Sublime

Progress is not automatic or inevitable. It depends on choice and effort. It is up to us.

Progress is not automatically good. It must be steered. Progress always creates new problems, and they don’t get solved automatically. Solving them requires active focus and effort, and this is a part of progress, too.

When you say progress here, what are you actually talking about? Is it just shorthand for economic growth or G.D.P.? What is progress? For, me it is something along the lines of our success in realizing a liberal, pluralistic and prosperous society, and a sense among people that their offspring can and probably will do better than they themselves h... See more

A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought everything was systemic. I said I think that’s sort of right. Take systemic racism. I tend to think that while systemic racism exists, “progress” on questions of race is no less systemic. This is not how we like to talk about things in the United States. We imagine entrenched injustice that is righted... See more