Let’s see if we can resurrect a word that has fallen out of favour: “progress”.
Humanity has made fabulous progress in the last two centuries, thanks to science and technology. People live longer and healthier, travel widely, learn anything they want, hear about the planet. There has never been a better time to be alive. But there will be better ones ahead. That’s progress.
Progress got a bad name with that phrase “that’s progress”, which became sarcastic. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”. Every human action is imperfect. Every change to reality has unintended consequences. We must focus on the nett results. We don’t know when we are well off.
We are constantly at risk of losing progress to nostalgia, cynicism, and magical thinking. Right now the USA is hell-bent on bringing back disease, misogyny, racism, and slavery.
Right now, we need optimism and forward momentum more than ever. We can be better. This is always true if we choose to. We can solve climate, energy, cancer, overfishing, polio, and Trunt. Just as we have solved or are solving poverty, starvation, acid rain, nuclear meltdowns, smallpox, and depression.
We won’t solve them with regressive movements like degrowth, anti-science, tradwife, trade wars, less government, or forced anything. We must move onwards, embracing everybody’s future dreams, giving the whole planet opportunities for a better life, while using the same progress to mop up the inevitable mess that humans always make. Through progress: neurodiversity, electric vehicles, psychological safety, AI, solar/wind shipping, democracy, global trade and migration, humanistics, safe nukes, world governance, space mining, decolonisation, and just maybe – only twenty years off now🙄 – nuclear fusion. And all the other fabulous things humanity is capable of when we allow ourselves and we get the negative forces out of the way, such as oligarchy, fascism, religion, self-entitlement, and stupidity.
Along the way, we must cope with the polarity tensions, the collateral damage, the mess. We have the tools to do that, from complexity thinking to advancing technology, from DEI to ESG, from art to engineering, from truth to goodness.
The Victorians knew a thing or two about progress. If we must be nostalgic for something, let’s bring that back.
For a little optimism, read
Not The End of The World, Hannah Ritchie
The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley
Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger
Factfulness, Hans, Anna, and Ola Rosling
Any other suggestions?