What if we’ve started to lose faith in the future?
For most of history, people didn’t believe life could really improve. The idea of ‘progress,’ that things could get better over time, wasn’t something most societies could count on. This radical shift only started in the 1500s, where we began to believe life could get better with the help of science and innovation. But over the last 50 years, that belief seems to be fading. Progress feels slower, and people aren’t as hopeful as they used to be.
In this episode of The Freethink Interview we sit with Jason Crawford, the founder of the Roots of Progress Institute and the author of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, to discuss where our modern belief in progress came from, why it seems to have stalled, and what it might take to believe in the future again.
Timestamps:
00:00 Was modernity a mistake?
00:45 The history of progress
02:02 Francis Bacon
03:33 The Industrial Revolution
06:07 A period of optimism
07:25 Technology and world wars
08:29 The cost and risks of progress
11:46 What our future can bring
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
Was modernity a mistake?
The discourse around progress and humanity has really heated up. Are we on the right track? What are we doing? Do we even know what we're doing? Maybe modernity was a mistake. Maybe progress itself is the problem. And maybe we should slow it down or stop it, or even go backwards. People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century, and we allowed that to slow down progress itself, and that was a mistake. My name is Jason Crawford. I'm the founder and president of the Roots of Progress Institute, and I'm writing a book called "The Techno-Humanist Manifesto."
The history of progress
I'm gonna rewind to the beginning, and I'm gonna try to tell the story concisely. Okay. One important thing to know about the idea of progress is that it really didn't exist through most of human history. I'd say most peoples in most places and times didn't see history as some kind of an upward curve. They saw history as more cyclical maybe, full of ups and downs, or perhaps they even believed in a declinist narrative, a story of the past being a golden age from which we have fallen, and perhaps will continue to fall.
This really only changed in the West around the 15-1600s. At the time, there was a big debate actually, about whether the modern people of that era could ever surpass the huge achievements of the ancients. They were looking back to the ancient world, the Greeks and the Romans, at the ideas that those people discovered, what the Romans could do with concrete, for instance, the Colosseum and the aqueducts, and even the pyramids of Egypt. Some people at the time had this idea: Those ancients must have been a race of moral and intellectual giants, that all we can do maybe is read the ancient texts and reread them, and try to wring as much meaning and learning as we can out of them, but that we could never surpass them, learn new things, invent new things, and go forward.
Francis Bacon
Things started to change in the West with the voyages of discovery that started to explore and discover the world, and discover entire new continents. Our knowledge was expanding. People started to think that, wow, maybe we could actually learn new things, maybe we could create new inventions. If you look at the writings of Francis Bacon, this was an Englishman who lived at the end of the 1500s, into the 1600s, and Bacon was one of the people who was arguing, no, there's a lot more to be discovered, and he pointed out all of the things that the ancients didn't know about.
They didn't know about the Americas, for instance. They didn't know about gunpowder, or the magnetic compass. They didn't know about the printing press, the Gutenberg movable-type printing press which was invented in the 1400s. Bacon said, "There's nothing in the art of printing that is not plain and obvious. What if there are a whole lot more things like this out there to be discovered?" And he used all of this as evidence to make his case that essentially, progress was possible, that if we used the right method, and he was really advocating for an empirical method in science, which was not the standard at the time, if we do this and if we get better at doing it, and put more effort into systematically collecting and trying to explain our observations, we'll be able to discover new things, we'll be able to create new inventions, and that ultimately, all of this can come together "to endow human life with new abilities and powers," I believe is the phrase that he used. His prediction essentially took 200 years to come true. It wouldn't come into full fruition until the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution
So, there was a slowly building idea of progress through the 1600s, 1700s. As we got advancements in science, we started to get Newton's theory of universal gravitation, we started to get developments in chemistry, people really identifying elements and were starting to work out the periodic table. And then, with the Industrial Revolution, certainly by the 19th century, all sorts of new amazing things were getting invented. The railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb. By the end of the 19th century, it's very clear that Bacon was absolutely right. It was a reality coming into people's homes and transforming everybody's lives.
So this is a great example of how a progress builds on itself, progress begets progress. The long-term pattern of progress over human history is that progress accelerates. It's not just a constant percentage growth each year. Over the long term, that percentage growth rate actually increases. Why does this happen? The fundamental reason is feedback loops. Progress begets progress. When we make progress, sometimes the invention or the new technology or infrastructure is so fundamental that it feeds back into the process of making progress itself.
Think about the early Industrial Revolution. You've got coal, you have steam power, you have iron, and you have locomotives. Now, all of these things reinforce each other, right? The locomotives were made out of iron, they were powered by steam engines that were driven by coal. The locomotives were also used to transport coal, and to transport iron ore, and to transport finished products. Steam power was used in the manufacturing processes that created the products out of iron, and so forth.
All of these things were reinforcing each other, and you can see this even today with all sorts of things. Computers, for instance, we invent computers and software, and now they are used to power everything else in the economy. Computers are even used to design better computers, right? So technologies feed back on into themselves. World population. The better we get at supporting human life, the more population grows. The more people we have, the more brains we have working on all kinds of problems, the more scientists, the more researchers, the more inventors, the more business founders, all of these people working on all of the different problems of human life. Even, I think, most fundamentally, the very idea of progress itself.
There's a virtuous cycle between actually making progress, believing that we can make progress, and then investing in progress motivated on that belief, and then making even more of it. And so, that is the accelerating pace of progress. Things move faster today, even on a percentage basis.
