Why the Progress Debate Goes Nowhere

Somewhere in Marc Andreessen’s brain is a dial labeled “Progress,” and in writing the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023 he turned it up to the max. “Technology … is the spearhead of progress,” he declares, and “our civilization was built on technology.” And because free markets are the infinite source of infinite growth supplying our infinite needs and wants, when you combine technology and markets you get a “techno-capital machine” that “never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.”

But this is not guaranteed, he warns. To ensure the spiral never ends, we must accelerate it. The dial needs to be turned up. Otherwise we get stagnation, and stagnation means “ultimately death.” Stagnation is on Andreessen’s list of “enemies.” Here is a related one: the “mass demoralization campaign” that, beginning in the 1960s, has tried to put limits on growth in the name of “zombie ideas” like existential risk.

If you want a picture of the enemy, you could do worse than to read the “Dark Mountain Manifesto,” penned by British writers Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009 in the shadow of the greatest market collapse since the Great Depression. “As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised,” Kingsnorth and Hine write. Instead, “you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.” According to the myth, “history becomes an escalator, and the only way is up.”

The techno-capital machine that our civilization was built upon is really just a myth. It’s the myth that humans are central on Earth and should dominate it, which “has led the planet into the age of ecocide.” Species extinction runs rampant, rainforests are dwindling, climate change is out of control. “The time for civilisation is past,” Kingsnorth and Hine proclaim; what is left for us to do is to summon all writers and artists and freethinkers to run to the hills and begin the work of “uncivilisation.”

Writing in UnHerd in 2023, Kingsnorth goes further: he is “against progress.” The way forward is the way back, through a “reactionary radicalism”: “a defence of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics.”

Andreessen turns the dial up; Kingsnorth turns it down. But it’s the same dial: Progress, understood as synonymous with modern civilization. Though they’re seemingly at loggerheads over whether or not we should want more of what got us here, their real dispute is about whether “progress” in the sense of improvement is still a coherent idea at all. We should hope that it is, or at least some version of it. But with Andreessen as its defender, that hope feels dashed. We fare little better with Kingsnorth, who seems to have despaired of it.

These two extremes are at the outer edges of reasonable disagreement. The use of taking them seriously nonetheless is that they help us to see more clearly the rift between two large trends in our culture, and possibly to build a bridge.

In a way, manifestos are bad places for thought. They are self-important, rhetorically grandiose, and argumentatively dim. On the other hand, this is also why we should think about them, if in a different way. In mostly casting arguments aside, they work like stories that are meant to convince by their vibes. Kingsnorth the novelist knows this well — “humans have always lived by stories” — and so he knows how to tell a story of his own: “We find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed…. It is time to look down.”

Andreessen seems oblivious to storytelling, or else he would have written something more elegant than the barking of a dog:

Where did we come from?

Our civilization was built on a spirit of discovery, of exploration, of industrialization.

Where are we going? …

We owe the past, and the future.

It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist.

It’s time to build.

And yet, as the Dark Mountain Manifesto notes, ultimately this is a story too: of human genius overcoming nature.

Both stories go back centuries. “The two schools may be called progressivist and primitivist,” writes Leo Marx in his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden. “At the same time” — that is, the early 1700s — “that electrifying advances in learning and the arts seemed to sanction a belief, or at least a new degree of confidence, in the perfectibility of civilized man, books like [Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia] were supplying Europe with apparent testimony in favor of primitive life. In effect, they called into question the whole value of civilization.”

By the mid-1800s, there was no clearer symbol of technological progress than the railroad’s conquest of the American landscape. The iron horse “towers above all other inventions of this or the preceding age,” said Daniel Webster at the time. It is a great social equalizer, as both the rich and the poor can use it. As if anticipating Andreessen’s free-market defense, Webster described the popular sentiment that the railroad was the product of “the indomitable industry of a free people.”

