The progress movement needs a better theory of progress

For as long as I can remember, I have been an enthusiastic believer in and supporter of human progress. The Apollo program was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood, and ever since I’ve been excitedly and impatiently anticipating the wonders the future might bring. (Which is why the Artemis mission this week has me feeling like a kid again!) At the center of my worldview throughout adulthood has been the astonishing fact of human progress — the fact that the story of humanity has a plot, and that plot is the steady advance of the human spirit and expansion of human capabilities — and the resolve to keep it going.

I recognize, though, that the vision of progress I sketch out in The Permanent Problem is decidedly offbeat from a contemporary “techno-optimistic” perspective. Yes, I do write glowingly about the possibilities of AI as well as exciting developments in energy, medical, space, and transportation technology; I imagine a future in which growth has progressed to the point that a sizeable fraction of society is independently wealthy; I express the hope that humanity’s destiny is to spread out among the stars.

At the same time, though, I argue that the connection between economic growth and overall well-being is weakening; I criticize the highly addictive snares laid by consumerism in general and commercialized virtual experience in particular; I argue that our current energy and food systems are not environmentally sustainable; I bemoan how getting richer has led to the unraveling of vital personal connections; I look forward to a substantial reduction in paid work effort and the reprioritization of family and community life. None of this sounds like contemporary techno-optimism. Recognizing the downsides of our ongoing material enrichment, calling for a partial demobilization from economic life — those ideas are more associated with the “degrowth” side of the argument.

I don’t think this means that I’m advocating some watered-down version of progress. Rather, it’s that I have a more complicated conception of what actually constitutes progress. In my view, we can’t simply be concerned with material progress; progress in overall well-being is the ultimate goal. It’s not enough that we keep extending our collective capabilities through ongoing innovation and specialization; we must also seek to expand the number of individuals living excellent, admirable, rewarding lives. We can’t be satisfied with improving our means for achieving what we desire; we must also lift up and improve the ends that we try to achieve.

In saying this, I’m not knocking the narrower policy focus of the “progress movement” that has emerged in recent years. It’s aimed specifically at kickstarting material progress — scientific and technological progress in particular. That’s a commendable goal, and a plenty big bite to try to tear off and chew. Addressing the current policy and institutional barriers to material dynamism will require an ambitious program of often highly technical reforms. There’s a lot of policy wonkery that needs doing, and you need a wonkish movement that is capable of handling the devilish details.

But you need more than that. If the progress movement is going to gain traction and actually accomplish things, it’s going to have to offer a vision of the future in which technological advances are working to improve ordinary people’s lives. For a small minority of technophiles like me, the case for the advance of scientific understanding and useful knowledge seems self-evident. But that’s simply not the case for most people. The moon landings were the biggest thrill of my young life, but the broader public saw things differently. Even with the added drama of Cold War rivalry, public opinion polls throughout the “Space Race” showed that consistent majorities thought the money would have better spent at home. There was a brief surge of national pride after Apollo 11’s initial landing, but after that interest and support evaporated. (Meanwhile, the return to the Moon this week after a half-century has been buried under the news of earthly mayhem in Iran.)

This is an important lesson for the current progress movement, which at present is composed overwhelmingly of my fellow technophiles. And the lesson is that we’re mutants: what motivates us isn’t what motivates the bulk of our fellow citizens. We thrill to the sheer ingenuity of technological advance – the intellectual firepower required, the intense discipline, the elaborate and mind-boggling feats of organization. Normal people, by contrast, only get past their native conservatism and anxiety about disruptive change if they can see clear benefits for themselves on the other side.

In a passage I’ve already quoted once in an earlier essay because it’s so on point, Jerusalem Demsas elaborates while commenting on Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”:

I agree with much of what he writes, but it reflects an orientation toward scientific achievement that is more focused on the adventure of invention than it is the point of all that progress….

The broader problem for technologists is the widespread impression that their “progress” is merely about accomplishing something technically impressive even if that breakthrough has limited or destructive impacts on humanity. I don’t care that it’s incredibly difficult and impressive to create addictive short-form video platforms, I care that it’s wasting our time. I don’t really care if Mark Zuckerberg is a genius if the impact of his brilliance has been to create platforms that degrade social trust.