A period of optimism
So by the end of the 19th century, the very beginning of the 20th century, you got this very optimistic period. They really saw industrial progress, and technology, and invention, and science, as just this almost unstoppable machine that was just making things better for everyone. There were definitely objections, don't get me wrong. There were people all through this entire process who didn't see it as such a great thing, all the way from Rousseau in the 1750s who was talking about how he thought that the progress of morals in society was almost inversely proportional to the progress of arts and sciences, and he hadn't even seen the Industrial Revolution yet.
So there was a lot of kind of romantic backlash against all of this science and technology and industry. But for the most part, people saw this as a good thing, and I think those kind of voices of backlash were really in the minority for a very long time. But what happened was, people were a little naive about how progress was going and how it was going to go. One, they saw it as kind of automatic and inevitable, as this thing that was just going to definitely unfold and nothing could stop it. They thought that moral progress and social progress would also automatically, inevitably unfold and go hand in hand with progress in science and technology.
Technology and world wars
By the end of the 19th century, people were very optimistic that this new growth of industry, and expansion of trade and communication, that all of it was leading to a new era of world peace, an end to war, and of course, they were terribly wrong. The world wars of the 20th century violently shattered those naive evolutions. It was clear that technology had not led to an end to war, it had made war all the more terrible and destructive. It had given us machine guns, the chemical weapon, the atomic bomb.
We also got a worldwide depression, the rise of totalitarianism around the globe, environmental concerns, concerns about pollution and harms to human health. We ran into concerns about the risks of technology, and whether new technology could create new safety hazards. You had these very strong counter-cultural voices, this kind of romantic backlash against the very idea of progress that said, look, maybe modernity was a mistake, maybe progress itself is the problem, and maybe we should slow it down or stop it, or even go backwards.
The cost and risks of progress
I think there were some very real questions there. The costs and risks of progress are real. Progress is messy. We're not gonna get anywhere and we're not gonna do humanity any favors by denying that, or by claiming that progress is always and everywhere good, or that we don't need to do anything to steer it or to mitigate the problems. We absolutely do. We're only gonna create human life and flourishing and wellbeing if we acknowledge the costs and risks of progress, and then step up to actually solve them and to move forward. I do think that we've seen what I hope is a temporary slowdown in scientific, technological, and economic progress over the last roughly 50 years.
I didn't believe this at first when I started hearing people talking about it. But the more I looked into the history of progress, the more I realized that I think it's true. We've seen a lot of progress, of course, in information technology, in computers and software. There's really been no slowdown there. But in manufacturing, construction, transportation, energy, all these areas, we're still using basically the same fundamental technologies that we used in the 1960s and 70s.
We're still using fossil fuel-based electricity as our main power source. We're still using the internal combustion engine. We're flying on basically the same kind of planes that we flew on in the 1960s. We're using the same basic sort of mass manufacturing, factory processes. So all of this stuff, it's seen improvements, certainly, it's seen a lot of incremental improvement, cost improvements, safety improvements, but it hasn't seen the kind of massive paradigm shifts that we saw in an earlier period.
Consider the period from about 1870 to 1920. So there's a 50-year period that ended a hundred years ago. In that time, we saw roughly, by my count, five major revolutions in different aspects of the economy. One, we got the invention of the electrical industry, the generator, the electric motor, the electric light bulb. Two, we got the invention of the internal combustion engine, and the things that it made possible, the automobile and the airplane. Three, there was a revolution in information technology with telephone and radio. Four, there was a revolution in synthetic chemistry, and we got things like the first synthetic plastics and synthetic fertilizer.
And then there was a revolution in public health. We got the germ theory and some of its first applications with a better water sanitation, new vaccines, and all these things started to really decrease mortality rates for the first time. So five revolutions across the board. If I look at the same period 100 years later, so 1970 to 2020, I count one or maybe two revolutions. There was definitely a revolution in information technology in computers and the internet, and maybe you could count one in genetic engineering and biology. But again, those areas like energy, manufacturing, transportation, those just have not seen the same fundamental breakthroughs.
I think the lesson of the relative slowdown in progress of the last 50 years is that progress is not automatic or inevitable, it doesn't just barrel along. It depends on us. It depends on our choices. It depends on us believing in progress and wanting to continue to invest in it. Each new generation has to sort of pick up that torch of progress and carry it forward. If nobody believes in the future, then nobody's going to build it.
What our future can bring
The most important thing I believe about the future is that the future can be as well off relative to the present as the present is compared to the past. In 1800, the vast majority of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, only a small fraction does. We've come such a very long way. We've more than doubled world life expectancy at birth. We are so much better compared to people a couple hundred years ago.
And yet, if you ask the average person back then, they didn't think that they were living in extreme poverty. They thought it was normal, because it was normal. Not having a refrigerator seems normal when nobody has one. Not having electricity seems normal when nobody has one. Not having a toilet or indoor plumbing seems normal when nobody has it. We don't think that we're living in extreme poverty today, but I think that 200 years from now, the future could be so amazing, if we create it, that those future people will look back on us and saying, "I cannot believe they lived that way."
There are so many things that we could invent in the future, or are inventing right now. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, fusion energy, going back to space and creating a real space economy, and settling the Moon and the planets, and one day the stars. All of these things, once we have them, we will consider them absolutely essential, even if today they seem like science fiction.
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