Orwell Was Right About Progress

A mission statement for Changing Lanes

Changing Lanes is a newsletter for optimists.

If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you may find this surprising. The first three issues were skeptical: of Tesla's coming foray into robotaxis, of fare-free public transit, and of Hyperloop technology. To judge from these posts, it may seem that Changing Lanes aims to debunk and tear down. It has not been rich in hope for the future.

But I am hopeful for the future. I want it to be better than the past, and I believe it is possible for that to happen.

Many people think otherwise. Popular culture has embraced dystopian thinking for decades. The agent of destruction differs from account to account, from nuclear war to environmental degradation to climate change to unaligned AI. Hope for the future often seems naive or childish, while lack of hope passes itself off as sophistication.

But there are opposing cultural and philosophical undercurrents to this mainstream view. They go by different names, and have different political commitments. On the right, there are the techno-optimists. On the left, there are the solarpunk anarchists. In the middle, there are the technocrats who espouse the abundance agenda. I am in sympathy with all of them. They differ on some matters, but they agree that human ingenuity, rationalism, science, engineering, and hard work can make, not a utopia, but a better world than we have. If we are willing to think, and work, and above all build, we can have a world that is richer and cleaner, more comfortable and more safe, with more human flourishing and less exploitation and drudgery.

While I appreciate all of these groups, the one that I am most drawn to is the progress movement. The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI), one of its standard-bearers, describes it thusly:

The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it. We need a new philosophy of progress. In order to make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust. We need a new way forward. We need a systematic study of progress, so we can understand what is needed to keep progress going. We also need to advocate for progress. We need a progress movement that both explains and champions these ideas and puts forth a vision that inspires us to build.

Changing Lanes aims to be part of this movement, and to put forward such a vision. The newsletter is not a product of the RPI—neither they nor I want the burden of being responsible for the other—but I am a Fellow of the RPI, and received support from it to help launch this newsletter. Their Blog-Building Intensive is an excellent program I would recommend to anyone interested in joining the community of progress intellectuals.

The puzzle of progress

Recently, another affiliate of the RPI, Rob Tracinski, noted a puzzle. In the face of the Covid pandemic, the scientific community rose to the challenge and developed a vaccine at record speed. And yet the result of that achievement was to create a groundswell of opposition to vaccines. Why should this be?

It's a good question. Given the incredible achievements of industrial civilization, why are so many hostile to it? A proper answer to that question would require a book, and in fact Jason Crawford, founder of the RPI, is writing it; I encourage you to read his (ahem) work in progress. But I would like to offer a short answer. To understand why progress has its doubters and enemies, let's look to George Orwell.

My copies of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Godine Press

You may think I'm referring to 1984. It is indeed a great book, and it certainly speaks to Orwell's concerns about the future. It depicts what he thought was the most likely outcome: techno-Stalinism, or more poetically, a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

Famously, 1984 ends on a note of despair, with protagonist Winston Smith's ego dissolved into helpless adoration of the totalitarian leader whom Smith knows will shortly destroy him. Less famously, the appendix of the book contains a subtle but clear message that the regime that oppresses Smith will not last forever and has at most a few decades before its inevitable fall. (1984's authorized companion novel cum sequel, Julia, suggests that fall is so close that Smith might even live to see it.)

So Orwell, the author whose name has become synonymous with ‘dystopian’, seemed to believe there was hope for the future. That may seem surprising! If so, it’s because he’s best remembered for his novels, and they are so empty of hope. But the novels were only a fraction of his literary output. He was principally an essayist, producing a wealth of book reviews, columns, and short pieces, all of which have been overshadowed by his fiction and are less well known today.¹ Looking there, we find two essays that specifically address the concept of progress, each a comment on another writer’s work on the subject. The first of these focuses on H.G. Wells.²

Tools and weapons

Herbert George Wells was a historian, social critic, and author. He was most active from 1895 to 1935, but still alive and working in 1941 when Orwell wrote about him. Wells was a, or perhaps the, progress intellectual of his day. He celebrated science and rationalism as tools that would deliver not only prosperity, but also liberation. As Orwell put it:

When Wells was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra... Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view... here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined...

That language of the future could also be used to comment on the present. We remember Wells as a science-fiction author, which means that we may miss the biting social commentary of his novels. The War of the Worlds features foreign invaders whose technology fails to protect them from indigenous disease, while The Time Machine is about a society of ethereal and rarefied people who fail to realize they are at the mercy of those whom they oppress. So much for the British Empire, or the British class system.

