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 ProgrammeThemesSpeakers
Reinventing progress. - Unesco, October, 18th-19th 2008
Unesco, 125 avenue de Suffren, 75007 Paris
Click here to download the press kit (PDF)
Scientific discoveries, medical and technological advances – progress is the vital backdrop to our daily lives. But we all know that we have reached the end of the industrial phase that was the locomotive of the Western world for 200 years, a period of runaway progress that preferred to ignore the collateral cost: the poisoning of the planet and the depletion of its resources. For some years now, we have been aware that we must look at progress in another way and that we must invent another model for society.
The idea of "sustainable development" is quite recent, but also quite novel: a sustainable economy can create new prosperity. The ecological revolution can create wealth.
If we wish to reinvent progress, we must explore its potential and redefine the ethics that should govern our scientific, political and social models. Until now, any attempt to slow the development of knowledge has come to grief on the shores of human conscience… and its irresistible instinct for transgression! Whatever their intentions, it looks as if the discoverers are engaged in a headlong flight from reality.
Reinventing progress could, perhaps, begin with accepting the fact that any invention is an element of progress: a necessary first step to avoid sterile debates between partisans and opponents of progress.
Does not reinventing progress mean putting mankind at its centre? No matter what form it takes, progress springs from the human spirit and embeds itself in the lives of millions of men and women. Since progress begets progress, reinventing it implies, first and foremost, redirecting it in order to imagine our future. The excesses of industrialisation demonstrate the need to preserve the resources of our planet.
Any new "model" of progress must take into account the growing awareness of the world's peoples (at varying degrees), and the need to apply it to all sectors of society: science, of course, but also business, education, consumption, leisure and social relations.
What if reinventing progress consisted, first and foremost, of assuming responsibility for our lives and citizenship in a world whose injustices and complexity become apparent, a little more, every day?
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