Shifting Societal Values: How Progress and Development Could Simply Be Illusions

Is there such a thing as “good development” or “progress?” As the semester has moved forward, this question has continued to plague my thoughts. I have continually tried to confront the issues we’ve been studying without bias. I have tried to understand the values and limitations of all actors, especially ones that I do not initially agree with. However, this unbiased approach has left me confused about where I stand and whom I support. I find myself seeing murkier lines between what is considered “good development” and what is considered “harmful development.”

For example, the mines and dams that various Thai villagers are protesting against destroy local culture and livelihoods. Because these local cultures are falling victim to big development, we assume that means that those development projects are “bad.” However, we forget that these same dams and mines also serve greater national and international populations by supplying valuable energy and mineral sources (which are key factors in maintaining modern livelihoods). Thus, to criticize these development projects means an attack on the way human society has chosen to progress for the last century since the Industrial Revolution. This brings to light the strange paradigm of societal values and the consequent actions we take based on these values.

The world is developing in the manner it is developing because we as a human race had previously determined that this is the “right” way. However, now we are beginning to introduce a new discourse that places the preservation of local culture over the progression of modern luxuries. But why? Why are we now taking this stance? Were we previously ignorant as to what “good development” is? Where we “wrong” before? Are new grass-roots development plans necessarily “better?” Is it really that “bad” that 99.9% of people in Thailand have readily available electricity, even though some people had to be relocated to make power lines? Is it really that “bad” that we have the necessary minerals to create computers that allow global levels of information and communication to be readily available, even though they came from mines that destroyed some local environments?

The problem inevitably arises due to the basic question of how we define “good” from “bad” (because progress and development should ideally be the pursuit of good for all). Do these terms carry any inherent meaning beyond what we as a society decide to ascribe to them? “Good” and “bad” are determined by the values a society has at a given moment in time. However, it is true that throughout history these values can change across groups of people and across time itself. An example of these changing definitions is: less than a hundred and fifty years ago, the majority of the world (which consisted of equally intelligent, rational human beings) decided that it was “good” to enslave millions of people based on their race. In fact in their opinion, enslaving these people was a necessary part in developing the world for the future. The triangle trade was seen as progress.

Although it is now our current opinion that this was an atrocious embarrassment to human history, can we truly pass this judgment? The problem with doing so lies in the inherent failure for us as a human race to firmly decide on a clear cut meaning for “good” and “bad.” Our own judgments on slavery are based on our current societal values, which could also be seen as wrong and vile by some distant group of human beings in the future. In Aldous Huxley’s timeless novel, A Brave New World, Huxley presents a new society in which the societal values of today, i.e. love, commitment, individualism, equality and family are seen as base and vile. In fact, Huxley presents a society in which slavery and inequality are re-championed: some people are bred to be subservient to others for the sake of efficiency and the benefit of society.

Along these lines, who is to say that our newly placed value on grass-roots development over big development will not later be judged as “misguided” and “wrong?” So my challenge to the human race is, is there anything inherently good? Is there anything that is timelessly bad? Or are these merely self-imposed terminologies that we attempt to use to better understand the insane (and dare I suggest meaningless) world we live in?

Furthermore, I have come to the serious conclusion that every action has both negative and positive effects. There will always be someone who is sacrificing their potential well being for the development of others, because we all have different values. So how can we decide on what development project to enact? Is there such a thing as true development or progress? Or are we just constantly improving on some things at the cost of others, thereby creating a disguised inertia, an inertia in which our world is constantly changing, but nothing is really improving? Progress and development become nothing more than illusions that we perceive to be occurring when in reality there is no net change. There are only currents and shifts from one value set to a different value set, and it is this that we perceive as “change.”

There will always be problems in the world. But where do we go from here? How do we act if we can never really determine a right from wrong, and consequently can never truly progress? I suppose all we can really do is continue to act along the social and moral values given to us by our upbringing; to continue doing what we think is best, moral, right and good; and to continue hoping that these actions are helping the world in some way.

Michelle Nguyen
Brown University