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We are so used to humanity advancing in civilization, rights and freedoms that we take it for granted. But progress cannot be taken for granted because it is not linear; There are advances, of course, but also setbacks.
Renaissance violence. The topic ensures that, after the darkness of the Middle Ages, the civilized world flourished in the Renaissance. But neither the Middle Ages was so dark nor the Renaissance era so civilized; extreme violence is part of the B side of the times of Leonardo or Michelangelo. And although in some areas this era did bring progress, it was not enough to put an end to infanticide, a frequent practice in Europe until the 18th century.
The involution of Francoism. In the first third of the 20th century, Spanish women made notable advances. One of them was María Bernaldo de Quirós, the first female pilot and one of the first to divorce with the Republic. But after the war, came the involution, the rapprochement of the victorious side to Nazism and the four decades in which Franco ruled peacefully. Bernaldo de Quirós himself, who had supported the rebels, saw her divorce annulled.
The morale of the bomb. An objective form of progress is scientific advances, but can they be valued in the same way if they are analyzed from the moral point of view? The development of nuclear technology undoubtedly brought benefits to humanity, but the same cannot be said of its military use, a dilemma that has persisted since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and with which the fathers of the bomb, beginning with Robert Oppenheimer, had to deal.
Revolution and bombs. Social inequalities lie at the root of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), which was destined to change the country forever. However, despite the triumph of that movement, many of its leaders were assassinated, such as Emiliano Zapata, Álvaro Obregón or Pancho Villa. The death of the latter, which is one hundred years old today, occurred some time after the strange episode of the invasion that he led against the United States.
The last signature. The document that heads these lines, collected by the twitter account of the philosopher and historian Edgar Straehle, shows the last signature of Robespierre. A signature, as can be seen, incomplete (it was left only in ‘Ro’) because it was interrupted by the tumult that preceded his arrest. Under the revolutionary terror that he led, most of the executions affected the popular classes (read in the Spanish version of The Conversation).
The Tour is no longer like before. The hyper-professionalized Tour de France, whose current edition ends this Sunday, contrasts with the old images of this competition. In 1962, the director Louis Malle filmed the documentary Vive le Tour!, which reflects scenes that today would be inconceivable as groups of cyclists entering roadside bars and leaving with bottles of wine and beer to -supposedly- recharge their batteries. The bill then came to the organizers.
Opium stories. The opioid epidemic has devastated American society for the last two decades and has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as portrayed by The Empire of Pain, the revealing book by Patrick Radden Keefe, or the series Dopesick: Story of an addiction. But this is not the first crisis caused by this family of drugs in Western countries.
The US already experienced a similar situation after the Civil War, which was the great gateway for the massive use of opium. Military medics administered this drug on the battlefield to combat the pain of wounds, but while the violence subsided, dependence (Jstor daily explains it, in English) on this substance endured, to the point that the number of pre-conflict addicts had increased fivefold by the end of the 19th century, to 0.5% of the population.
By that time, opium had become a serious public health problem in China that led imperial authority to ban its sale and production in 1829-30. The United Kingdom’s interest in avoiding this prohibition and getting the Chinese market to reopen to British exports of this drug is found after the two Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) in which the Asian giant was defeated.
China reopened its ports to foreign products with easily imaginable consequences in the form of addiction and huge benefits for the British economy. On that occasion, in the same way that has happened in the first two decades of this century with pharmaceutical companies, it was not a criminal organization that facilitated drug use, but fully legal institutions.
