By 1900 what had formerly been a land mostly of farmers and villagers had become a land increasingly of cities and roaring industrial towns; and comforts, conveniences,
and wealth had so piled up that it almost seemed as if a whole new world had been invented for people to work and play in.
Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself 1900-1950, 50-51.
In 1910, the Ford Motor Company produced 18,664 cars. In 1920, it produced 1,250,000. In the same time, the price decreased from $950 to $290. At the time, this was a sign of great progress. The automobile was finally accessible to common workers, and it gave those people the ability to move throughout the country. The automobile opened new possibilities to a wide range of people.
Other technological advances during the same period led to similar results. “It was the golden heyday of railroading. The great network of railroad lines which linked the country together from sea to sea was now virtually complete, and the amount of business which the railroads did swelled hugely.” The Big Change, 114. Skyscrapers, broad infrastructure projects, factories, retail stores—all of these areas expanded significantly in the first several decades of the 20th century.
Progress can be good, for sure. The progress that Allen talks about brought many people out of poverty, led to great advances in medicine and other fields, and generally brought about better living conditions for all classes of people throughout the United States. In a way, unchecked progress also led to the Great Depression. Today, there is a problem with progress. Many people seek “progress” for the sake of “progress,” untethered to any particular telos for society or for them individually.
Aristotle talks about how human beings, when acting rationally, act for certain ends that they have determined are “good.” Human beings act according to certain basic appetites—the desire for food, water, reproduction, etc.—but also for higher ends—like running into burning buildings to rescue loved ones or donating to a nonprofit because helping the less fortunate is the right thing to do. For humans, actions are “the conclusion of a piece of practical reason.” Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: the Desire to Understand, 145. We deliberate about certain choices presented to us based on the desires we have. That “[d]eliberation is not merely an intellectual process by which an agent realizes how to act; it is a transmitter of desire.” Lear, 145. We apply our knowledge and skills to pursue what we consider to be good.
As Allen describes the first 50 years of the 20th century, the “goods” that Americans pursued were primarily economic. Increased production and wages, bolstered by the investment surrounding two war efforts, led to improved standards of living across the board and to other advances as well. Americans lived longer because of medical breakthroughs—antibiotics, treatments for previously incurable diseases, etc. And according to Allen’s recounting of this progress, progress in all areas of society is good for sake of the progress itself. Allen does not really cite any negative effects of these developments.
So how do we draw a line between good progress and bad progress? Is there a line? In Hobbes’ Leviathan, he describes the “good” not as the product of rational deliberation as Aristotle did. Rather, the “good” is, essentially, what you happen to choose. It’s a post-hoc rationalization that what you have decided to do is “good” simply because that is what you chose to pursue. Such a theory removes the ability to make a moral claim about human action. Taken to its logical extreme, all human actions are “good” because the individual choosing subject thought that action was good in the moment. There is no objective judge of good or bad action.
Those who argue for a Hobbesian view of the good often argue that they need to be able to pursue the goods they identify to be fully free human beings because freedom is a constituent part of being human. Freedom is a broad topic for another newsletter, but people have difference understandings of it. There is a difference between believing we have a freedom from certain things, or a freedom for certain things. The freedom from camp seeks to serve their own interests and desires separate and apart from others. In this sense, it is less “freedom” and more “license”—license to do what you want so long as it does not begin to infringe on another’s right to do what she wants. In this scenario, people in society are naturally pitted against one another because others exist at the limits of your own personal freedom. And you necessarily have to guard your freedom against intrusion from other people.
In contrast, those who believe in freedom for something have a vision of the good that they are pursuing and a mental, spiritual, or other framework in which to pursue it. The example I used to give to my students was that Michael Jordan (or Kobe, or Lebron for you younger folks) was the “freest” basketball player of his generation because his physical abilities, work ethic, and innate talent allowed him to be a great basketball player. But he was only a great player because he played within the rules of the game. If Jordan had picked up the ball and sprinted to the other side of the court without dribbling, or if he had punched other players or tackled others rather than playing defense, he would not have been a “free” basketball player. He would not even have been playing basketball anymore. He was great, and had the freedom to play well, precisely because he was playing within the construct of the rules of basketball; the rules and the constraints of the game helped demonstrate his true freedom and just how good he was.
In thinking about progress, we need to think about whether we know what game we are playing. Progress in every aspect of life in every direction is more entropy than progress. It’s useful to have guardrails. In American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (the material for the movie), one recurring theme is that those in government who were pushing for the Manhattan Project were asking only whether it was possible to create the bomb, not whether it was good to create it. Given the speed of progress today and the desire for even faster progress through AI and other means, it is concerning that we have not had the prerequisite discussion about what the telos of all this progress should be: Progress for the sake of what? Without that, we risk buying progress at too great a price.