Real Progress
What I love about this organization is that it is entirely run by volunteers. People who simply want to help other people. The sweat equity they put into their effort to make our community a better place is truly “progress”.
What I love about this organization is that it is entirely run by volunteers. People who simply want to help other people. The sweat equity they put into their effort to make our community a better place is truly “progress”.
How we think about progress governs what we do every day. The dominant notions of progress, however, are driving us to ruin even when they are deployed to help us address the critical environmental problems of our day.
All of this commotion we call industrial civilization understandably looks like progress to those living through it and fortunate enough to die before the decline begins.
It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.
To a person alive today it is hard to fathom that the ancient Greeks regarded themselves as living in an age of decline. These are the people who gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the mathematician Pythagoras, the scientist and polymath Archimedes, and the first person to formulate atomic theory, Democritus.
Politics in the United States subsists on a single myth whose narrative is central to all positions, even most of the ones located at the fringe.
As a child of the 1950s I grew up immersed in a near-universal expectation of progress.
Over the nearly seven years I’ve spent blogging on The Archdruid Report, the themes of my weekly posts have veered back and forth between pragmatic ways to deal with the crisis of our time and the landscape of ideas that give those steps their meaning. That’s been unavoidable, since what I’ve been trying to communicate here is as much a way of looking at the world as it is a set of practices that unfold from that viewpoint, and a set of habits of observation that focus attention on details most people these days tend to ignore.