Reflection: Your Progress Narrative

Prompts to consider

• Gray says the belief in progress is not an empirical observation but a secular religion that most people have absorbed without noticing. Try to identify the specific progress narrative you actually hold: not the one you would endorse on reflection but the one that shows up in your assumptions. Do you assume that new generations will be more tolerant than old ones? That science will solve the major problems? That political institutions will gradually improve? That you personally will be wiser in ten years than you are now? For each assumption: what evidence do you have that it is true, rather than hopeful?
• Gray's distinction: politics as damage limitation vs. politics as salvation. Think about a political cause you care about. Is it oriented toward preventing specific bad things from happening to specific people (damage limitation) or toward achieving a transformed future state in which a fundamental problem is solved (salvation)? How does framing your political commitments in damage-limitation terms change what they feel like and what you expect from them? Is something lost in that reframing, or is it actually more honest?
• Gray thinks that the Stoics, the Taoists, and various pre-modern philosophical traditions offer genuine alternatives to the progress narrative: ways of finding meaning and living well that do not depend on the future being better than the present. What would it mean for you to have a relationship to your own life that was not structured around improvement, that was not oriented toward becoming a better version of yourself or and contributes to a better world? Can you even imagine what that would feel like? And does the difficulty of imagining it tell you something about how deeply the progress narrative runs in you?