And yet, Webster also knew that the railroad builders cared little about the rural ideal of the agrarian: “Their business is to cut and to slash, to level or deface a finely rounded field, and fill up beautifully winding valleys.” Another commentator at the time wrote that “the brute forces of nature lie waiting man’s command, and ready to serve him” — a description that may ring true, though very differently, for both the primitivist and the progressivist. Andreessen echoes: “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

It’s tempting to imagine that the right path to avoid two extremes naturally lies somewhere in the middle. Between the city and the wilderness there must be a compromise: the village or small town that combines the best of both. Leo Marx demonstrates the hold that this “middle state” vision has had on the American imagination, including for thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Jefferson. Each in his own way imagined a society — between the industrial filth of London and the savage Western frontier — that would take advantage of new technological wonders but be made up of people who would largely be devoted to cultivating the land.

It remains a compelling vision. The problem is that it underestimates the nature of the disagreement between the primitivist and the progressivist. Their dispute is not only about what kind of past we should preserve and what kind of future we should strive for, such that we could find some happy medium combining agrarianism and industrialization. The disagreement is also about what progress even means, and about what or who is progressing. And compromise may not be feasible when we have a disagreement about that.

The late German philosopher Robert Spaemann published a lecture in the 1980s, “Under Which Circumstances Can We Still Speak of Progress?,” in which he distinguishes two types of progress.

First, there are changes we call progress because they get us closer to a finished state. Think about building a house, Spaemann’s example. At each step toward its completion, we can say we are making progress. Now, we would not say this if we knew in advance that the house will never actually get finished. The framing of walls would not be progress if the roofers never show up and in the end the structure remains uninhabitable. Progress here receives its meaning from a clearly defined goal toward which the project moves until it is finished. We might call this extrinsic progress.

Second, there are changes we call progress even if we never accomplish what we set out to do. Spaemann’s example for this is playing a Beethoven piano sonata. We may practice and practice and never manage to play it, and yet we can say we are making progress in playing the piano — we might even entertain guests with simpler pieces, or take pleasure in what we feel is inherently a worthwhile activity. We call this progress because we are improving in doing something that we believe is in itself a good thing to do. We might call this intrinsic progress.

In many human activities the two types of progress are mixed together, but it is useful to think of them as separate. Consider a further important difference. With extrinsic progress, the question of whether progress is happening is essentially an empirical matter: the goal is defined — a house, a car, a potato harvest — and we can find out which steps will get us there. It is a question of means and ends. With intrinsic progress, means and ends cannot be teased apart in this way; they form a whole. Playing the piano is at once the means and the end of the activity in which the musician may be said to be progressing, and the question of whether progress is actually happening is essentially a matter of judgment.

The paradigm for extrinsic progress is the production of a thing: the completion of the house is the goal toward which the house is progressing.

The paradigm for intrinsic progress is the growth or maturing of an organism, for example a person. The person is already a complete being at the start of the process but now grows as a result of it: the piano player increases in musical maturity.

When progressivists and primitivists disagree about their visions of the good life, more often than not they are talking past each other because they have different types of progress in mind.

Consider why it is that the two sides repel each other as much as they do. Both are fundamentally reactionary: Kingsnorth explicitly, in calling for a “reactionary radicalism,” and Andreessen in offering a long list of his enemies: “stagnation,” “statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism,” “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories,” to name just a few. Ezra Klein has shrewdly argued that Andreessen’s program should be called “reactionary futurism.” Each rejects the other with equal force.

The reason for this is not political tribalism, though it plays a role — each side argues, half-convincingly, that it transcends the left–right divide. The main reason is technology.

Progressivists like to talk a lot about technology: “We believe that there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology,” Andreessen writes. At first blush, this looks like the extrinsic way of thinking about progress. You define a goal and find the best means to achieve it: “Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.” The real world here is the world of things, which is why his manifesto is peppered with images of engines and forces. Progressivists even think of society at large in this way, using objective metrics like GDP, wages, energy costs, and cost of living as proxies for social progress broadly.

