Gospel of Progress
How our blind worship of perpetual growth conceals civilization’s deepest cracks
The thing about this system is that it’s not all broken. It works to a far degree, to a degree more than anything else that came before it. It’s just that we’ve put it on a pedestal, we who have called it perfect, at least in overall design, even if it does need a few tweaks here and there.
The kids who come out of Stanford are not stupid. They’re generally bright. It’s just that they’re not the most creative, innovative thinkers that we take them for. They are smart, and they do perform, but we extrapolate from that way more than we should. It doesn’t mean the system is working, or that we’ve discovered the end of history – the way things are, and, from here on out, always will be!
It’s this infatuation with our own brilliance that is our undoing. It’s our belief in Progress, in the particular way we believe in it. All parts of our life and society are subject to Progress. There is always something New to replace the old. We have come to expect a sense of forward progress through our lives – the better things, flashier gizmos, more powerful software. We believe constantly that every step we take as a society removes us more from our past, and takes us that much closer to Perfection. This foundational rite of our civilization is complete, we believe. It’s just the refinement and polishing of rough edges that remains.
We are not the first civilization to reach such a point of hubris; indeed, we probably won’t be the last. The foundational worldview is never permanent. It was, in Rome or Constantinople, never the Han Dynasty, nor the Egyptians nor the Babylonians. All of these great civilizations met their end, their strong foundations, which had stood for generations, crumbling finally into memory and dust.
By comparison, our civilization is a baby. The principle of capitalist democracies is just over around 300 years old, its current heyday no more than 70. We are living in Pax Utopia, but now the cracks are emerging at the edges.
We have placed too much stock in this notion that we’re perfect. We fail to see the deep structural problems in the way that our society works. The huge cracks at the base of our foundation. Why is it that we need to be right so badly? Why must we believe unquestioningly in Progress? What happens if things stop going up and to the right?
The entire defense of this civilization is that it is an engine of Progress. It is not any single state that has achieved in particular that testifies to its greatness, but the sequence of states it has moved through. Slavery to civil rights to gender equality to gay rights. The drumbeat of forward-marching Progress.
No matter how things are, or ever will be, we believe they will get better. That the way we have set up society makes “better” a matter of time, not a matter of happening at all.
But what is this so-called “engine of progress”? How does it work? What are its basic principles? And most importantly, can it really go on forever?
This engine is the marriage of talent and resources, with an incentive structure that rewards proper utilization. What previous civilizations did wrong was to develop a very static model of who ought to do what. They absconded themselves from the chains of the creative free-for-all. They valued security and stability over novelty, and ultimately someone else developed novelty instead, and obliterated them.
Our system works, we believe, because it is dynamic. The doors of opportunity are open to all comers. The treasure within for the taking by anyone who can prove themselves worthy. We cast away decrepit, defunct ways of doing things, in favor of the new, no matter who it hurts or what it costs.
It is possible that our openness to new ideas, even ones that make us uncomfortable, is truly revolutionary in the scope of human history. That of all the Amendments, it is the First, the right to free speech, that makes us truly unique. Perhaps that will continue to drive us forward until the end of time.
But even that is under attack by the powers that be. There are things you can’t say now, things you can’t even think—ideas that are verboten—even if they would work better than what we have right now. Race is one.
It is in this space, of the ideas that we are not willing to consider, that is the blind spot for our civilization. It is from this corner that the existential threats will come—precisely because we won’t see them coming. It will be someone else who does, who finds something that works better than what we have.