Progress

Wednesday

The Spectator

My late husband’s insatiable appetite for ‘sticky willies’

From our UK edition

Labour’s just deserts Sir: Last week’s leader hit the nail on the head (‘Desperate retreat’, 16 May). You have to wonder what is in the minds of the Labour party and specifically its potential new leaders Burnham, Rayner and Streeting. Their failure to read the room is what gave them the kicking they got at the local elections. Now they’re all expressing a wish to rejoin the EU, although Burnham will not apparently be campaigning on the issue in the forthcoming by-election. I bet he won’t! To bring an anti-Brexit, pro-EU agenda to an area dominated by Reform would be political suicide. Furthermore, if I were a constituent of Makerfield, I’d feel mightily annoyed that my vote was being used as a stepping stone in one person’s political career.

Monday

Patrick Kidd

Patrick Kidd, Madeline Grant, Simon Heffer, Lloyd Evans & Toby Young

From our UK edition

28 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Patrick Kidd asks why is sport so obsessed with Goats; Madeline Grant wonders why the government doesn’t show J.D. Vance the real Britain; Simon Heffer reviews Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea; Lloyd Evans provides a round-up of Edinburgh Fringe; and, Toby Young writes in praise of Wormwood Scrubs – the common, not the prison. Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Teresa Mull

America is forgetting how to make stuff

Articles about the future and “progress” have been popping up a lot lately, with conversations revolving around the inevitable advancements in technology and automation. Where we should head next is the collective theme. To the metaverse? To outer space itself? But instead of setting our sights on colonizing Mars or creating a perfect alternate reality, we should slow our roll, focus on the here and now and consider whether the frenzied “progress” we’re in such a rush to make has demonstrated any benefit to real-life people. Manufacturing is a good place to start. Let this startling reality sink in, reported in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: Between 2000 and 2010, US manufacturing experienced a nightmare.

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The peculiarly American attitude toward change

Future historians will marvel, if history is not abolished and historians themselves canceled — or worse — before then, how so many Americans at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st came so suddenly and with apparent certainty to believe in such human and scientific impossibilities as homosexual marriage and the multiplication of the two biological sexes into a unlimited number of them; the ability as if by magic to transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and for a man to give birth to a baby; the possibility for Homo sapiens to exert direct control over the terrestrial climate, as if the earth were a suite in a luxury hotel; and other manifest absurdities.

change
progress
Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Feminism has failed us

I’ve lost count of how many seminars I’ve had to sit through on Diversity & Inclusion, how many times I’ve been asked for my preferred pronouns and expected to discuss what I think ‘bringing my whole self to work’ really means. Conservatives mock these practices and complain that our lives seem to be dictated by a new moral order to which we did not consent. But we’re missing the forest for the trees. The problem with virtue signaling goes far beyond its annoying and unwelcome intrusions into our lives. We have been utterly hoodwinked. Or at least, I was. Sitting in my bathroom last week in the middle of my third miscarriage, blood, tears and expletives pouring out of me, I felt frustrated and stressed out.

Thursday

Sam Leith

Only an idiot would choose to live at any other time than the present

Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at any point in human history, only a stone-cold idiot would choose any time other than the present. On average, humans are by orders of magnitude healthier, wealthier, nicer, happier, longer lived, more free and better educated than ever before. Moreover, as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure noted: ‘Bowling averages are way up, minigolf scores are way down, and we have more excellent waterslides than any other planet we communicate with.’Some of the many graphs in this book slant from the bottom left towards the top right, showing the rise of Good Things, and some of them (charting the decline of Bad Things) go the other way.