NEW SAVANNA: Some videos that that need to be seen together: From Progress Studies to Progress, OR: Breaking out of the mid-20th century optimism bubble

War Boys contemplating the future.

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I'm gathering these things together in one place because I think they belong together. I'm working on it. I'm thinking.

Last year Patrick Collison and and Tyler Cowen sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to talk about accelerating human progress. Here's a link to the video (where you'll also find a link to a transcript of the conversation). Here's my post about the conversation, which confines itself to an exchange between Tyler and Cowen about the narrowness of the academy.

Collison and Cowen articulate the goal of Progress Studies (from their 2019 article in The Atlantic):

The success of Progress Studies will come from its ability to identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions. In that sense, Progress Studies is closer to medicine than biology: The goal is to treat, not merely to understand.

What is required to plan and execute a course of treatment?

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I've been thinking about human progress for decades (the work on cultural evolution I began with David Hays years ago). I'm all for it. But this current push feels to me like it's encapsulated in a bubble of mid-20th century optimism typified in this 1966 video in which Walt Disney presents his vision to an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) (starting at about 6:30):

From Uncle Walt's pitch:

Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase.

We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community.

Yes, Disney had his limitations, but count me among those who think he was a great man. The world he lived in is gone and his optimism is not adequate to the world we're living in now. That disparity is visible in two movies from 2015, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, encased in Disneyesque optimism and George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, which I read as a mad and carnavalesque dash to escape dystopian visions of the future. I've written about the confrontation of those visions in War Boys in Tomorrowland, or: Mad Max Meets Disney. I'm currently thinking, but have not yet written about, that Kim Stanley Robinson may be pointing a way out of that bubble. In some ways it seems to me that his New York 2140 depicts a future in which the War Boys set out to reclaim Tomorrowland.

But, you may object, Robinson writes fiction. Yes, he does. And he knows it. As he remarked in a recent article in The New Yorker, "science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling." Disney's EPCOT was a fiction, and it didn't get built. The future he longed for and envisioned was a fiction. Robinson's fiction has been tempered by what has happened since then, the facturing of the American body politic, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, the disastrous wars in the Middle East, the financial collapse of 2008, and so on.

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Ross Douthat is arguing that the advanced nations are steeped in post 1969 decadence and decline. 1969? The Apollo moon landing. He sees that as a high point. Since then we've just been marking time, going nowhere. He discusses his current book, The Decadent Society, in these two videos: