The article in the Christmas edition of the Economist discusses a philosophical issue essential to whoever tries to make sense of the times we live in. What do we mean by progress? Do we still care about it? Does it still exist? Was it worthwhile to dedicate lives, years of studies, for something that is perceived to be in trade off with other not less popular values like family, tradition and cohesion?

Certainly, progress as a value is not living its best days and appears to be trapped in the wrong side of an ever - lasting war. On one side, the leaders of great religions and amongst them not only the ayatollahs of some theocracy but also the  more tolerant Pope and Dalai Lama have engaged what sometimes appears to be a proper ideological battle with the excess of enlightenment; on the other side intellectuals and scientists appear to have been weakened by the memory of some horrors (reason inspired revolutionary bloodshed, scientific socialism, rationally planned exterminations of entire peoples, technology driven environment catastrophes) that too much trust in rationality is said to have produced.
Is there, thus, still a place for progress? Was it worth dedicating an entire civilization (which is, incidentally, the one where we still live) to its achievement? The question is, of course, not only a matter of historical evaluations, but also of establishing some sense of our travels as mankind as well as individuals.

There are two substantial reasons that should make us enthusiastic defenders of the concept followed by four arguments that may moderate the enthusiasm and transform our  strong preference for progress into a more prudent and yet probably more effective approach that acknowledges also the limits of the concept.
First of all, it is undeniable that the idea that we can better our material conditions through technologies has produced enormous advancements.

In order to appreciate this jump in the conditions of human beings it is useful to refer to an idea realized by BBC a few years ago that I still believe is very powerful (and much more entertaining of boring “big brother” realities): the broadcaster asked a number of British families to go back in time one century, and to live as their great  grandparents  used to live (the resulting reality was apparently much more entertaining than any boring “big brother”). The volunteers found no running water, no heating, no electricity which means, incidentally, no television, no disco, reading or writing but at the light of candles, leaving alone personal computer, no internet or facebook. No telephone with very rare communication with the outside. No airplane and very few cars which also means that 90% of Europeans did not, practically, know the experience of what we now call travelling, unless they were part of a very thin intellectual elite or – at the other side of the social spectrum – they were forced to emigrate to some far away land with no possibility to come back.

Some authors (amongst them Amartya Sen) would advise that the single best – or less worse – of the indicator of progress is the duration of life and, in fact, life expectancy almost doubled in one century going from slightly above 45 to slightly less than 80 in the USA (45 was, by the way, an already significant improvement against an average of 20 if we go back to eighteenth century and to the even more staggering fact that three quarters of the new born in the powerful Victorian London used to die before turning 5). 
 
The second reason why our (20th century’s) progress is worthwhile is that it has been very democratic as opposed to other forms of progresses that history has witnessed: true, at the time of the Romans expected life at birth was 30 (incidentally more than in the UK during the industrial revolution), and yet emperors and their court did, in fact, have some form of heating, running water and Augustus was not an exception to live until 77, as long as an average American citizen today. The characteristic of this particular form of progress that we have experienced in the last century  has been its ability to have, in fact, made ordinary people living like (and as long as) emperors (as some commercial used to say few years ago),  to become a mass phenomena (as for the Ford intuition and the model T).

In a first phase the improvement of material conditions has been made accessible across classes within developed countries; at a later stage it has widespread to the rest of the world. A powerful picture of what we are talking about is to compare those particular pictures taken by the satellites that measure enlightenment – in the very sense of the artificial illumination during the night -  around the globe (some economists believe that this proxy should even be used as a replacement of GDP): forty years ago light was practically limited to North America, Western Europe (with less brightness even in Spain and Greece), Japan and at the most some military infrastructures of the Soviet Empire: today dramatic black holes resist only in Africa. As everybody knows  in countries such as India, China and Brazil  hundreds of millions of people have entered the world wide labor (and consumption) market; even in Sub Saharan countries programs like the millennium goals register improvements in poverty and, especially, in education targets (although new tragedies – like AIDS – may have whipped off much of the progress  against old ones). These numbers do, undoubtedly, have the problem that overall advancement or even poverty reduction may be statistically compatible with an actual increase of inequalities that may still upset many, and yet material welfare has been objectively multiplied and made accessible to most.
 
If these are, however, the pluses, the rhetoric of progress still misses at least four essential questions that are reducing the appeal of the idea and that may have already compromised – at least partially – its capability to work as a moral value (whereas, this entire concept of advancement did, in fact, start as a moral or even religious imperative):

1. It is not true that progress is unavoidable. The consequence of such an acknowledgement is that progress can go away as quickly, if not more rapidly, as it arrived and became the ideology of the world.
Progress is not unavoidable. It is not true that the only way for human history to proceed is forward as Leopardi sorely reminded about Le magnifiche sorti e progressive  that Lorenzo il Magnifico (portrayed above) announced at the beginning of the renaissance.

For hundreds of years the conditions of human beings stagnated or declined: during the middle ages, for instance, people used to live less, as we said before, than one thousand year before; China peaked around the beginning of last millennium to then witness a slow but unstoppable regression that lasted for a number of centuries; and for 99% of the one million (still a negligible fraction of the duration of other species like ranging from bacteria to dinosaurs) years that humans have inhabited the planet changes and improvements were so slow to be practically undetectable.

In fact, progress is a relatively novel – mostly but not only western - concept introduced a couple of times on an artistic and cultural plane (the Economist refers to the 17th century, I would add, certainly, the vision of the renaissance, the Greek philosophy and the Roman pragmatism) in the last 2000 years and capable to change most of human lives only for forty, fifty years of the last century.

