Sharing from my blog: https://spiralprogress.com/2024/10/22/scenario/

Following Kuhn, normal progress is when things get better along the values you already hold and society feels improved without becoming less recognizable. Cars get safer, screens have more pixels, food gets cheaper.

Normal progress does not mean “trivial” or “frivolous”. Decreasing infant mortality is hugely important and also a kind of “normal” progress.

There are however, rare moments of revolutionary progress where society changes in a more profound way. I am thinking of the advent of democracy, the slow death of religious fundamentalism, the shift to agriculture. In these moments, along the values and priorities held by the pre-revolutionary people, society may actually seem to be in decline. It is more difficult to say along the same axes that were important pre-revolution, that these kinds of shifts constitute progress at all.

As in science, this discomfort is a function of undergoing a paradigm shift. Think of Martin Luther in 1517.

Normal progress does not require faith, it merely requires hope that things can be improved. It’s like going out to eat and hoping the food will be good. Not much is really at risk here. If things are good you will know it.

Revolutionary progress that requires faith in the deeper religious sense of giving oneself up to something beyond one’s understanding and control. This is faith that a future you can’t predict, control or even fully understand is still worth bringing into existence. We could not say in the early moments of American independence what this new country would bring. Or in the early days of widespread literacy what would come from empowering the masses. Hope is going on a blind date and hoping you haven’t been catfished. Faith is having children with no real ability to predict who they will be or how becoming a parent will transform you.

This is inspiring. Is it good?

Proponents of revolutionary progress will often point out that decision to move forward defies utilitarian calculus. There is too much uncertainty at the material level, yes. But more importantly, uncertainty over what values will even take hold in the future, and over what people will be around to take hold of them. This is all true. And yet what is the basis for faith? And how can matters of faith be resolved when true believers disagree?

In the past our only answers were religious war, or in more asymmetric cases, witch hunts and accusations of heresy. Neither feels like a particularly healthy model of conflict resolution for the 21st century.

One rhetorical move is to claim that the future is simply inevitable. “Information wants to be free”. “Social Darwinism”. “The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Toward Justice.”

These slogans seem to mistake a reason for a future to exist in some equilibrium, with a definitive reason for it to exist starting from current conditions. Even if you buy the first half, systems get trapped in local maxima all the time. There is no guarantee that the best or most efficient outcomes comes to fruition.

More generally, we should be suspicious of any rhetoric that aims to simply eliminate the possibility of discussion. When a certain future truly is inevitable, fine, let it come. In the meantime, let’s take the anti-determinists’s wager: If there is only one scenario where human agency still matters, we should act on the premise that it exists.