ABSTRACT
Progressivism, the pathological project of escaping from this condition in permanently restless forward movement, has taken its deep hold on people as an instinctive, desperate recoil from that loss of sense. The feedback process that it drives has now reached a level of intensity at which it is seriously eroding its own human and resource bases. In an accelerating process of positive feedback over the last three centuries, however, industrialisation has supplanted that interactivity with nature by an increasing technological dominion over it, and the associated accelerating urbanisation and artefactuality of living conditions have increasingly divorced people from that recuperative contact. Bacon's 'effecting of all things possible' for the ongoing betterment of the human condition, massively productive of material benefit as it has been, has thus ended by robbing people not just of an ecologically stable resource base, but of the essential conditions for making sense of humanity, of themselves, lives and mortality.
