A new vision for the advancement of humanity

The following is an introduction from the book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute. The entirety of the book will be published on Freethink, one week at a time. For more from Jason, subscribe to his Substack above.

We live in an age of wonders. To our ancient ancestors, our mundane routines would seem like wizardry: soaring through the air at hundreds of miles an hour; making night bright as day with the flick of a finger; commanding giant metal servants to weave our clothes or forge our tools; mixing chemicals in vast cauldrons to make a fertilizing elixir that grants vigor to crops; viewing events or even holding conversations from thousands of miles away; warding off the diseases that once sent half of children to an early grave. We build our homes in towers that rise above the hills; we build our ships larger and stronger than the ocean waves; we build our bridges with skeletons of steel, to withstand wind and storm. Our sages gaze deep into the universe, viewing colors the eye cannot see, and they have discovered other worlds circling other Suns; they have found the atoms of Democritus; they can tell us the system of the heavens and the mechanism of life; they can at long last turn base metals into gold.1 Once, these accomplishments, and their benefits to humanity, were referred to simply as “progress.”

But not everyone agrees that the advancement of science, technology, and industry has been such a good thing. “Is ‘Progress’ Good for Humanity?” asks a 2014 Atlantic article, saying that “the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind’s ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth.”2 In Guns, Germs, and Steel, a grand narrative of civilizational advancement, author Jared Diamond disclaims the assumption “that the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for iron-based statehood represents ‘progress,’ or that it has led to an increase in human happiness.”3 Diamond also called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” and “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered,” adding that this perspective demolishes a “sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress.”4 Historian Christopher Lasch is even less charitable, asking: “How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”5 Economic growth is called an “addiction,” a “fetish,” a “Ponzi scheme,” a “fairy tale.”6 There is even a “degrowth” movement advocating economic regress as an ideal.7

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