Primitivists, on the other hand, tend to talk about progress in the intrinsic sense, though they typically don’t use the “progress” label at all. What they are looking for isn’t as clearly defined as the price of gas; they want a sense of wholeness and belonging, they want thick communities whose members feel a sense of personal agency in their work. They want activity that is meaningful in itself. In his UnHerd piece, Kingsnorth calls for a return to a “moral economy.” In the manifesto we read that “keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads.”

A vision focused on extrinsic progress, on choosing the best means for achieving one’s goals, is naturally enamored of technological solutions — this is where technology can be especially useful. A vision focused on intrinsic progress, on pursuing the kind of life that is inherently rewarding, is naturally less interested in technology — instead, it tends to recognize that certain technologies at certain scales diminish our sense of reward.

The Silicon Valley progressivist may join Andreessen in saying that “we had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution,” to which the primitivist, who may be a farmer, might say that large-scale industrial agriculture has turned personal care for the land into a factory job, hollowing out local communities. One can agree or disagree with either of these positions, or push back in various ways; the thing to note is that technology is at the center of the debate.

But casting the progressivists as focused on extrinsic progress — because they obsess over technology and building things and measuring growth — misses the central question, which their program doesn’t clearly answer: What is all the building for?

The primitivists, on the other hand, have a clearer sense of what they hope to achieve, but they tend to see the goal more as a personal escape than a coherent social vision, whose realization would require building and finding the best means for their ends.

Consider a real-life parable. Bernard Moitessier was a French sailor who in 1968 participated in a solo race around the world. Starting from Plymouth, England, he had to sail alone and without stopping around the three big capes — the southern tips of Africa, New Zealand, and South America — and then sail north across the Atlantic to return to Plymouth.

As he tells the story in The Long Way, he rounded all three capes with relative ease. For all he knew, he might have been ahead in the race, with a good chance of winning. But it had gradually dawned on him that winning was actually not what he wanted to do. After months alone at sea, Plymouth, in his mind, had come to represent all of modern civilization, and he wanted none of it: “I charge the modern world — that’s the Monster. It is destroying our earth, and trampling the soul of men,” he wrote. “‘Western civilization’ is almost completely technocratic now, it isn’t a civilization any more.” The race toward Plymouth was really “the race for Progress,” and winning it would have meant losing his soul.

So here, in the South Atlantic, Moitessier faced an existential choice: sail home, perhaps collect the prize, and risk getting stuck there in the machinery of Progress, or find a new home altogether where he could be at peace with himself — progress of a different sort. He chose Tahiti. Sailing once more around Africa and New Zealand, he landed in Tahiti after almost a year nonstop at sea.

Alas, when he arrived in Tahiti he found that near the harbor a five-lane highway was being built: “That they might kill man some day, they couldn’t care less. So long as the bulldozer and the mixer don’t die.” In protest, Moitessier planted a garden.

Note that Moitessier is not simply choosing between two different goals, Plymouth and Tahiti, toward which he is either moving or not at any given point. He is choosing between two different conceptions of progress itself.

The race to Plymouth is a stand-in for extrinsic progress. Moitessier makes progress as long as that goal remains clearly defined. Progress here depends on speed, which in turn depends on the route he chooses, the sails he hoists, accurate instruments, his reading of the wind and currents, and so on.

Progress toward Tahiti is different, because Tahiti isn’t really the ultimate goal: the goal is being at peace with himself. He is making intrinsic progress in that direction as long as he is at sea and not thinking about Plymouth. Even in Tahiti the work will continue.

The trouble with the techno-primitivists is that they are like Moitessier sailing to Tahiti in the hope of escaping civilization itself, and with it some of humanity’s oldest problems. “We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’,” write Kingsnorth and Hine. Fine, but aren’t there some problems for which we need those solutions? Their manifesto is clear that technology is not the answer to everything, but it is curiously silent on what role technology should play.