2. One of the still rather not sufficiently acknowledged consequence of progress being not unavoidable is that its pace is not constant and that we may even find out that in the last twenty years such a pace may have slowed down. 

This is a trend that probably some science fiction art directors may know better than economists and sociologists: according  to some of the most famous fantasy movies (and to some rather scientific forecasts done at the time of the Space race) by 1999 we should have already completed a livable basis on the Moon (as for the famous serial in the youtube box alongside this article) and by 2001 we should have already been able to have embarked on odysseys like space travels beyond our satellites (as for Kubrik's masterpiece). True, those movies were all about grand space related conquests (that were, however, unavoidably associated to some disasters that fortunately have not materialized). But even if we look to individuals and families it is undeniable that future is proceeding more slowly.
 
The jump between the time when my father was five and the one when I was the same age has been bigger than the jump between the time I was five and now when it is my daughter Chiara to be that age. A demonstration of this comes, again, from the trajectory of life expectancy during the years: true, in the USA, for instance, life span has grown by 30 years between 1900 and 2000 and yet 22 of these 30 years were gained in the first half as opposed to only 8 in the second half of the century (as shown in the chart below). And it is not only life duration, because geographies of cities and of or lives were literally overhauled in the 35 years between me and my dad, whereas the change has been mostly about communications in the same 35 years separating me and Chiara.

3. The problem of progress is that the mechanism by which it advanced – competition (a sort of microeconomic version of the natural selection mechanism envisaged by Darwin) –may not be working anymore as a tool for allocating scarce resources efficiently. This may mean that the winners may be not the ones that deserve it and this can make the entire game less acceptable.

It has been said that the main pitfall of progress is the fact that it produces winners and losers in a selection process, something that Schumpeter has admirably described.  However, this mechanism has been largely accepted until it has proved as necessary to  select good products, firms, individuals, so that the resources of the system could be concentrated on the most productive means and thus increase general welfare.

The other idea was that the selection mechanism would have worked both in the economy and in politics. In the first arena it was the market defined as the sum of individual preferences to drive the production of goods and services to the maximization of welfare. In the arena of the collective choices was the democracy that was supposed to make  optimal distribution of the generated welfare.
Both things – democracy and market – seem not to work as well as they used to.

Incompetent politicians, gap of accountability and bankers that are using dominant positions to organize world – wide, quasi legal frauds are increasing distrust in a mechanism that is essential to progress and yet is increasingly seen as neither effective nor just.

4. Progress has the inherent characteristic to raise enormously both the potential for opportunities and for risks, rending societies more powerful and more vulnerable at the same time: as a consequence, it tends to produce widespread returns that anticipate costs and possible disruptions of which it is difficult to discount the value.

As the Economist acknowledges, the evaluation of progress is “more than just a branch of accounting.. the books are never closed and .. a catastrophe would tip the balance into the red”.  One effect that Progress has already produced is an increase of vulnerability of societies (of systems – financial, logistics, information we should say) that we never saw before and that is, paradoxically, due to the increase of power and distribution of it to many.

The lesson of September 11 (as for my article after the WTC attack at http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-globaljustice/article_140.jspis ) is - much besides the implications of geopolitics  that have kept busy the centers of intelligence of the world - mostly about vulnerability and unprecedented speed by which things can happen as a consequence of distribution of information (and, thus, power).

It is like we are driving in an increasingly more powerful and faster car but this may also need that we increase our capability to steer it and the feeling that it is happening to fast for us to align the two. The final outcome may still be a crash if we do not immediately pose to ourselves and to our fellows, on both a government and individual basis (individual because this is how intelligence is distributed) how to better guide the vehicle that we ourselves (or more precisely generations of reason-devoted scientists that have preceded ours) have assembled.

But probably the last and the most radical mistake about progress, is the widespread belief that the future is in the forecasts of few economists or in the hands of few powerful individuals that will decide for everybody and that everybody can only sit in front of television sets to wait for events to unfold. Progress is what we make out of it. It is in the hands of everybody and it is everybody’s responsibility.

The biggest problem of the so called progress is that it is progress itself to have produced its own enemies: rationality not tempered by ethics, technocratic views that exclude that men and women can change out of their determination and ideals. These are obscure and self produced evils that have transformed the trust in reason and hope in nihilism, despair and a relativism that make it almost impossible to express any judgment or to express any advice on where to go. The opposite of what for enlightenment was meant by giants like Bertrand Russell or moral philosophers like Adam Smith. The only way is forward and it will still be about continuing “to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress” as for the motto of what is considered by many the most venerable magazine of the world.

Post Scriptum

There are, in fact, other issues that are posed by this discourse on progress: most of them are linked to the connected idea of the objectives that we - as societies and individuals - should or are allowed to establish for ourselves. It is the question of the metrics by which we measure our advancement - or, in fact, assess a crisis like the one we are still experiencing) - and well being: thus, the problem of the widely acknowledged ineffectiveness of the GDP related measurements which, however, still do not have a proper alternative; but also of the processes by which we - as communities - decide what we stand for.

The brand new Vision project on "the politics and economics of happiness" (paper accessible at http://www.visionwebsite.eu/UserFiles/File/filedascaricare/ppaper_happiness02.pdf ) and the one of "the future of democracy" ( the project platform is at http://visionforum.it/forum/globalizzazione_e_democrazia/il_futuro_della_democrazia/index.php ) are supposed to gather some fresh, actionable ideas on these very central matters.