I resonate with this. The issue is that culture is particular, but the type of progress the progress studies is generally committed to is civilizational (tech and institutions) not cultural (art and meaning). A community dedicated to progress would instantly become significantly more narrow if it committed to some particular vision of what is valuable and meaningful. While I am fairly committed to a particular vision of how to integrate civilization and culture to create a meaningful life, I wouldn’t want the Progress Forum to commit to a particular view of, say, family values or the status of rituals in society.
Your video is still a broad tent view of meaning. Yet, I’d like to hear how one can actually engage in the project you describe without becoming partisan some particular view of what makes a meaningful life.
Actually, you can’t really separate cultural progress from civilizational progress. The modern world didn’t just come about because of the industrial revolution, but also because the set of new ideas about what it means to be an individual and live in society that liberalism promoted. In fact, it was this set ideas what catalyzed the industrial revolution, rather than material or technological factors like geography or access to capital.
And, our project is super focused on technological, scientific and institutional progress. We are very pro-tech and markets. But we think that the way to unlock this type of progress is through redesigning tech and institutions around meaning:
In regards about culture and meaning being particular, that is also not quite the case. Liberalism itself is proof that you can have a dominant cultural system that is not affiliated to any particular way of life (and yes, it’s now failing, but it’s failing for another set of reasons).
In fact, most of the people engaging in our project have very different views of what it means to live a good life! In our core team of five, we have a very conservative orthodox jew living in Jerusalem, and a poly, queer, social justice political philosopher from the Bay Area — the rest of us are all somewhere in between.
And the people who are resonating with our message are also as equally varied! We have religious leaders and anarchists, rave organizers and hedge fund managers, radical environmentalists and tech accelerationists, midwives and alignment researchers. To be honest, even I have been surprised at the diversity of the people who have been writing us!
I resonate with this. The issue is that culture is particular, but the type of progress the progress studies is generally committed to is civilizational (tech and institutions) not cultural (art and meaning). A community dedicated to progress would instantly become significantly more narrow if it committed to some particular vision of what is valuable and meaningful. While I am fairly committed to a particular vision of how to integrate civilization and culture to create a meaningful life, I wouldn’t want the Progress Forum to commit to a particular view of, say, family values or the status of rituals in society.
Your video is still a broad tent view of meaning. Yet, I’d like to hear how one can actually engage in the project you describe without becoming partisan some particular view of what makes a meaningful life.
Actually, you can’t really separate cultural progress from civilizational progress. The modern world didn’t just come about because of the industrial revolution, but also because the set of new ideas about what it means to be an individual and live in society that liberalism promoted. In fact, it was this set ideas what catalyzed the industrial revolution, rather than material or technological factors like geography or access to capital.
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/review-bourgeois-equality-how-ideas-not-capital-or-institutions-enriched-world-deirdre
And, our project is super focused on technological, scientific and institutional progress. We are very pro-tech and markets. But we think that the way to unlock this type of progress is through redesigning tech and institutions around meaning:
https://twitter.com/ellie__hain/status/1632823967734984706?s=20
In regards about culture and meaning being particular, that is also not quite the case. Liberalism itself is proof that you can have a dominant cultural system that is not affiliated to any particular way of life (and yes, it’s now failing, but it’s failing for another set of reasons).
In fact, most of the people engaging in our project have very different views of what it means to live a good life! In our core team of five, we have a very conservative orthodox jew living in Jerusalem, and a poly, queer, social justice political philosopher from the Bay Area — the rest of us are all somewhere in between.
And the people who are resonating with our message are also as equally varied! We have religious leaders and anarchists, rave organizers and hedge fund managers, radical environmentalists and tech accelerationists, midwives and alignment researchers. To be honest, even I have been surprised at the diversity of the people who have been writing us!