I want a techno-optimism that is focused on human progress…. Technology isn’t just about pushing the frontier. It’s about making people’s lives better.

It’s not just that advocates of material progress need to take a broader view if they’re going to be persuasive to the broader public. What is needed isn’t simply more effective salesmanship; what’s needed is a clearer, more complete understanding of what we’re actually trying to sell. Because we don’t just want the progress movement to move – we want it to move in the right direction.

And I’m convinced that the conception of progress currently dominant among technophiles is too narrow and incomplete to offer the grounding and guidance we need. A vision of progress that defines success solely in terms of increases in humanity’s collective instrumental rationality — our ability to develop better means to pursue our ends — is insufficient. Progress, to be worthy of the name, must also include advances in value rationality. That is, we need to improve the ends we seek as well.

Consider, for example, the following descriptions of a pair of future societies featuring a host of technological marvels:

1. The people of Axiom enjoy a life of supreme comfort and convenience. All drudgery has been automated away; people are free to spend their whole lives devoted to leisure and social connection. Nutritious food is always available for immediate, effortless consumption; a wide variety of entertainment options are constantly on offer. Powerful AI keeps everything running perfectly while robots dash around to take care of our every need. Physical suffering and conflict have been eliminated; everybody is enjoying a cheerful, carefree life of fun and relaxation.

2. In the World State, poverty, war, disease, social anxiety, and unhappiness have been eliminated. Every child is raised to find an important and valued role in the larger society and take pride in what they do. Technologically advanced entertainment and therapy options suffice to keep every trace of psychological discomfort at bay. There is no anxiety, no gnawing dissatisfaction, no crushing heartbreak; everyone is healthy, fit, attractive, and happy.

The above descriptions are accurate as far as they go, but they leave some important things out – namely, that we’re talking about a pair of well-known dystopias. In case you’ve forgotten, Axiom is the name of the giant spaceship in the movie Wall-E, and the World State is the name of the totalitarian society described in Brave New World. Both of these dystopias feature impressive technological advances — but advances twisted into the service of human degradation. Humanity’s collective capacities may have expanded, but individuals’ opportunities to develop and exercise their own personal capacities have been crushed.

A theory of progress that can’t distinguish between eutopia and dystopia is worse than useless. If heeded, it can easily lead to disaster. If rejected, the baby of genuine progress is liable to get tossed out with the bathwater.

And unfortunately, the theories of progress most popular in techno-optimistic circles suffer from precisely this blind spot.

The problem is most obvious in the case of the tech right’s “effective accelerationism” — a term that combines a poke at “effective altruism” (which expresses concern for the possible downsides of technological advances, especially in AI) and a nod to the “accelerationism” of British philosopher Nick Land. The reference to Land is telling, and disturbing. Land’s philosophy is explicitly and radically anti-humanist. The point of technological progress isn’t human progress; on the contrary, according to Land, “nothing human makes it out of the near future.” Considerations of human welfare are irrelevant; what matters is the ongoing and accelerating development of capitalism’s “techno-capital machine” until humanity is ultimately left behind by artificial superintelligence. Humans matter only insofar as they serve the machine. There’s really not much space between Land’s nihilistic fatalism and the worldview of Agent Smith from The Matrix.

The best known expression of “effective accelerationism” is Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen concludes the essay with a roll call of “patron saints” that includes not only Land but also Friedrich Nietzsche and the Italian futurist and fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (as well as many wholly admirable thinkers). Whether such references reflect sincere radicalization to the dark side or juvenile, edge-lordy trolling is unclear — my guess is a mix of both.

In the text of the essay, though, Andreessen consistently adopts the position that technology is the servant of human welfare. He celebrates the “techno-capital machine,” citing Land by name, but then flipping Land’s conception of it on its head. “We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human — in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is,” Andreessen writes. “It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.”

Andreessen’s view of human well-being, though, is narrow and blinkered. His focus is exclusively on material welfare. “Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy,” he states. And elsewhere: “We believe that there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” There is no recognition in the essay that there is such a thing as spiritual welfare, or that its requirements may diverge from or even conflict with some dimensions of technological advance.

