This post is a natural segue to the previous posts on how human life continually grows in complexity and how this imposes the need to adjust to its consequences. I could have chosen words like “innovation” or “change” in the title, but I don’t think we can have progress without either of them. After all, human history is nothing but a persistent pathbreaking adventure of innovations in survival, culture, knowledge, and technology which we collectively call progress.
Progress though is more than innovation or change. It also and primarily means betterment, which inserts a value judgment. We are so much taken by the force of progress that we judge people, societies, and civilizations by the progress they make in the course of their existence. Thus, we are indoctrinated with the obligation to make progress. And we rarely pause to think that progress as innovation and change has consequences and that these consequences do not translate to betterment for everybody, including other species and our ecosystem. More importantly, we fail to see that progress may not be managed in a democratic way and, hence, it can open up a divide between those who seek it and those who resist it. It all comes down to how we understand “betterment.”
So, let’s first recognize that not everybody has rushed to embrace progress in our human history. For example, hunter-gatherers were still roaming Central Europe a few thousand years after the emergence of agriculture. Was this due to slow diffusion of farming or refusal to adopt it? Hunter-gatherers have survived to our day in various remote parts of the planet and not because they are ignorant of the existence of modern societies. The Amish in the United States have refused to adopt progress and integrate into modern life. Workers, called Luddites, opposed technological progress that threatened their jobs in the early 19th century. To all these groups, what was proposed as progress did not necessarily entail betterment.
This past January (2023) David Brooks and Bret Stephens had an interesting exchange in an Opinion piece of the New York Times. Brooks: “In society after society, highly educated professionals have formed a Brahmin class. . . . This class dominates the media, the academy, Hollywood, tech and corporations. Many people on the middle and bottom have risen up to say, we don’t want to be ruled by those guys. To hell with their economic, cultural and political power. We ‘ll vote for anybody who can smash their machine.” Stephens: “… The class/partisan divide is between people whose business is the production and distribution of words – academics, journalists, civil servants, lawyers, intellectuals – and people whose business is the production and distribution of things – manufacturers, drivers, contractors, distributors and so on. The first group makes the rules of the administrative state. The latter lives under the weight of those rules … “
In that exchange, Brooks identified the class that mostly drives progress not only as inventors but also as proselytizers. Going a step further, Stephens associated pretty much the same group with shaping and running the modern administrative state. Here, we have a link between progress and its political ramifications.
Progress in science and knowledge has been the handmaid of state administrations since cities appeared in Mesopotamia and soon after in Egypt. Cities brought new organization of labor, legal and enforcement systems, the need to manage farming and irrigation, keep inventory and money accounts, and set up defense systems. That’s why we still consider cities to be incubators of progress.
The path has remained quite straightforward. New ideas, new knowledge and new technologies increase the complexity of human life. They also trigger adaptive mechanisms that alter human behavior and social life. More complexity means new risks and perils to navigate, new needs for law and order, new regulations, and, inadvertently, new restrictions in individual freedom.
This process brings forth two forces that become sources of friction in the path of progress. One is epistemological, meaning how well we understand and appreciate new knowledge and innovations and their impact on our world. Unless all citizens are sufficiently educated or otherwise capable to understand the implications of innovations and change, a gap opens between those who know and those who don’t or don’t care to learn. The other source of friction is how reliance on the advice of experts alters the relationship between citizens and the state.
State administrations ancient and modern rely on experts who have the knowledge to inform governments as they deal with higher degrees of complexity. Thus, the administrative state dictates the extent and severity of the mediation between what individuals want to do and what or how they are allowed to do it. That’s where, progress and politics intersect. We saw that on a global scale during the pandemic when states thought it responsible to enact unprecedented restrictions and mandates. Significant portions of people refused to comply. Part of the non-compliance was due to the epistemological gap and part was due to resistance against the stretch of the administrative state.
Societies and states are ruled by political groups invested in specific paths of progress, and, thus, they have every interest to push the path of progress they favor. This means citizens must adapt to the skills and ways of life a particular path of progress implies. Over the last 40 years, this path in the developed world has been: innovate, accept automation, go global, retool and go where the jobs are. Either you jumped on this bandwagon or you were left behind. How well, though, is this message heeded? In the 38 advanced economies of the OECD, the average percentage of the population ages 25 to 64 with a college degree was 39% in 2020. In the US, it was 50%. That means the majority of the working age populations of the most advanced countries lack the academic and technical skills to successfully navigate the current path of progress. In the US, in particular, there is a significant deficit of workers with the requisite skills to be part of the new technology sectors that are the flagships of progress.
Why is this? Is it because the state has failed to provide the motivation, incentives and means so that more young people choose to advance their knowledge and skills? Or is it because significant segments of the population here and around the world are not so eager to embrace progress as defined by what we now call elites? In the US, blue color workers resent their college-educated fellow citizens, what they stand for, and more importantly their notion of what progress is, just as David Brooks has argued.
It is difficult to imagine a human race not aspiring to innovation, change, and the desire to make progress, whatever the latter means. That being the case, growing complexity will expand the knowledge gap and the administrative hand of the state. Societies and states already face a political problem that will become more and more serious. It has to do with the question: Of the possible paths of progress which one do we choose and how do we make this decision?
* Here I use the term administrative state not in its current dark meaning favored by some very conservative quarters. I rather use it in the meaning of Dwight Waldo who coined it in his dissertation published in 1948. Waldo viewed the administrative state to comprise the bureaucracies and agencies dedicated to public service.
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