Humans are a curious species: We have a need not only to do, but to explain what we are doing—to each other and above all to ourselves. Movements begin with practice, but as they evolve, they need theory in order to maintain the coherence needed to change the world. Providing this is the role of what Joel Mokyr calls the “cultural entrepreneur,” whose function is “formulating a coherent doctrine that the followers can all accept as the consensus central message.”
The progress movement needs such a doctrine, and it has long been my intention to offer one. Years ago I thought that I would write a comprehensive history first, as the empirical foundation for philosophy. But the need for the doctrine has become too pressing, and I’ve decided that it cannot wait.
I am now writing a book laying out my philosophy of progress: The Techno-Humanist Manifesto. And you’ll be able to read it here, one essay at a time.
“Techno-humanism” is what I am calling that philosophy, a worldview founded on humanism and agency. It is the view that science, technology, and industry are good—not in themselves, but because they ultimately promote human well-being and flourishing. In short, it is the view that material progress leads to human progress.
The purpose of the book is to present a moral defense of material progress, and a framework the progress movement can use to understand what we are doing and why. It will present a bold, ambitious vision of a future that we want to live in and will be inspired to build. It will acknowledge, even embrace, the problems of progress, and point towards solutions. And it will show how progress can become not only a practical but a moral ideal—giving us a goal to strive for, a heroic archetype to emulate, and a responsibility to live up to.
This book is first and foremost for the scientists, engineers, and founders who create material progress and who are seeking to understand the moral meaning of their work. It is also for intellectuals, storytellers, and policy makers, to inform and inspire their thinking and writing. More broadly, it is for everyone in the progress movement, and for anyone who is curious to learn what we are about.
I am going to serialize the book on this blog and on Substack, publishing the first draft one essay at a time. The series will also be syndicated on Freethink Media, as part of their new Freethink Voices feature. Freethink’s purpose is “to cover the progress we’re making on new frontiers” and “to tell stories about a future that is possible so we can inspire others to make it real,” and to do so in a way that is “curious, thoughtful, open, and constructive.” I’m honored to be their first Voice.
Here’s the plan, including target publication dates:
Introduction
The Present Crisis
July 9: The conflict in our society today over progress, and why we need a new philosophy of progress to resolve it. Techno-humanism as the belief that progress is good because it supports human welfare and agency
Part 1: The Value of Progress
Chapter 1: Fish in Water
July 16: How we take progress for granted, and why instead we should look at industrial civilization with awe, wonder, and gratitude
Chapter 2: The Surrender of the Gods
July 23: The story of progress as a story of the expansion of human agency
July 30: Why we should seek mastery over nature
Chapter 3: The Glory of Man
August 6: Why we should have reverence for human beings and their creations
Chapter 4: The Life Well-Lived
August 13: Human well-being as a life of goal-pursuit and value-achievement (and not as mere mood; the resolution of the “hedonic treadmill” paradox)
August 20: How spiritual values form a part of well-being—and how material progress supports them
Chapter 5: Solutionism
August 27: Active solutionism vs. complacent optimism or defeatist pessimism
September 3: Safety as an achievement of progress, and the invisible technical work that supports safety
September 10: How to solve climate change with progress (instead of degrowth)
Part 2: The Future of Progress
Chapter 6: The Flywheel
September 17: The long-term pattern of acceleration, and the feedback loops that drive it
September 24: The fourth age of humanity—after hunting, agriculture, and industry
Chapter 7: The Problem-Solving Animal
October 1: Why progress is not limited by “natural” resources
October 8: Why progress is not limited by “ideas getting harder to find”
October 15: Problem-solving as a deep part of human nature; why pessimism sounds smart even though it’s wrong
Chapter 8: The Unlimited Horizon
October 22: A bold, ambitious vision for the future: mastery over all aspects of nature
October 29: Progress as a dynamic ideal, not a static one
Part 3: A Culture of Progress
Chapter 9: What We Lost
November 5: The culture of progress we once had
November 12: How we lost our optimism in the 20th century
Chapter 10: The New Ideal
November 19: How progress can be a moral ideal to strive for, and how the discoverer and the creator can become new heroic archetypes to emulate
Chapter 11: What to Do
December 3: The progress movement we need, and the changes in society it should bring about
December 10: The role of education, media, and storytelling; conclusion
To support this effort, we are turning on paid subscriptions at the Roots of Progress Substack, for $10/month. The book will be free to read online, but I will try to give some exclusives to paid subscribers, such as outtakes or excerpts from my research. If you buy an annual subscription ($100/year), I’ll send you a copy of the book when it is published. Founder subscriptions ($500/year) will get a signed copy and access to other exclusives, such as Zoom calls with me to discuss the book. But the most important reason to subscribe is to support this work and to support me as a public intellectual. (Note, all subscription revenues will be received by the Roots of Progress Institute, the nonprofit organization that employs me.)