Here’s a turn of phrase that highlights Andreessen’s blind spot: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” Not “an important avenue for realizing our potential,” not “a necessary means for the realization of our potential,” but simply “the realization of our potential.”

Andreessen’s conception of human flourishing — another way to say “the realization of our potential” — applies only to the tiny minority of highly educated, well-trained specialists directly involved in technological and economic innovation. All the rest of us are, apparently, “NPCs” or “non-player characters” — extras who come into the story only as dutiful servants and grateful beneficiaries of the techno-capital machine that a few Masters of the Universe can drive. None of the sources of flourishing for the rest of us — all the other productive projects in which people engage, all the personal relationships that bind us together and structure our lives, all the experiences we anticipate and savor and fondly remember — merit any thought or mention at all.

I don’t want to focus too much on criticizing Andreessen. He has made his mark on the world as a doer, not a thinker — so we shouldn’t put too much weight on his forays into the world of ideas. And there is an extreme and provocative edge to his manifesto that sets it apart from the worldview adopted by many in the progress movement. Nevertheless, when we take a look at the American progress movement as a whole, we see the same blind spot that afflicts Andreessen: namely, an overriding focus on the progress of the system, and progress within the system, as opposed to progress in the lives of the individuals who participate in the system (and which progress may, to some extent at least, occur outside the system).1

One reason for this blind spot, I believe, is that many in the contemporary progress movement share Andreessen’s libertarian instincts — in particular, the celebration of the competitive market order as the engine of discovery and progress and the central battle ground in the contest between freedom and domination. This strong faith in free markets extends to the belief that economic growth translates directly into improved welfare at the individual level – which was certainly true enough during the ascent from mass poverty to mass plenty, and which remains true when it comes to strictly material welfare. Accordingly, it’s natural enough to focus attention on the system, on our collective capacities, and then simply assume that if the system is chugging forward nicely then its individual members are thriving as well.

Another contributor to the blind spot is the broader tendency within contemporary liberalism — a tendency that extends to the more big-government-friendly center-left as well as the more libertarian center-right — to shy away from endorsing any specific conception of the good life. This aversion to making substantive moral judgments about how people choose to live their lives has multiple sources. On the philosophical side, the immense influence of John Rawls — with his prioritization of the right over the good in A Theory of Justice and his later embrace of an especially thin “political liberalism” — helped push the idea of “liberal neutrality” to new prominence. Meanwhile, the concepts and methodologies of economics have grown increasingly influential, and so the triumph of value-free “preference satisfaction” within welfare economics has spilled over into social thought more generally.

It should be pointed out that a general allergy to making substantive claims about the nature of the good life is a fairly recent feature of liberal thought. Previously, it was broadly understood that public liberty rested on a foundation of private virtue, and that the ultimate purpose of liberty was the development of human potential at mass scale. Consider this small sampling from some of liberalism’s greatest champions and theoreticians:

John Adams: “Liberty can no more exist without virtue and independence, than the body can live and move without a soul.”

Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation that expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was & never will be.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt (in a line that serves as the epigraph for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty): “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”

Alexis de Tocqueville: “It would seem that sovereigns now only seek to do great things with men. I wish that they would try a little more to make men great, that they should attach less importance to the work and more to the workman, that they should constantly remember that a nation cannot long remain great if each man is individually weak, and that no one has yet devised a form of society or a political combination which can make a people energetic when it is composed of citizens who are flabby and feeble.”

By comparison to such sentiments as these, the shriveled liberal faith more prevalent today looks bloodless and technocratic — and increasingly ineffectual in the face of fundamental challenges.

A final contributor to the blind spot regarding progress is the relatively privileged position that technophiles tend to occupy in the socioeconomic hierarchy. If you’re a Master of the Universe like Marc Andreessen, then of course it makes sense to say that technology just is “the realization of our potential” — because pushing technology forward is your own life’s work. If you’re part of the highly educated elite that spends some of their free time reading Substacks like this, then it makes sense to say: “The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.” The whole course of technological change that has ushered in our current post-industrial, information-age economy has lifted up people like us — raised the relative demand for our labor for decades on end, and propelled our incomes and living standards ever further ahead of most of our fellow citizens. It’s easy for us to just assume that economic growth — the development of society’s collective capacities – cashes out in improved individual welfare.

