We should know by now that progress isn’t
guaranteed — and often backfires
Robert Samuelson notes:
“We Americans are progress junkies, as I’ve written
many times. We believe that tomorrow ought to be better than today, just as
today was better than yesterday. This optimism, in part, defines us as a
people. We assume that progress is the natural order of things. Problems are
meant to be solved. History is an upward curve of well-being. But what if all
this is a fantasy that, ironically, exposes us to more social and economic
disruption?
If you look back on recent history, our most powerful
disruptions shared one characteristic: They were not widely foreseen. This was
true of the terrorism of 9/11; the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the
parallel Great Recession; and now the coronavirus pandemic — with all its
destructive side effects on public health, the economy and our national psyche.
In each case, there was a failure of imagination, as
Tom Friedman has noted. Warnings found little receptiveness among the public or
government officials. We didn’t think what happened could happen. The
presumption of progress bred complacency. To emphasize: There was a failure of
imagination in each case.”