What If We Are Wrong About Progress?

We have become extraordinarily good at measuring progress. We can tell you how much faster a computer is than the machine it replaced, how many people are connected to the internet, how many packages can be delivered in a day, how much electricity a country produces and, with increasing confidence, precisely when your supermarket driver will be arriving with the cheese you forgot to order yesterday. We have graphs for almost everything now. If something can be turned into a percentage, plotted on a chart or presented during a corporate presentation with the words “year on year”, we appear to regard it as evidence that civilisation is moving forwards.

The problem is that progress isn’t actually a measurement. It is a judgement.

That distinction seems rather important, yet we don’t often stop to examine it. We talk about technological progress, economic progress, social progress and scientific progress as though the direction of travel is self-evident. Newer must be better. Faster must be better. More efficient must be better. More convenient must certainly be better. We have constructed an entire vocabulary in which the word “better” is often quietly smuggled into the conversation without anyone having first bothered to establish what better actually means.

Perhaps we should.

I was thinking about this recently while doing something that would probably be regarded as gloriously inefficient by modern standards… fixing something instead of replacing it. There was no app involved, no subscription required and no cheerful little notification informing me that my object had reached the end of its recommended service life. Something had stopped working, so I looked at it, worked out what appeared to be wrong and attempted to repair it.

It wasn’t particularly remarkable. People have been doing exactly that for thousands of years.

Yet there was something satisfying about it that modern life increasingly seems to have removed from everyday existence. You look at a broken thing, you understand it a little better and, if you’re lucky, you make it work again. The process gives you something beyond the repaired object itself. It gives you knowledge, confidence and a slightly better understanding of the world in which you live.

We don’t tend to count those things.

That is one of the oddities of our definition of progress. We are very good at measuring what has been eliminated… time, effort, inconvenience, cost and physical labour. We are considerably less good at measuring what may have disappeared along with it.

Consider how much of modern life has been designed to prevent us from needing to know how anything works. Cars diagnose themselves. Washing machines display error codes. Telephones navigate for us. Calculators perform arithmetic that would once have required paper and concentration. Search engines retrieve information instantly. Artificial intelligence can now explain the answer, write the email complaining about the answer and, if sufficiently encouraged, probably draft a formal letter to your Member of Parliament about the whole affair.

It is marvellous.

It is also slightly terrifying when you stop and think about it.

The average person today has access to more information than any human being in history, yet may have less practical understanding of the machinery that keeps their everyday life functioning. That isn’t necessarily because people have become stupid. In many cases, it is simply the rational consequence of specialisation. If a trained mechanic can repair your car, why would you spend months learning how an engine works? If your phone can navigate you across an unfamiliar city, why memorise a map? If an online calculator can work out compound interest in seconds, why sit down with a pencil and do the mathematics?

Quite reasonably, you wouldn’t.

Until the mechanic isn’t available, the phone has no signal and the website has disappeared.

That is when competence suddenly becomes rather fashionable again.

This matters because efficiency and resilience are not the same thing, although we increasingly behave as though they are. A system can be exceptionally efficient while being remarkably fragile. Remove one small component and the whole arrangement can begin to wobble.

Modern life is full of such systems. Electricity, banking, communications, food distribution, transport, payment networks and digital identity all depend upon layers of infrastructure that most of us neither understand nor control. Under normal circumstances, this is an extraordinary achievement. We can live remarkably complicated lives without needing to understand the complicated machinery underneath them.

But resilience begins where convenience ends.

A person who knows how to produce a little food, store water, repair something, cook from basic ingredients, navigate without a phone or keep essential equipment functioning may appear slightly old-fashioned in ordinary circumstances. Give them a serious disruption, however, and some of those apparently old-fashioned skills become rather less quaint.

This is something I have noticed about off-grid living. The romantic version is all sunsets, wood fires and cups of tea while gazing thoughtfully across the countryside. The reality is somewhat more practical. You become aware of where your water comes from. You notice how much electricity you actually use. You learn that things have a habit of breaking at inconvenient moments and that relying upon a single system for something important is generally an invitation to regret.

Redundancy stops looking wasteful when the alternative is sitting in the dark wondering why the clever system has decided today is the day it develops a personality.

There is a lesson in that which extends well beyond off-grid life.

We have spent decades making ordinary existence more convenient, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. I enjoy hot water, refrigeration, decent medicine, modern communications and the ability to order some obscure piece of equipment from another country and have it delivered to my door because apparently civilisation has now reached the stage where a specialist screwdriver can be summoned with approximately the same effort once required to summon a horse.

I have no desire to return to 1840.

What interests me is the assumption that every reduction in effort is automatically an improvement.

Sometimes effort is merely effort. Sometimes it is the mechanism through which we acquire competence.

Learning to cook is harder than opening a packet, but the difficulty isn’t entirely wasted. Learning to repair something is more troublesome than buying a replacement, but the knowledge gained doesn’t disappear when the repair is finished. Walking somewhere without navigation software may take longer, but you might actually discover where you are.

We have become very good at removing friction from life.

Perhaps we haven’t considered that some friction was useful.

The same problem appears in the way we think about consumption. We have somehow managed to construct an economic culture in which replacing perfectly serviceable objects is treated as progress. Your telephone still works perfectly well, but a new model has appeared. Your television works, but the new one is thinner. Your car works, but the latest version has a larger screen and will helpfully tell you that you are tired, apparently having detected the fact through your steering wheel.

The old object isn’t broken.

