A Glass Half Full: Three Ways We’re Duped by Progress
Progress is a euphemism for conflict.
Progress is a strategy. People vote for a vision. People buy a better future. It is an agenda with aspirations of a better world (of course it is only a coincidence that it is only possible with a particular product or biased for specific demographics supporting a particular party with highly visible legislative action in election years).
Progress is a claim laden with assumptions of values and shared goals, assumptions of representative participation, and assumptions of meaningfully distributed outcomes.
I suspect “progress” is often taken at face value. This is easy to problematize because we do not know the future. What we consider progress may not actually lead to the outcomes for which we hoped. Consider failed military actions oftentimes argued as necessary for progress toward peace, security, or democracy. Or layoffs and inflation amid rising wages won as part of progress toward economic equality. Or declining mental health and climbing social isolation exacerbated by social media era technological progress.
This focus on outcomes is itself actually another demonstration of a problem with “progress”: we emphasize results over process. Not to fall into the journey-not-destination cliche, but a significant amount of life and indeed the benefits of what we do in life occur during the process not because of the outcome. A mundane example is that even given the practical necessity of eating, we enjoy certain foods while eating and not only because we ate (not to mention any incidental elements of the experience like occasion, location, or company).
Considering both progress toward outcomes and progress as process does not resolve the assumptions baked into the concept itself. Progress is change but change is not always progress. In a world of constant change, in which people want change but no one wants to change, more attention can be given to determining what even counts as progress.
Progress and Perspective
The difference between change and progress is the inherent value claim. Change is the delta between two conditions. Progress is the delta between two conditions, biasing the second condition as better than the first in sequence and implying additional, improving future state conditions (i.e., progress toward something). Such a bias is dependent on perspective.
Reconciling diverse interests, unequal distribution of resources, and inequitable outcomes for equal work is an ongoing problem in society. Politics rightly implemented engineers the societal structures that mitigate or solve those problems. However, how to solve those problems and what even counts as “solved” does not have a single, discrete answer. Increasingly polarized politics confirms this, and even the concept of being able to learn from history implies we are facing the same problems now that we did then.
Progress in this light is a delusion. There is only change masking the persistent problems we face.
There are few things in life that are universally good or universally agreed upon, yet the quality of life for most of the world has improved by many measures. In the face of such data, people have nonetheless been left behind. We can improve the world by continuing to strive to improve equality of opportunity and provide additional support to those who have been and are systematically left out. Despite the shortcomings of our current systems, we have been able to improve as a society.
This suggests progress is a slow but consistent reality.
It is a failure of tenacity, of hope, of commitment to decry the entire system, calling it a failure and everyone in it a villain (which I admittedly tend to do). Such victimhood is a function of entitlement, which in our current discussion could be defined as the belief that one should make progress in life by default. We forget though that the only default context of life is the state of nature, and nature does not care. We are owed nothing. Any form of justice is a privilege to work toward, a set of values established to promote the wellbeing of people in the face of uncaring nature, a threshold of ideally equitable outcomes engendered through consistent process.
The values we espouse and the goals we aim for determine our perspective on change. Change happens, sometimes it’s progress. As politicians, tech moguls, and entrepreneurs seek to convince us of the progress only they can bring, we must do our due diligence to understand if our values are truly shared, how those values show up in their decisions when they don’t need our votes or participation or approval, and toward what world their progress is actually bringing us.
Progress Toward Outcomes
The improved future state implied in progress is an outcome. There remains a question about when change counts as progress, and moreover when we have an option about whether or not to undergo a change before it happens we have the precursor to the same question: do we anticipate the change will bring progress and therefore justify investment of the resources, time, and attention toward an effort? This should be agreed upon by well-informed, consenting adults impacted by the effort; otherwise, “progress” could be toward the darkest dreams of a sociopath and the waking nightmare of everyone else.
This contextualization of outcomes also ensures that we do not lose sight of the what for the how. Returning to politics as the engineering of societal infrastructure, all too often polarization prompts party-line dogmatism rather than rational problem solving. The what of an improved world is oftentimes lost to the how of party-based identity. “Blue No Matter Who” and “Give Me Red ’Til I’m Dead” have little to do with the outcomes of party agenda or accountability to election-year claims. If politicians and their parties espouse solutions that don’t work, we should be willing to change. Not just subbing in another candidate that will toe party line, but a willingness to change our mind about a topic, split-ticket voting, or similar openness to critical thinking. Sometimes progress is changing your mind in the face of new evidence.
