Writers nowadays who value their reputation among the more sophisticated hardly dare to mention progress without including the word in quotation marks. The implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress that during the last two centuries marked the advanced thinker has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind. Though the great mass of the people in most parts of the world still rest their hopes on continued progress,it is common among intellectuals to question whether there is such a thing, or at least whether progress is desirable.
Up to a point, this reaction against the exuberant and naive belief in the inevitability of progress was necessary. So much of what has been written and talked about it has been indefensible that one may well think twice before using the word. There never was much justification for the assert ion that “civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction”, nor was there any ground for regarding all changes as necessary or progress as certain and always beneficial. Least of all was there warrant for speaking about recognizable “laws of progress” that enable us to predict the conditions toward which we were necessarily moving, or for treating every foolish thing men have done as necessary and therefore right.
But if the fashionable disillusionment about progress is not difficult to explain, it is not without danger. In one sense civilization is progress and progress is civilization. The preservation of the kind of civilization that we know depends on the operation of forces which, under favorable conditions, produce progress. If it is true that evolution does not always lead to better things, it is also true that, without the forces which produce it, civilization and all we value—indeed, almost all that distinguishes man from beast—would neither exist nor could long be maintained.
The history of civilization is the account of a progress which, in short space of less than eight thousand years, has created nearly all we regard as characteristic of human life. After abandoning hunting life, most of our direct ancestors, at the beginning of Neolithic culture, took to agriculture and soon to urban life perhaps less than three thousand years or one hundred generations ago. It is not surprising that in some respects man's biological equipment has not kept pace with that rapid change，that the adaptation of his non-rational part has lagged somewhat and that many of his instincts and emotions are still more adapted to the life of a hunter than to life in civilization. If many features of our civilization seem to us unnatural, artificial, or unhealthy, this must have been man's experience ever since he first took to town life, which is virtually since civilization began. All the familiar complaints against industrialism, capitalism, or over-refinement are largely protest against the new way of life that man took up a short while ago after more than half a million years' existence as a wandering hunter, and that created problems still unsolved by him.
When we speak of progress in connection with individual endeavors or any organized human effort, we mean an advance toward a known goal. It is not in this sense that social evolution can be called progress, for it is not achieved by human reason striving by known means toward a fixed aim. It would be more correct to think of progress as a process of formation and modification of the human intellect, a process of adaptation and learning in which not only the possibilities known to us but also our values and desires continually change. Its consequences must be unpredictable. It always lead into the unknown, and the most we can expect is gain an understanding of this kind of forces that bring it about, Yet, though such a general understanding of the character of this process of cumulative growth is indispensable if we are to try to create conitions favorable to it, it can never be knowledge which will enable us to make specific predictions. The claim that we can derive from such insight necessary laws of evolution that we must follow is an absurdity. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
1.How does the writer regard the intelligentsia?
2.Which of the following best expresses the writer’s thought?
3.Which of the following proverbs/sayings best expresses the meaning of writer's quotation?
4.According to the writer, which of the following words best applies to the modern man?
5.For the writer, which of the following is true?
