Is progress making us practically useless?

When you look at all the extraordinary things humans have done, it’s not just strange but utterly bewildering that: (a) noone has designed an app that enables us all to get along together; and (b) how helpless most of us become when technology breaks.

The more the world progresses, in technological leaps and quantum bounds, the less those who benefit from progress seem able to perform practical tasks.

Having experienced both a groundwater flood and two days without power this week, I understand some of this helplessness. Middle-classers are so dependent on technology, and on those with the skills to wield such technology, that when things go wrong we can’t do much except wring our hands, curse Eskom and order a pizza delivery.

This is not a rant about how lucky we are compared with those who still do not have access to electricity or running water. I’m just wondering about how we define progress.

A “progress” was originally a journey undertaken by royal personages to visit their subjects. Normal people would just take a trip, but kings and queens needed all sorts of tents and armies and horses and chefs and banners and things, so their large party took a long time to make any progress.

In the 1600s, the common man adopted the word progress and it came to mean any sort of growth or development. Progress can be fast or slow.

As long as there is some forward movement it is still called progress.

The odd thing about progress, etymologically speaking, is that it almost didn’t make it as a word.

In the 18th century, British lexicographers those who approve all the words accepted as proper English decided they no longer liked the sound of progress.

Royal excursions were no longer as popular and the public hadn’t taken to progress in a big way, so they decided it should be stopped in its tracks and left on the side of the road.

After the Brits called an end to progress and threw it out of the Oxford English Dictionary, some progressive Americans launched a campaign to rescue it.

Once they had sufficiently proven that progress was indeed a popular word in the US, the Brits reluctantly readmitted it into dictionaries, appended by the scarlet label “Americanism”.

Progress simply means to go forward, but is it progress if development in one area is accompanied by regress in another? How much have we progressed when most of us are unable to fend for ourselves in the event of service breakdown?

I’m not saying everyone should know how to dig a French drain or fix a circuit breaker, but such arcane knowledge has become scarce, which partly explains our panic when things go wrong and we haven’t the slightest idea what to do about them.

Progress relies on human collaboration. Perhaps we’d move forward more rapidly if all schools taught not only academic subjects but survival skills.

Incidentally, last year I spoke to Thulani Madondo, director of the Kliptown Youth Programme, who would also like to see more attention paid to the practical professions. A three-month plumbing course, for instance, costs up to R20,000, way out of reach for most young people who want to learn a trade.

“We need to convince more donors to fund those trade courses,” Madondo said.

“It’s very rare to find people interested in this kind of funding; everyone wants to fund university careers, but we invite plumbers and carpenters and mechanics as well as business people to come and talk to our young people.

“Not all of us can be academics. There’s nothing wrong with going to a trade school instead of university, if it is made possible.”

On top of that, I think we should all have some basic knowledge of how things work.

It would be nice to know what to do when water starts welling up through your bathroom floor and you can’t search online because there’s no power for Wi-Fi and you can’t use your phone as a hotspot or call a plumber because you (again) forgot to charge the battery-operated phone charger.