This is, of necessity, a book for the moment. For the sake of time and readability, I won’t be able to research all prior work or to answer every objection (much as I wish I could). And as a manifesto, the purpose of the book is to state clearly and vividly a certain worldview as a reference point for people to define themselves in relation to—not to make the most thorough and unassailable case for that worldview. I would like to make that case eventually, and I expect this will not be my last word on the topic, but the full case will take me another decade or so. This is my best current statement of my ideas, for the people who need to hear them the most, right now. If you disagree with it too vehemently, all I can say is that it’s not for you.
If I do not have the obvious credentials to write this book, I hope that my long study of the subject, my position near the center of these conversations for many years, and my previous career in engineering and business gives me a unique perspective from which to write it. And if none of the ideas in it are original to me, I hope there will at least be value in pulling them all together into a foundation for the progress movement.
This book will, again of necessity, contain a large quantity of my personal opinions and philosophy. Ultimately, these opinions are mine alone. The Roots of Progress Institute as an organization works with a wide range of intellectuals and partner organizations, including our fellows, and none of them are responsible for anything I say here. Indeed, I expect that many of them will disagree with at least some of what I have to say—as will, I expect, many of you in my audience. I look forward to hearing your rebuttals and theirs, and I hope that we can have a healthy debate over the issues—one that leaves all of us wiser, and that sets a standard in civility and epistemic rigor for our community.
Thanks to the tens of thousands of subscribers and followers who have shown me that there is an audience for my work and given me the confidence to go from essayist to book author. I’m excited to write this in the open with you and to get your feedback along the way.
This is a huge undertaking, and I admire and respect both your industry and your courage in it.
Two questions/comments:
Is there a page I can bookmark that will have links to everything that has been published up to that date? I haven’t found it if one exists.
I love the core value of human life first made explicit in what’s been published to date, but I’m struggling with the concept of agency. I feel like the word agency gets thrown around a lot these days, and I’m afraid that may have muddied the waters for me at least in understanding the ultimate point.
But is agency even necessary? What if it was just techno-humanism without this additional concept of agency? That’s what I find myself wondering at this stage. I found some earlier work by the author here: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/progress-humanism-agency and I’m guessing the same or similar use of “agency” is intended. I’ll keep reading to see how this plays out, but at least for now I’m not seeing the case for agency clearly — meaning both that I don’t quite understand what agency means and that whatever it means it’s not clear how it’s a necessary moral imperative to human progress.
This may be a semantic argument in the sense that if what is meant by agency boils down to something like attention to pragmatic fitting of means to ends, then this argument for agency would be much clearer. And I may be idiosyncratic in how distracted I get worrying that “agency” in the sense the author is using the term here requires an appeal to “free will,” which I believe both ambiguous and unnecessary.
I’ll keep reading to see what it plays out.
Thanks!
I just updated https://rootsofprogress.org/manifesto with links to everything that’s been published so far, and will try to keep it up to date.
By agency, I mean two closely related things.
It is the belief that we can make choices and that those choices matter and can be effective, that we can to some significant degree control our lives and shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. The opposite of this is fatalism, the belief that we’re being carried along by forces outside our control and that we don’t have any choices or that they don’t matter.
It is also an ideal or a value, in the sense of believing that it is good for people to have choices and to make them, and that the expansion of choice (again, both for individuals and for society) is a good thing.
I do believe in free will (although I’m less clear on it and less certain about it than I used to be) but I’m not sure that a strong belief in free will is necessary to align with my concept of agency—maybe you could also agree with it under a compatibilist notion of volition.
I’m still mulling this over, but I have come around to the view that you’re right about what you’re calling “agency” not being something that could be removed without disservice to the promotion of progress, and that you’ve got the best way of framing it. If I take your suggestion of viewing “agency” from a more compatibilist point of view—and thanks for this nudge—I find it all far more tractable. I’m a big fan of W.V.O. Quine, and I believe he would have supported your pointing to “agency” as useful in this context. Even if “agency” means not freedom in some metaphysical sense, we have to grant that the removal of constraints on human actions is going to be better rather than worse for human progress.
And I think you have the right rhetorical approach to the question. Talking about freedom as we have for millennia, in the metaphysical sense, is more comprehensible because of how we’re wired.
...but I can’t resist observing that if, in the background, what’s going on is something determined then the actual mechanism for the promotion of progress does seem to collapse into something more like far from equilibrium free energy maximizations, of the sort popular among techno-optimists at the moment. Not for no reason it’s called “compatibilism” I suppose!
Thanks.
Yes, one of my problems with compatibilism is, if determinism is true, then in some sense none of this matters? Like, why bother talking about progress when the entire trajectory of the future is already predetermined and literally nothing will change it?
For some this might be too fine a distinction, but for me understanding ontology has always been important, and I find compatabilism useful for its pragmatic distinction between ontology and any prescriptivist philosophy (like positivism). A compatibilist can accept that we don’t have free will and yet endorse the instrumental value of rhetoric that promotes freedom — what does it matter that under the hood it’s just thermodynamics? One can’t escape the illusion of free will even if and when you believe it is an illusion and try hard to do so. But pragamatism is a common thread running through compatabilist ontology and prescriptivism, and my aesthetic preference (? prejudice? precommitment) is to believing in things that work even when I don’t understand how or why.
So there might very well be a point in talking about progress even if we’re not sure whether or how it would have happened had we never existed.