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The Illusion of Progress
The Illusion of Progress This is precisely what you’d expect of a self-serving elite that was desperate to cloak the unhappy reality that the relative few are benefiting immensely at the expense of the many. The core narrative of politics everywhere is progress, i.e. “moving forward.” If progress isn’t being made, politicos and the system are […]
Retrotopia: The Far Side of Progress
Retrotopia: The Far Side of Progress I got lunch at the little café across the street from the Capitol, and then went to talk to Melanie Berger and a dozen other people from Meeker’s staff. We had a lot of ground to cover and I’d lost two and a half days to the flu, so we […]
Can We Afford the Future?
Can We Afford the Future? Broken road image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress. Everybody expected a shiny new future; the only thing that might have prevented us from having it was nuclear war, and thankfully that hasn’t happened […]
A Beacon in the Sand
A Beacon in the Sand We might begin with the image of American history as a great tidal wave of progress. A wave launched with the appearance of the colonists; a wave rolling with greater and greater momentum westward across the continent. It brushed aside everything that resisted it. It used covered wagons and steamships, homesteads and railroads, guns and axes; it used laws and politics, noble speeches and the rhetoric of free enterprise; […]
Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future
Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason… Friedrich Hayek The […]
You Call this Progress?
You Call this Progress? One of the prevailing narratives of our time is that we are innovating our way into the future at break-neck speed. It’s just dizzying how quickly the world around us is changing. Technology is this juggernaut that gets ever bigger, ever faster, and all we need to do is hold on […]
Progress in an Uncertain World
Progress in an Uncertain World Strong Towns is often accused of offering doom-and-gloom diagnoses of problems but being light on solutions. “You don’t tell us what we can actually DO to fix our insolvent cities,” goes the response. “You’re just so negative all the time.” This is not true, but I also don’t think it’s […]
The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem
The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem The mythic role assigned to progress in today’s popular culture has any number of odd effects, but one of the strangest is the blindness to the downside that clamps down on the collective imagination of our time once people become convinced that something or other is the wave […]
The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide
The Externality Trap, or, How Progress Commits Suicide I’ve commented more than once in these essays about the cooperative dimension of writing: the way that even the most solitary of writers inevitably takes part in what Mortimer Adler used to call the Great Conversation, the flow of ideas and insights across the centuries that’s responsible for […]
What Progress Means
What Progress Means Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report appears to have hit a nerve. That didn’t come as any sort of a surprise, admittedly. It’s one thing to point out that going back to the simpler and less energy-intensive technologies of earlier eras could help extract us from the corner into which industrial society has […]
Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute
Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute. “…Progress is one of the most powerful notions in the modern world” writes John Dryzek inThe Politics of the Earth. I’m inclined to agree with him. Progress acts as a kind of meta-narrative, an incredibly potent and pervasive trope that is woven through stories ancient and contemporary, and forms […]
