Why Progress is So Hard (And Why We Take it For Granted)

Three Ages of Civilization and Where We Are Now

There’s something that we take for granted today, which I think is the greatest thing of all: human progress.

We live in a time of tiny magic, of chemotherapies and iPhones — and for precisely that reason, it’s hard to imagine that we are also now in an age of regress, where life expectancy is falling in the world’s two most powerful societies, and backwards forces are rising across the world, while we barely really stop to think how delicate and fragile civilization really is. Why is that? Why is progress so hard? And why do we take it for granted? Perhaps these seem like foolish questions — still I cannot help thinking they are among the ones we should be asking now.

So let us, together, just think about them a little.

Perhaps you’ve heard of NORAD’s Santa Tracker. Now, imagine that a society, enough of it, anyways, believed Santa really was on the way, and was tracking him, breathless, excited, thrilled, delighted, the adults not just as much as, but even more than, the kids. What might happen next? Well, Santa had better show up — or this society will have to pay the costs of a loss of cohesion, of upheaval, of its leaders and its intellectuals and so on being wrong. So the longer this…