For all his admiration, Orwell levels a stern judgment on Wells. The progress intellectual, says Orwell, understands the new world, but fails to understand its opponents. Nationalism, bigotry, and class interest make up "the tremendous strength of the old world", which will not meekly fade away when something better becomes available. Hence, says Orwell, Wells was so perplexed by Nazi Germany that he simply refused to take it seriously. "Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous... The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age... But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based."

I agree with Wells that progress, pluralism, democracy, science, rationality, and meritocracy are tools of liberation from poverty, feudalism, and authoritarianism. But I also agree with Orwell that there are many who will see these tools as weapons, aimed at them.

The 'tool people' are intellectuals, start-up founders, venture capitalists, and middle-class secularists, ready to disrupt the world to make something better. The 'weapon people' are the ones being disrupted: taxi drivers outcompeted by Uber, restaurant owners who have to enforce vaccine mandates, evangelicals surrounded by mushrooming indifference to religion, and soon, perhaps, paralegals whose work is taken over by ChatGPT. They come by their fears honestly, and just as in Orwell's day, some are ready to exploit those fears for their own purposes.

The two viewpoints

There are other reasons to be skeptical of progress. In another essay, Orwell summed up the career of Charles Dickens, again with affectionate exasperation.³ In Dickens' novels, Orwell notes, the plot is resolved, far too often, by a rich man showing up and throwing his money around. This is most obvious today in A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge uplifts the Cratchits and saves Tiny Tim by writing a series of cheques, but similar denouements show up in The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and many more. Orwell suggests that Dickens used this tired plot so often because he saw no alternative. The way things are is how they will always be, so why imagine otherwise? As Orwell puts it:

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

Dickens, says Orwell, was the latter type. The system will never change, so the best one can hope for is that individuals within it behave decently.

A good progress intellectual must take these fears seriously. And the way to do that is to embrace the other side of Orwell's dichotomy.

If we want to change human nature, we have to change the system. And we have to do so in a way that recognizes that disruption, the buzzword of change in Silicon Valley, is a thing to fear. People may like change, but no one wakes up in the morning hoping their life will be disrupted that day.

Progress wins when it takes zero-sum games and makes them positive-sum.

If we introduce self-driving cars, and the net result is that we impoverish Uber drivers and long-haul truckers, we've failed. But if we introduce self-driving cars and create a panoply of new jobs for mechanics, cleaners, and teleoperators, we'll succeed.

Self-driving cars also fail if we introduce them and do nothing else. Robotaxis alone means that city streets become more congested; riders will spend more person-hours in longer commutes, becoming less healthy and more socially isolated. We must insist that as the robotaxis arrive, our cities must change too; as some streets become reserved for self-driving cars, others must be pedestrianized.

So Orwell was right (as usual): progress is possible, but only if we understand clearly why some will reject it. For some, incuriosity, cupidity, or pietism will be enough to make them prefer the status quo. But others will fear that arguments for change are actually smug frauds: disguised attempts to pick pockets or break legs.

Here lies an opportunity: such people are open to persuasion.

That opportunity is what being a progress intellectual means to me. It's about embracing change to produce benefits, and making sure those benefits are widely shared. It's about recognizing the fears and challenges that come with progress, and working to address them. Most importantly, it's about maintaining our sense of optimism: not smug certainty that everything will work out, but an expectation that through ingenuity, hard work, and empathy, we will build a better future, for ourselves and everyone else.

Changing Lanes is my attempt to bring about progress. It will continue to cast a skeptical eye on both the status quo and proposed changes to it, at least some of the time. But it will also enthusiastically promote the concrete ways that technology and innovation really could make things better. Its skepticism and enthusiasm are both manifestations of my belief that if we try to think clearly about where we are and where we might go, we really can solve problems, improve lives, and spread prosperity. 

This is a newsletter for optimists. Believing that change is possible is the first step toward bringing it about.

Respect to Kevin Kohler, Jonah Messinger, and the aforementioned Rob Tracinski for feedback on earlier drafts.

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1. With one notable exception: his seminal essay “Politics and the English Language”.

2. Orwell died in 1950 and consequently all his writing entered the public domain in Canada in 2021. His work is also in the public domain in the UK and Australia. Due to the inanity of American copyright law, I believe this essay is not yet in the public domain in the USA. American readers should conduct themselves appropriately.

3. The caveat in the previous footnote applies here as well.