Progress

Monday

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.