Social Progress, Dreams of Perfect Societies and the Love's Role

Love can be a blessing, and can save us. But some of its forms are dangerous. The love of some political causes or of some ideas of good and progress are a source of fanaticism and hate, which can be a source of evil, conflicts and bloody wars.

Maybe because of this and of our conscience that abstract appeals to love are largely worthless, love is rarely presented as part of the solution to the evils of our societies. The solutions are mainly set in grounds of education, removal of poverty and elevation of social ethics.

But is this last standpoint consistent?

We may argue that levels of education have increased, as have global social wealth and our ethical consciences, yet our many social problems remain. We may even sustain that there are no sound progresses, as some distinguished thinkers support:

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.
Ralph W. Emerson, 1803-1882, America writer, Self-Reliance.

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, Physician, in EinsteinQuotes.html, rescomp.stanford.edu, by Kevin Harris

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968, American politician, Strength to love

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Norton Whitehead, 1861-1947, English philosopher and mathematician, Adventures in Ideas.

You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers, 1879-1935, American actor, in New York Times de 23/12/1929

Today we know how to measure, to weigh, to analyse the Sun. Science is elucidative, enriching, conqueror, triumphant. And yet this living knowing is the one which makes and threatens the annihilation of mankind.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V

Legitimately we can still stand and believe in our social progress and in a better future. But whatever our position is, the dream of a truly fully balanced society, without major conflicts, is obviously just that: a dream. And in this viewpoint, Ovid is right: we may see the better, and approve of it, but we don’t follow it. Our nature does not allow it… unless we set up other more drastic paths, namely technological futuristic ones, involving modifications in our genome, or prothesis to our brain, or chemical drugs.

But that is another story, raising other problems (see the essay and the quotations: Robots and Love).