Progress: Verb

Idea of Progress, the theory that scientific progress drives social progress; that advances in technology, science, and social organization inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition.

Scientific progress, the idea that science increases its problem solving ability through the application of some scientific method.

Social progress, the idea that societies can or do improve in terms of their social, political, and economic structures.

Progress trap, the condition societies find themselves in when human ingenuity, in pursuing progress, inadvertently introduces problems that it does not have the resources to solve, preventing further progress or inciting social collapse.

In a series of extraordinarily eerie pictures, the lost world of North Brother - quarantine zone, leper colony and centre for drug addicts - has been brought back to life.

It is hard to believe that these echoing corridors and abandoned halls were home to hundreds of patients - or that a criss-cross of tree-lined avenues were once roads. 

But the haunting quality of these pictures makes it easy to imagine that it was a place of indescribable misery, which one inmate compared to the notorious black hole of Calcutta.


  1. progressivehumanity posted this