LIFE MATTERS: Have We Truly Progressed or Just Survived?

By COL Dencio S. Acop (Ret), PhD

Can we say we’ve progressed in life? I’m sure we have to some extent. How about the world? Has the world progressed? I’m certain it has too, to some degree. Then, why doubt? I’m not sure that it is a doubt. But it is rather more a statement of fact. I think it has something to do with the shortness of human life. Progress denotes learning, and while man has learned through his lifetime, his life ceases at some point. Such learning may be passed on to the next generation, and this is desirable. Especially when the lessons learned are enhanced thereby moving on to more advanced learning. But what kinds of lessons are learned? Well, there are different types of lessons to be learned almost as many as there are the various aspects of human life from cradle to grave. There are the small lessons as well as the big lessons in life. While the lessons themselves are important, the process by which these lessons are imparted is just as important and perhaps even more critical. Indeed, “no man is an island”, and humans cannot but interact with the march of populations through time. Individuals are just as essential as organizations. Therefore, there is hierarchy; There had to be. Chaos and anarchy cannot survive humanity but peace and order. There had to be a leader and followers. The code by which organizations from family to tribe lived by had to redound to the essential element of what benefited the members, foremost of which was their survival. As needs were met by organized survival mechanisms, their satisfaction progressed from basic to higher needs. Even before Abraham, man had always recognized both his natural limitations as well as his inclinations for awareness of a higher, supreme being. Fast forward to today’s moral clarity as learned through the centuries since Abraham all the way through the New Testament, and we find a moral code whose clarity is widely documented and whose reach is worldwide. This writing argues that it is this moral clarity which ultimately defines whether we have made progress or not in this life.

When we have our alumni class reunions, what is so striking about these gatherings that occur after what is basically a lifetime? Of course, it would be such a joy to once again be reunited with familiar faces after decades of not seeing each other. There is the welcome wholesome vibe of seeing families in lieu of the schoolboy or girl who once stood or sat just beside us daily in the classroom. There may be some sadness too from learning about classmates or their loved ones who’ve gone ahead of us. Others may still be in the process of dealing with debilitating challenges. Then there is the pride felt from seeing classmates who’ve had very successful careers or done some very notable achievements which made them famous. We also like to take pride in the spoils falling out from a classmate’s worthy achievement. The moment of a reunion can also befall us with mixed feelings of awe at a classmate’s overly grown respectability as well as the nostalgia of the all too familiar “boys will be boys” (or “girls will be girls”) familiarity from childhood memory. It can also become a window into the souls of attendees when the kinds of lives lived enter the picture. Neither judgmental nor condemning, the point here is that it is what it is, at that point. One may see a classmate he hasn’t seen in years and say, “he hasn’t changed a bit at all”. Or another might see a long-lost classmate whom he thinks has changed so much he now appears unrecognizable. Now, I’d like to move over to the bit about choosing a speaker from the group or giving an award to an alumnus from the group. I noticed that oftentimes, some alma maters execute such selections based on the amount of material resources an individual candidate has managed to give. I’d like to believe that alumni associations ought to recognize alumni deserving of such honors as those who’ve lived their lives closest to the alma mater’s motto in the truest sense. If we’ve noticed, most alma mater mottos advocate the advancement of moral excellence. Whether in Latin or some other language or vernacular, such mottos advance moral ideals more than anything else. Therefore, in our gatherings toward the twilight of our lives, have we come to share that we have tried to live up to those ideals of our alma mater? Or are we there to skirt the issue focusing merely on just having survived? 

Now, let’s move up a little and apply the same barometer to the macro sphere of our existence. Through time, the world has constantly been at war. It has seen tribal wars over food and territory, regional wars over geographical boundaries and natural resources, religious wars, and global wars to create incessant empires whose scope is simply the expansion of dominance over all worldly competitors. The world has learned painful lessons from these wars. In respites between these wars and even alongside them, man has managed to live his life fully anyway through creative advances in the arts and sciences. These advances grew from Europe and spread like wildfire to every corner of the world. Then the greatest of wars happened, twice even, both just in the previous century. Just to name some of these man-made modern disasters, World Wars I and II were quickly followed in succession by the Korean War, Vietnam War, Soviet-Afghan War, Gulf War, Yugoslav Wars, Rwandan Civil War, US-Afghan War, Iraq War, Arab Spring Civil Wars, War against Boko Haram, War against ISIS, Russia-Ukraine War, Israel-Hamas War, Israel/US-Iran War, etc. Despite the creation of the United Nations, a universal organization to prevent wars implementing a key lesson learned from WWII, wars continue. The presence and absence of wars illustrate in no clearer terms the kind of progress achieved by the world and the lack of it. Progress has been temporal at best and worst. While the consequences of lives lost and properties destroyed on the ground create some seemingly logical explanations, the alleged truths hardly seem visible to ordinary people who are not privy to the wheeling and dealing which goes on in the corridors of power of the involved protagonists. Between and among interacting individual vested interests using national interests merely as legitimate fronts. It almost always seems like it is the ordinary people down below disinterested in power who suffer the whims and caprices of those few up top who do. Even in the age of AI, there are some things that do not ever change. It is the same loss of moral clarity which has ultimately defined the kind of progress we have made in this world and in this life. And judging from what we are seeing in the world today, this is true whether the world likes to believe it or not.