The trouble with the techno-progressivists is that they are like Moitessier racing to Plymouth, but without telling us where Plymouth actually is or why we’re going there. “We believe the ultimate mission of technology is to advance life both on Earth and in the stars,” Andreessen writes. Advance toward what? The reason he seems unconcerned to spell this out is that, in fact, he sees building itself — problem-solving, technological mastery — as inherently worthwhile without particularly caring what problems are getting solved or what broader purpose will be realized by solving them. Like the piano sonata, we are making progress as long as we are moving, even if we never get anywhere. It’s about intrinsic progress after all. It’s about the journey, not the destination: “We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.” Technology to do what? Now the cat is chasing its tail.

The conceptual muddle goes deepest on the question of how to think about civilization at large, where the two sides share the same murky terms of debate.

Both quarrel over which way to turn the “Progress” dial because both see modern civilization as synonymous with Progress: civilization as a whole moving in a distinct direction. Spaemann notes that this idea of capital-p Progress became popular in the eighteenth century. In the essay “End of Modernity?” he describes it like this: “The notion of universal, necessary progress … is the myth of modernity. It is the idea of progress in the sense, somehow, of an absolute improvement.”

Is civilizational progress more like extrinsic progress — society gradually moving toward a completed state in the future, be it jetpack cities or a republic of yeoman farmers? Or is it more like intrinsic progress — society engaging in inherently meaningful activity, a sort of maturing of humanity?

Endorsement of the idea of civilizational progress is essentially the progressivist stance: when we advance energy technologies, iPhone apps, and GDP, what’s progressing is not just those things, it’s society itself. The expansiveness of progress in this sense, Spaemann writes, “is related to its lack of content.” The aim is not to say exactly what it means for civilization to progress; the aim is the continuous “expansion of options” for a good life, whatever that may be. Andreessen writes: “Material abundance from markets and technology opens the space for religion, for politics, and for choices of how to live, socially and individually.” In his 2020 essay “It’s Time to Build,” Andreessen calls for an “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.” It’s as if it doesn’t really matter what we build, or to what end, as long as we are building, pushing civilization forward, whatever forward actually means other than new and more.

It’s as if, as long as we are racing, it doesn’t greatly matter where we are going. But that of course is nonsense. So the reactionary primitivist, already attuned to the ways in which technology can undermine his vision of communal flourishing, drops out of the civilization race and declares he is “against progress.”

But this move is a trap. The primitivist implicitly grants that technological progress is tied up with the progress of modern civilization — by rejecting them both. In their place, he conjures a beautiful image of pre-industrial, communal life while abandoning the work of directing technological means toward good ends for society.

Andreessen builds aimlessly; Kingsnorth aims but doesn’t build. In effect, he leaves that to Andreessen, whose vision he fully distrusts.

The lessons are simple in theory if difficult in practice. Both the progressivist and the primitivist would do well to be clear about what specific goals they each are pursuing, about what we’re building for. Are we building a bridge that will bring greater economic prosperity to an area, or are we building a thick community with a library and lemonade stands and kids playing in the streets? We should be able to imagine a future in which we can say yes to both, even if the proposals tend to come from different sides of the debate — and not because building is inherently good but because these are worthy goals for this community.

But the endless debate around whether the pre-industrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend, is a dead end. In arguing over this, both sides essentially agree that modernity is on a track. And maybe it actually is — history tells us that civilizations can derail. Which makes this a conversation worth having, but on different terms — historical and ultimately metaphysical: Does history have a direction, does it have an end point? But this is not what primitivists and progressivists mostly argue over.

If both sides stopped pretending that they have a grip on Progress at large, they might just have a conversation about what goals for society they each have in mind and how to achieve them. The country gardener may have to think harder about what we should build, and the tech entrepreneur be more sober about what perhaps we shouldn’t.