To be clear, this need not mean simply satisfying our base material needs, such as full bellies and warm beds. This is the standard proposed, for instance, by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.
Humanism says that the good is that which helps us lead better lives: longer, healthier, happier lives lives of more choice and opportunity lives in which we can thrive and flourish. (Some won’t go this far, but express agnosticism on the question, or are simply indifferent to material progress, greeting it with a shrug.)īut if progress is real and important-how do we judge this? How do we justify that improvements to material living standards are good? That technological and industrial progress represents true progress for humanity? Humanism as the standard of value Perhaps even hunter-gatherers were better off than us moderns, and agriculture was a mistake. A declinist might think that the benefits of energy are not worth the costs of pollution, that the value of cars does not redeem their role in accidents or congestion, and that the pleasures of social media are outweighed by its psychological and social harms. This observation is so generally acknowledged and incontrovertible that Deirdre McCloskey calls it “ the Great Fact.” Everyone in the progress community looks back on the last few centuries and concludes that, no matter how we interpret or caveat it, something obviously went very right.Ī sharply contrasting position is declinism: the idea that that world is getting worse. The starting point and motivation for progress studies is the historical fact of the enormous improvements in material living standards in the last ~200 years. I see three premises at the core of this movement: progress, humanism, and agency.
This implies that the world needs, not just progress studies, but a progress movement: the advocacy of a set of ideas. I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. Progress, humanism, agency An intellectual core for the progress movement
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