The outcome of our efforts may not align to our values even though the expectations or the process did. We see this in politics, social media and mental health, and other examples discussed. Even if something is progress by one measure (e.g., social media as advancement of communications technology), it may not be progress by another (e.g., mental health). Not to be a luddite, but when technological, or any, advancement leads to regression in our experience of life, I would not say it is progress. If it does not contribute to the wellbeing of conscious creatures, as Sam Harris might say, it is not worth pursuing.
The world is complex. Actions, intentions, and even outcomes themselves are not always good or bad. This makes assessing if something is “progress” particularly challenging. Progress for whom? If we attempt to create criteria, we quickly fall into the challenges of consequentialist ethics and utilitarian calculus. How do we measure if something tends to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people?
Progress from Process
Unable to foresee the future or objectively measure the outcomes, we may be stuck with progress as a function of the process itself. Perhaps this is actually more useful.
I think of the folk psychology question “is the glass half empty or half full?” Ostensibly revealing if we are optimists or pessimists, remember that the state of being half [whatever it is] is not only an outcome but also a step in a process. It is only in understanding the details of the process at hand that we can really understand what someone’s answer means. Insight requires context.
I favor a realist’s answer to the question: a half-joking/half-serious 4 ounces of liquid in an 8 ounce glass. This is intentionally unhelpful in the optimist/pessimist debate, but I think I would have an easier time choosing a side if I understood what we are in the midst of doing. Are we trying to empty the glass or fill it and do we have the resources available to support the activity? If we are emptying it, this seems a very achievable task: the glass is half empty, easily on its way to empty. If we are filling it, I’d like to know if we are near a source of water or in the middle of the desert. The answer contains a statement of belief about the feasibility of a specific task. Knowing if that implies optimism or pessimism requires knowing the process on which we are working. It indicates the outcome, yes, but is focused on the progress we have and have not yet made.
It is easy to lose sight of the process as we focus on outcomes. Outcomes, however, are the result of a process. Not only in the sense that outcomes are the subsequent effect of a cause, but also in the sense that some outcomes occur only while participating in a process.
Exercise for example contains many mental and physical health benefits. A target outcome of exercise could be to maintain a healthy body weight. During exercise, we would experience a host of neurochemical changes that also reduce anxiety and depression. To make progress in our efforts, we would have to adopt and sustain a set of processes that encompass a healthy lifestyle. Progress is a function of the processes, and an outcome is actually sustainable recurrence of the processes themselves. If instead we focus solely on the target outcome to maintain a healthy body weight, we could use an amphetamine or trending pharmaceutical proven to promote weight loss. You wouldn’t get the mental health benefits or make sustainable process changes. Would that count as progress? (This is obviously a reductive example; different people have different health needs.)
The lifestyle-as-process concept is also illustrative of other tensions between progress and wellbeing. I think of the movie Wall-E in which advanced technology has allowed humans to survive in space. Without belaboring the point, I would not call their lives progress. This also reveals that markets may justify investment toward endeavors for which “progress” actively reduces quality of life. Pleasure versus meaning is an easy example in which pleasure is increasingly easy to experience yet ephemeral while meaning is typically the result of effort and overcoming difficulties. It seems humans prefer pleasure whether or not that leads to progress.
Progress as Progress
As we peel back layers of intention and outcomes, repeatedly asking for whom is this progress, we see how some experience progress while others struggle. Progress is a function of perspective, toward an outcome, dependent on a process. But given the commonality of people claiming to know how to make progress and how you can too despite the evident complexity of considerations, I suspect progress is at base a function of power. Who is making progress and who gets to decide what counts? Whose values are instantiated in the world toward which we progress?
Despite my cynicism, politicians, tech moguls, and entrepreneurs may be needed as visionaries or innovators. To create progress that gets traction and is sustained, though, the people their work impacts must be heard and understood. Compromise about what that future entails is the only way progress in any form can be meaningful.
We need diverse groups invested in decision making to help represent the multiplicity of futures that will be impacted by any course of action — including in anything that impacts humanity and how we relate to the world, like new technologies disrupting workplaces or used in military applications.
We need a willingness to reason from Rawls’s veil of ignorance, an inherently compassionate exercise. Would you make the same choices if you didn’t know what position in society you would have in the future?
We need to instantiate in our daily lives the future we envision as best we can, rather than defer our perspective and abdicate our own power in working toward progress.
Not everything is progress, and progress is not inevitable. Some advances decrease wellbeing. Great civilizations collapse. The hardest won victories may leave us injured but generate the most meaning.
Progress may not be success, creature comforts, or advanced technology, but it will always be a claim we can make based on our values, our goals, and in the context of our community.
The grass is greenest where we water it, and we have a glass half empty.
Originally published at http://jsmonson.wordpress.com on June 5, 2024.
