In Praise of Progress

Sometimes, it feels as if the most common riposte to the idea of human progress is “Progress? What has it done for me lately?” We humans tend to reset our expectations each time a prior aspiration is achieved. Let’s eradicate polio. Done. Now, let’s deal with all the other diseases. Let’s create societies governed by the rule of law. Done. Now, let’s turn to what the law actually says. Let’s guarantee every American “a chicken in every pot,” a phrase incorrectly attributed to Herbert Hoover in his 1928 presidential campaign but accurately capturing the drive to give every citizen food security. Done. Now, let’s focus on nutrition—on what kinds of calories we eat and not just whether we have enough. And so on and so forth.

The result, especially in the modern world, is perpetual discontent even in the face of considerable success addressing fundamental challenges. That can be a source of the next wave of progress. It can be. It can also be, and currently appears to be, a negative skew that colors our sense of reality in ways that impair our ability to solve those problems.

I just got back from a conference in Berkeley sponsored by the Roots of Progress Institute, an organization dedicated to developing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. It is one of a panoply of relatively new groups forming a self-anointed “Progress Movement,” which the organization I created, The Progress Network, is also part of. No one leads this movement.

And to be fair, it is not yet clear if this even is a movement rather than the aspiration to be one. It remains to be seen if these atoms in motion ever coalesce into something more focused and more culturally potent. All we know now is that there is a set of voices, people, institutions loosely aligned around the idea that human progress is real and magnificent and that we are selling ourselves and our culture short by over-emphasizing the harbingers of doom and underestimating the forces of progress.

One theme over the few days in the Bay, which I’ve also echoed, is that the belief in a better future is itself a key ingredient in creating a better future. There is no empirical evidence for that, and truly, it’s hard to see how there could be given that we don’t get to run controlled experiments on either the past or the future of societies. Yes, political scientists attempt to apply quantitative methods to the past and formulate testable hypotheses, so I’m sure someone could create a model of “optimistic” societies versus “pessimistic” ones. There has been some attempt to look at how “high trust” societies perform compared to low-trust ones. Francis Fukuyama in his book Trust, attempted to prove that trust is what distinguishes economic success from failure on a societal scale. After all, much of what we do is predicated not on the threat of legal action, should someone fail to do something we contractually agree on, but on the faith that they will do so regardless. If I send someone money online for a product, I expect to be sent it. That is an act of trust on a small scale, which is an essential building block of a functioning economy.

Intuitively, and observationally, it does seem that societies that are convinced about their capacity to generate progress, to improve the future, are more able to achieve collective goals. Certainly, the United States has been marked by its chronic belief in a better tomorrow, a belief that everywhere is in retreat today according to public surveys. If the conviction that we can create a better future is a core ingredient in creating a better future, then the obverse is also true: the conviction that we are creating a worse future may be one reason why we do.

This isn’t the same as the often-derided power of positive thinking at a personal level. Any one of us can delude ourselves about our abilities and whisper dulcet aphorisms as pablum to get us through the day Stuart Smalley style. Societies can all fall to delusion, but a collective energy that we can, with enough grit and determination and money and time and resources, power our way to solutions to problems can be transformative. Hence the John Kennedy speech in 1961 about the space race: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” That speech perfectly embodies the sentiment of Americans at the time, the belief as Vannevar Bush said, in the “endless frontier.”

That collective optimism isn’t just an American thing. Europeans felt it in the 1990s with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the surge of the European Union. China felt in the first decade of the 2000s as their economy surged in a wave of openness and liberalization. Perhaps the Athenians of the 5th century B.C. did as well; perhaps the Malian grandees of Timbuktu in the 14th century. Certainly the English at the height of the Victorian Age did.

Progress, Rediscovered: An article I enjoyed by Ronald Bailey. A new movement promoting scientific, technological, and economic solutions to humanity’s problems emerges.

One of the more notable aspects of two days of progress studies was what wasn’t said. Twelve hours each day, countless side conversations and panels and discussions, and I didn’t hear the words “Trump, Harris, Israel or Gaza.” Not one. Aside from how refreshing that was, it also spoke to a larger truth frequently forgotten in the haze of our dystopian media landscape. The U.S. election is important, but it isn’t nearly as important as the attention it receives would suggest. There are things going on with nuclear energy or AI or land use or education that will shape our near future profoundly and have precious little to do with who occupies the oval office. For sure, the regulatory framework here matters greatly, but that is often less about the party in power than the years of rules and bureaucracy that have accreted. Maybe one party will be better at reforming those, but few would argue that reform isn’t needed.

There is something infectious, contagious about optimism, about several hundred people jazzed at the idea of what is possible, and hard-nosed about what it takes to make it real. There is something heady about discussions of AI that don’t begin with The Terminator and end with the Matrix. There is something energizing about reflecting on the material progress humans have made even while recognizing that it’s neither complete nor encompasses the non-material needs of the spirit and family and communities. And above all, we all need frequent reminders that golden ages are not just myths of the past but aspirations, and that often, the greatest obstacles are the ones we create. Two days of progress talk was that reminder for me. This column is my reminder for you.