INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM
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Jacob Weisberg:
Orthodox Jewish mathematicians reading pornogra–
phy on the Web-how many friends like that do you have?
Edward Rothstein:
Let me clarify what I was trying to express about
progress. I don't think that the notion of progress is nonexistent outside
of technology. I do think, though, that there has been a dramatic
change. At one time, there was a strong argument,
a
fa
Hegel, that a
progressive evolution of human consciousness was taking place. Later,
a
fa
Marx, a progressive evolution of human society was asserted. These
ideas-and many others that have defined a progressive course for
humanity-are no longer tenable. There are still Hegelians and Marx–
ists just as there are still religious people who believe that progress will
take place according to these old models. Even the ideology of demo–
cracy can have a progressive element in it; for example, the argument
has been made that democracy provides a stable point at which history
and social evolution is going to come to an end. But I don't think that
most of society thinks about life in this way, believing either in the sta–
bility of our current status, as the culmination of a long progressive
road, or in the evolutionary status of human history, in which we are
proceeding to even greater levels of enlightenment or justice. My sense
is that, generally, people feel that whatever we have got here, we want
to keep getting or keep improving, but that we can't rely on some notion
of inevitable progress. And in fact, the only place we can see progress
taking place, not as a theory or a hope or a belief, but in tangible, con–
crete ways, is in the development of technology. Technology has become
an unusual repository of human hopes and aspirations right now; but
elsewhere the notion of progress is not as strong as it once was.
Mark Mirsky:
Just one tiny rebuttal. I'm a professor at a university
which I feel is often paralyzed by ideas of progress-ideas of particular
human studies, black studies, Puerto Rican studies, Jewish studies, and
so on. This notion of progress has so mesmerized City College that it
seems individual programs forget their debt to the broader world of the
humanities.
Edward Rothstein:
Okay, but this is going to lead us into a whole other
discussion. Maybe
I'll
retreat a little from my broad point. The idea of
progress does indeed live, but it's fairly sickly, while technology has this
aura around it that now seems fairly invulnerable. We can discuss these
various other eruptions and incidents another time.