But for those outside the meritocracy, things look different. The same “skill-biased technical change” that has been so relatively favorable for the well-educated has meant a steady decline in social status and leverage for everybody else. The growth of the ranks of the college educated has made them numerous enough that those without degrees now feel like failures. The gap between the lifestyle ordinary people can afford and the elite lifestyles plastered all over TV and social media keeps growing. Big gaps have also opened up in the likelihood of getting married, and of growing up with both parents at home. In the United States, even the gap in life expectancy is expanding.

The particular set of spectacles through which 21st century American technophiles typically see the world thus make it very difficult for them to recognize the existence of what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion: the weakening connection between economic growth and overall conditions for well-being; and, in particular, the coincidence of ever-mounting comforts, conveniences, and diversions and the systematic disintegration of the vital personal relationships and social connections that are, for most people, the foundation of a well-lived life.

For whatever reason, recognition of the growing class divide along educational lines opened the door to my recognizing the weakening connection between material welfare and overall welfare for large segments of the population. And seeing that, it became clear to me that, in thinking about progress, we must look not only at our collective capacities but also at what’s happening with individual human lives.

In the blinkered view of progress that prevails today, my call for greater “economic independence” — the revitalization of face-to-face communities through considerable self-sufficiency at the local level – looks like an endorsement of deceleration or even regress. If one sees progress as basically synonymous with growth of the market-mediated division of labor — aka the “techno-capital machine” — then it is our highest destiny to be lashed to its mast for the duration. The more completely human energies and human attention are mobilized to serve the machine, the better. A brighter future thus consists of better and more absorbing paid employment, not increased leisure to be filled with non-commercial pursuits. The realm of non-commercial, face-to-face interaction doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t accumulate. In other words, it doesn’t progress. And so, yes, leisure is one form of material good and a certain measure of it is necessary for maximizing overall productivity, but its role in the good life is subsidiary. What we do outside of paid work is the tail, not the dog.

And yet for most real, flesh-and-blood, individual humans, paid work is the price they pay for the life they want. The lower the price they have to pay, the more life they earn from an hour on the job, the better. There’s a reason that the general tendency for most people has been for lifetime working hours to decrease steadily as incomes rise. (And the recent exception to that rule — the rise in average working hours for high earners in recent decades — highlights the extent to which the elite sees economic life as an arena for flourishing, with substantial intrinsic as well as extrinsic rewards. Good for them, but bad for their ability to empathize with the work experience of everybody else.)

Accordingly, if you take seriously concerns about the quality of individual lives, a future in which most people can spend less of their time in paid work — where they experience low autonomy, low status, and the ongoing stress of precarity — and more of their time with friends and loved ones, is one that has achieved real progress in the conditions for flourishing.

In the fuller conception of progress that motivates my work, progress isn’t simply a matter of producing shiny new goods and developing new capacities never exercised before. It also counts as progress to recover old goods lost along the way, and redevelop capacities that had been allowed to atrophy. These lines from C. S. Lewis drive the point home:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

Yes, we very much need further progress in the material realm — new sources of clean energy, new and more sustainable food systems, new cures for diseases, new modes of transportation, new ways of making all the costs of living less expensive, and new thinking machines to aid in all of the above. But we also need to recover the physical fitness that once came naturally from an active life; we need to reclaim our attention spans and cognitive acuity from screen-addled brain rot; we need to revitalize neighborhoods and communities withered by atomization; and we need to re-center marriage and parenthood as cornerstones of normal adulthood. And if we succeed in those tasks, we can achieve real progress in genuine social complexity as well, as today’s atomized monoculture gives way to pluralistic variety and vitality. Focus on individual flourishing, and flourishing societies will follow.

Better individual lives are the ultimate measure of progress, and advances in our collective capacities are only a means to that end. A progress movement that internalizes and applies that lesson will have found its true North Star — and one capable of attracting a larger following.