many difficulties to live your life, when you have a house, when you have good food, when it's not too cold in winter, etc. But if I'm happy today, there are so many people 
in this world who are in difficult circumstances. I really think that I have too much and I don't need all this progress, but it's difficult to let something go.

Our progress in the modern world involves many environmental issues. I wouldn't be thinking about the weight of progress if there weren't such problems. I can see that my ancestors, once confined to one region, were suddenly spread all over France, and perhaps now all over the world, after the industrial revolution in the 19th century. Time accelerated. For centuries, people stayed in their region, except when there were wars or catastrophes. Today, migrations are more important and often linked to the history of colonisation and the wealth of states. People are always looking for progress in their lives, or what they think is progress. Are we able to sort all this out in our lives? It's very difficult to avoid some achievements. If you were a tribe in the forest, cut off from the rest of the world for centuries, could you choose between the ability to preserve food for longer, to have access to health care, to live without pollution, to always have fresh food, to cure your illness with plants...? It's hard 
to refuse some of the advances if you can't see the inconveniences. That's what we're facing with the ecological revolution. We feel free to travel in our cars and planes. If you only have a bicycle or your feet, you feel like you're going back a century. We look only at our personal lives, not at the global life of the planet. We may think that we are alone in making these efforts, when other people are spoiling these efforts by wasting resources. 

During the last election campaign in France, I heard this speech that France is not a big polluter in the world... Of course, we are only 0.9% of the planet. But we emit 1% of the CO2, and more if you take into account what we buy from other countries. And it's a lot more if you look at history since the industrial revolution. It's just that we forget that we share the same planet, a finite space, with people, animals, plants... If you think that plastic was a step forward to protect some goods, think about the consequences for the whole planet now. There is no one in the world who can say: "Hey, stop it, it's not good for the planet if you consider the consequences in relation to the gain". So when I see the label "progressive" on something, I wonder if that's the right word, and sometimes it's better to be conservative to preserve the common good, the collective interest. So the world isn't binary between those who are for progress and those who are against all progress. Don't forget that we brought progre
ss to the populations of Africa or America that we evangelised ... by massacring them when they refused (or simply by our diseases). Now we can see flying cars as progress because they have been described in classic science fiction books or films. We can see our smartphones as an advance, with visual conferencing and so much more. Is it really progress for communication, for travelling, for working... if the planet Earth is burning? I question a lot of this progress, much more than when I was younger and more carefree. 

2Dɛ

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