It has simply been declared insufficient.

There is a curious psychology to this. We increasingly measure improvement by comparing what we have with what we could have, rather than by asking whether what we already have is sufficient.

That is a very useful arrangement if you happen to be selling things.

For the rest of us, it can become an endless treadmill. There is always a faster phone, a larger television, a newer car, a smarter appliance, a better subscription and another upgrade waiting just around the corner. We call it innovation because “your perfectly adequate possessions have been made to feel inadequate again” doesn’t sound quite as good in the brochure.

Perhaps this is why the question of progress becomes particularly interesting when we stop looking at technology and start looking at time.

Technology has given us extraordinary ways to save time. Yet many people feel they have less of it than ever.

We can communicate instantly, shop without leaving the house, work remotely, automate household tasks, obtain entertainment at any hour and have almost anything delivered to us. We have removed an astonishing amount of inconvenience from daily life.

And yet we remain busy.

Perhaps we have misunderstood the purpose of saving time.

We seem to have treated every minute we save as an opportunity to fill that minute with something else.

The washing machine saves us hours of labour, so we work more. Email makes communication instantaneous, so we communicate more. Online shopping removes the journey to the shops, so we buy more. Smartphones make us constantly reachable, so we become constantly reachable.

The technology does exactly what it promised.

We simply keep moving the goalposts.

There is something almost wonderfully British about having invented labour-saving devices and then finding new forms of labour with which to occupy the time they saved.

And then there is the question of information.

We often describe the internet as having solved the problem of access to knowledge. In one sense, it has. Information is everywhere. We can investigate almost any subject, compare sources, read historical documents, examine scientific papers and listen to people from places we might otherwise never encounter.

But access to information isn’t the same thing as understanding.

Nor is having more information necessarily the same thing as being better informed.

The modern problem may not be ignorance so much as saturation. We are exposed to an extraordinary volume of claims, opinions, headlines, commentary and outrage every day. We are encouraged to respond immediately, share instantly and form opinions before the coffee has cooled.

The result is rather strange. People can know a great deal while having very little time to think.

Perhaps that is one of the unintended consequences of technological progress. We have become extraordinarily efficient at transmitting information and rather less efficient at allowing human beings to digest it.

Silence, reflection and boredom have become almost suspicious activities.

If you are sitting quietly doing nothing, there is almost certainly an application somewhere prepared to help you stop.

This matters because judgement requires something that technology cannot easily provide… time.

Good judgement isn’t simply knowing more facts. It involves experience, context, uncertainty, instinct and the uncomfortable ability to sit with a question without immediately demanding an answer.

We don’t seem particularly good at that anymore.

Everything requires an opinion.

Everything requires a response.

Everything requires a position.

Perhaps genuine progress would involve becoming slightly more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know yet.”

There is another reason I am increasingly suspicious of the way we use the word progress, and it concerns what we choose to measure.

Economic growth is important. Productivity matters. Scientific discovery matters. Better healthcare matters. Longer lives matter. Improved communications matter. Nobody sensible should pretend otherwise.

But these measurements tell us only part of the story.

They don’t tell us whether people feel connected to their communities. They don’t tell us whether children know how to entertain themselves without a screen. They don’t tell us whether people can repair things, grow food, make things, sit quietly, talk to their neighbours or cope when the normal systems stop functioning.

They certainly don’t tell us whether people are happy.

Perhaps that is because happiness is notoriously difficult to measure and therefore deeply inconvenient to modern management.

You can’t easily put “sense of belonging” into a quarterly report.

You can, however, put revenue into one.

And so the things that are easiest to measure gradually become the things we treat as most important.

That may be one of the great traps of modern civilisation.

We mistake what can be measured for what matters.

A larger economy is measurable. A richer life is considerably harder to quantify.

A faster internet connection is measurable. A meaningful conversation is not.

A new product can be counted. The satisfaction of repairing something with your own hands is much harder to put on a graph.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether progress is good.

Of course it is.

The question is whether we have become too lazy in defining it.

Modern does not automatically mean better. New does not automatically mean improved. Fast does not automatically mean efficient. Convenient does not automatically mean desirable, and complicated does not automatically mean sophisticated.

Sometimes the most sophisticated solution is knowing when not to add another layer of sophistication.

Perhaps progress is not simply about having more things done for us. Perhaps it is also about having the freedom to decide which things we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves.

Perhaps resilience is not a rejection of modernity but a sensible companion to it.

Perhaps keeping a few old skills alive isn’t nostalgia. Perhaps it is insurance.

Perhaps knowing how to grow something, mend something, cook something, build something or navigate somewhere without asking a machine to do it for you isn’t evidence that you have failed to embrace the future.

Perhaps it is evidence that you haven’t surrendered entirely to it.

I don’t want to live without modern technology. I write, communicate, research and earn my living through it. I have no intention of throwing the computer into the garden and retreating into the woods while shouting at passing drones.

But I do think we should occasionally step back from the relentless march of “new and improved” and ask a rather unfashionable question.

Improved for whom?

Improved in what way?

And, most importantly, improved towards what?

Because if we cannot answer that last question, we aren’t necessarily progressing.

We may simply be moving faster.

And there is a considerable difference between the two.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that a civilisation obsessed with progress may eventually discover that one of the most valuable things it has lost is the ability to stop for long enough to ask whether it was heading in the right direction.

That would be an interesting discovery.

Although, knowing us, somebody would probably develop an app to measure it.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham