Pay attention to the “progress” you want, because you could get it …
It was better when it was worse. Agree: it is a cliché, one of the many that the older ones are used to repeat in the bench speeches in public gardens. But we cannot deny that the tradition and conscience of a people rests in popular wisdom. We are so leaning forward that we risk moving our physical and mental center of gravity too far, compromising a balance that never seems to be so precarious as today. So caught up in thinking exclusively about tomorrow that we do not care at all about what is currently happening around us, moreover forgetting with guilty superficiality the teachings of the past.
We are all a bit immersed in this unstable situation and we all seem unable to evaluate the things that happen to us between head and neck with the help of experience, of the teaching of history, of the skills acquired along the path of evolution. It should not be forgotten that the theory of evolution, which fascinated physiologists, naturalists, philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, from Malthus to Darwin and Wallace, placed at the center of speculation the study of the mechanisms that lead to the change of living species but always through a reasoned comparison between a past that has formed all species in an evolutionary process, partially influenced by human activities, which we already experience in today's everyday life.
On the subject, I like to dwell on a corollary of the evolutionary theory, the one that attributes a fundamental role for our future to the diversity found in the many living species. According to the classical evolutionists, the individuals who will be more likely to survive will be those who have best been able to adapt to the environment in which they lived, through the study of everything around us with the necessary contribution of several disciplines that allow us to correctly analyze those phenomena. .
Today, concepts such as "resilience" and "biodiversity" are going crazy and these theoretical concepts seem to be inspired by the highest state and social strategies, without however taking care not to use these terms inappropriately. Resilience, which should be the result of a reasoned resistance to unfavorable circumstances, is confused with mere passivity and the term "biodiversity" is used, which should be the sum of evolutionary thought, even where it would be better to speak of confusingly standardizing all forms of diversity in a cauldron that relentlessly brews a soup devoid of any identity. We have become champions in the art of passively tolerating everything in the name of a resilience devoid of any volitional element and we sing more and more the praises of a biodiversity which, in practice, means not distinguishing one species from another at all in order to better protect its preservation by making it all a shapeless and incoherent mass of impossible survival.
We applauded as idiots the fictitious and forced abolition of genres by decree, as if to say: from today there are no longer the differences that nature has created because we have decided it and woe to those who argue that insects are not needed to pollinate flowers because the flowers perfectly know how to pollinate themselves or that the underground sciences can now be (dangerously) confused with those of the atmosphere. Science is now a political question and in a world where an ignorant and haughty girl is allowed to dictate the programmatic lines to the powerful of the Earth, everything is now possible, we know, but a beautiful series of perplexities faces the limelight of so much spectacularization of the science.
More than the nonsense of Greta it would be appropriate to remember the teaching of Carlo Rubbia, who, at the reception ceremony of the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1984, addressed young people, inviting them not to be afraid of the future because progress technology and science would certainly have found solutions to the great evils of that time. The positive attitude of the scientist has now been outclassed by a widespread catastrophism of manner, in a senseless race to predict all the worst for the still living zombies only in a handful of years and now those who shoot the biggest and most poisonous take on d office has the privilege of being able to impose itself on anyone, as bearer of the Word.
The most glaring inconsistencies of the new television scientists and mass agitators are as varied as they are difficult to contest (one would go from retrograde, from dirty polluters in principle, even from no-vax ). But if we were still able to pause for a moment in the deemed salvific race towards a pre-packaged future, we should also consider that even Galileo Galilei, by far the most philosopher among the great scientists of the past, never came to such confusion between science, politics, ethics, theory of the state. Precisely in honor of the principle of biodiversity, for which all diversity is necessary for evolution, one should not allow to confuse disciplines that are too different with each other, beautifully exchanging their very different methods, in the name of a unique scientific path, which, coincidentally , the housekeeper on duty knows perfectly well, to be carried out rigorously all huddled behind the flag on duty, equally rigorously created ad hoc .
Sometimes it seems to go back to the time of Khrushchev who indicated in the glorious conquest of space (costing dozens of deaths among Russian cosmonauts, forced to very questionable experiments whose almost certainly lethal outcome was perfectly known) as the world revenge of the proletariat. Far be it from me to give advice, but I would be careful of such easy adherence to the great ecological issues, the same to advocate with total superficiality the theory of "happy degrowth" or, again, aim solely at accelerated decarbonization and the race towards electricity, We could stumble upon more or less hidden obstacles, but certainly not negligible.
What makes everything more worrying, as I have been writing on these pages for years, is the tendency to throw oneself on the "new" before having reasonably verified, at least with an empirical method, that the "old" should not be dusted off and re-evaluated quickly and fury a few years later. It has already happened with the unjustly retired radio, with the widespread use of plastic packaging, with the premature abandonment of agriculture in the field in favor of the production of more elaborate goods. I started by talking about commonplaces and therefore I will not exempt myself from unraveling one of the most reclusive: those who leave the old road for the new, know what they leave and do not know what they find .
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/attenti-al-progresso-che-desiderate-perche-potreste-ottenerlo/ on Wed, 24 Nov 2021 03:46:00 +0000.