Integrating Conceptions of Human Progress
The existing literature on human progress is dominated by a focus on a small set of indicators: optimists stress advances in economic output or technology, while pessimists bemoan environmental or cultural deterioration. Yet progress can potentially be evaluated across hundreds of indicators. Indeed the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development heads a collaborative research project designed to develop such a list of indicators. However, we can only speak of progress in this way after first identifying what would be ‘good’ or ‘better’ with respect to a variety of social, political, psychological, and other variables. Is it possible to develop consensus cross-culturally on the direction human societies should move?
This paper will argue that it is indeed possible to identify what most humans would consider progressive across a wide range of phenomena. It is then possible to perform a historical survey in order to ascertain for which of these phenomena progress (or regress) has been observed historically. And then it is possible to speculate on whether it is possible to achieve progress in the future for phenomena that have shown regress in the past. Since people will disagree regarding the relative importance of different types of progress, humanity can only share confidence of a progressive future if progress can be imagined across most/all phenomena.
Such a project involves integrating across both disciplines and cultures. It requires integrating ethical, historical, and social scientific analysis. And it involves integrating scholarly and public policy analysis. In so doing, the project must grapple with three prominent sources of pessimism regarding the human condition: a fear that we cannot identify a universal ethics (and thus do not know what progress is), a concern that the world we live in is too complex for us to understand (and thus that we could not identify a path to progress even if we could decide what progress would mean), and finally a concern that public policy is not guided by rational discourse (and thus we would not achieve a path to progress even if we could identify it).
These challenges can each be met through the application of recent developments in interdisciplinary analysis. This paper will both outline how these challenges can be surmounted in achieving a holistic understanding of human progress (its nature, its history, and its future prospects), and present the results of research that has attempted to overcome each of these challenges. The paper draws on two recent books by the author, Classifying Science (2004) and Unifying Ethics (2005), as well as a book manuscript, Restoring Human Progress.
