Progress and it's Consequences

We humans pride ourselves on progress. We’ve progressed from cavemen to kings, from hunter-gatherers to genetic engineers. We can build rockets that fly to the moon, cars that purr like cats and iPods that sing in our ears. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way (babe). Though I often question the virtue of progress, I guess I wouldn’t voluntarily go back to the trials and tribulations of life in the Middle Ages.
In school we were taught about all the advances mankind has made over the centuries. We told of the glorious inventions of the industrial age and the huge technological steps made in the early 20th century. Seldom we were, or do we ask how all this progress is possible. If I were to take a wild guess I would say that the vast majority of what we consider progress was only possible because of war, slavery, brutality, oppression and plain old cruelty.
It’s a hypothesis I am not prepared to examine in depth for I’d have to take six months off of work (hey, what a great idea), but it is certainly worthy of a few moments thought. Of course there have been inventions that came through good hard work by individual scientists in their laboratories. As far as I know da Vinci didn’t have a team of slaves doing all his thinking for him. Just think about the role slaves played in history: Egyptian pyramids, railroad to the American West Coast, Roman cities.
What about war? How often has “progress” been used as an excuse the legitimize war? How often have we heard the statement “We have to fight this battle to preserve the American way of life”?
Taking these ideas into consideration serves only to increase my distaste of the concept of advancement.