Thanks for this great trip through the history of how we view progress. I do wonder, though, if the tech-skepticism of our time isn't such a bad thing after all. I feel there is an important difference between a healthy belief in progress and a blind faith in it (the idea that technology will simply solve everything).
For Bacon, science was almost a religion; he wanted to use it to return to a paradise-like state, while simultaneously achieving total dominion over nature through technology. Rather than this claim to absolute control, a much better path might be the one Daan Samson seems to be exploring—not controlling nature through technology (which our time rightfully warns against because it ends in destruction), but rather finding a harmonious fusion of the two.
While I don't agree with absolutely everything, I found the piece really thought-provoking and inspiring. Thanks again for writing this!
Thanks for the kind words, and for engaging so thoughtfully! You're absolutely right that Bacon's religious framing (science as a route back to Eden) is alien to how most of us think today, and I agree that Samson's vision is more balanced and more attractive than a fantasy of total dominion. I'd happily take the SMR-in-the-rainforest over the totalitarian society of Bensalem! But I do want to push back a little on the framing that healthy belief in progress is somehow opposed to Bacon's ambition. Historically, it was precisely the audacious version that paved the way to the industrial revolution and the Great Escape from poverty and misery. The idea that we could systematically investigate nature in order to improve the human condition was genuinely radical in the 17th century, when most people accepted disease, famine, and early death as the unalterable human condition.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and for sharing the updated link—I’ll definitely give it a read!
You make a very fair point about the historical necessity of that audacious ambition. Escaping the absolute misery of the 17th century required a radical shift, and it’s true that we all benefit immensely from that breakthrough today.
While researching Bacon recently for an essay, though, I couldn't help but feel a certain unease about the specific flavor of that ambition. It really shines through towards the end of New Atlantis, where the objective of science is described as "the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible." Or in the violent metaphors he explicitly uses in his Novum Organon, where nature must be "put on the rack" to force her to reveal her secrets.
It makes me wonder if this desire for dominion wasn’t just a vision for progress, but actually a kind of trauma response. Bacon’s era was anything but comfortable. Between the "Little Ice Age," widespread famines, economic collapse, and the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, nature was experienced as an unpredictable and deadly force. The scientific revolution, in its early days, seems partly driven by an existential fear—an attempt to forcefully control a world that felt completely out of control.
This might explain why modern science—which per se is a great achievement—came wrapped in such a strange philosophical package. Shortly after Bacon, Descartes provided the perfect psychological coping mechanism by declaring nature (including all animals) to be mere soulless machines. If nature is just mechanics, it’s no longer terrifying, and it can be dismantled and mastered without moral hesitation.
Of course, this is just one angle on the scientific revolution, and I completely agree with you that the scientific method itself was a triumph. I just suspect that the foundational mindset it was born into—this paradigm of extraction and domination—is exactly what we are struggling to outgrow today.
I find it interesting that you see higher optimism in China and Indonesia as a cause of their growth, rather than the other way around. Just from a personal narrative perspective, if you talk to people from these regions then they frequently frame their optimism in terms of having gone through a period where they have seen great strides across multiple generations.
The dystopian turn in the west at the start of the 21st century coincides with the emergence of a halting of improvement (or even reversal) in life quality for younger generations, measurable in terms of housing situation, social mobility, economic, political and environmental stability, and life expectancy.
The reaction to modern day aspirational artwork is very much tempered by beliefs emerging from material conditions. To me it very much seems Western people are losing faith in progressive beliefs because they aren't feeling the relative intergenerational material improvement that developing world people do.
I always love the posts on this newsletter, but I am stuck on the comfort with convention and status quo. Of note, referring to “climate terrorists” in “The Ministry of the Future.” Using the terminology of terror is inherently status quo, even when those agents in the book are critical for the survival of the species.
I think we stop believing in progress not because of a failure of the polity to have optimism, but because of the success of the political system in creating epistemological traps where we simply cannot conceive of anything being different than it is.
I know that confronting this is in many ways the purpose of this newsletter, and I deeply respect it. But I also wanted to observe the status quo bias that even you are not immune to. The machine future is a dead future, but the machine age has only been around 250 years, so who really cares. It had a good run.
What we need is different thinking, and in a world that is so powerfully oriented to conformity this is insanely hard. We cannot imagine even well-trodden alternatives like Democratic Socialism, which makes us incapable of conceiving truly new ideas that will meet the situation.
I have to ask, was the utopian Black Mirror episode San Junipero? Hands down, San Junipero is my favorite Black Mirror episode. It’s the total opposite of the Matrix and suggests that it is possible to write a story that portrays the future in a positive light.
We do need to promote a more optimistic vision of the future in the media, but let’s face it, that’s an uphill battle. We naturally give greater emotional weight to negativity (hence why almost all news in negative), but tend to suppress negative memories over time.
Thus, the present always appears worse than the past is remembered, suggesting a downhill trajectory.
Yes, it's San Junipero, arguably the best episode of the whole series! Incredibly moving. Having said that, I'm an admitted "apocaholic", with a serious addiction to disasters and dystopias. ;-) So I like the dark episodes as well, like the terrifyingly simple "Metalhead".
I love it when movies and TV shows keep you guessing. San Junipero is great in the sense that there are these odd time jumps, you have no idea what is going on, the music changes, the clothing changes...etc.
But then, suddenly it makes sense, it's the chosen time period of the user.
I agree with your psychological explanation, but then it's puzzling why that negativity bias was less prominent in earlier eras. Our psychological make-up didn't change, so it must have been something about our culture.
Thanks. Excellent post from the ever optimistic Maarten Boudry. As a contemporary artist and sci-fi filmmaker I resonate strongly with Maarten's post. I often find myself disappointed by the pessimistic narratives presented to me in movies and art exhibitions. I suppose that it's much easier (and safer) to complain than to offer plausible solutions to problems.
I wonder if the origins of the disillusionment came from the 2008 bank crash which destroyed the belief in the economy. The pandemic showed the limitations of science and Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine questions the whole geopolitical world order. The thought of war has returned to Europe and countries are arming themselves. But the problem with this thought is that WWII and the cold war are bigger crises and people seemed to have been more optimistic.
The self fulfilling prophecy of the dystopian future should be taken more seriously because we build what we believe and the believes are pretty negative now.
What a lively history of futurism. Thank you also for introducing me to Daan Samson's work. It speaks to me of a utopia perhaps disassociated from the Enlightenment. In his art, nature and artifact seem to find their extremes in an Edenic past without humanity's influence and a futuristic perfection through humanity. This pairing suggests to me modernity’s false binary of humanity and nature. Real nature is artificial, I think, the work of both creation and humanity. The desire to recreate a past located in "untouched" nature or to construct a future in technology made impervious to nature seems to avoid the kind of longstanding artifice (in the old sense of the word) that many indigenous cultures mastered. So his art strikes me as a means of suggesting how these two desires may stem from the same broken worldview but point to a particular utopia--the new expression of an artificial nature.
Very cool ideas here, thank you! I wonder if the loss of hope is linked to the greater availability of news and social media, which tends to skew negative. So we all get the impression that things are going downhill when they're really not, and then we project that image to our expectations for the future.
First I have to say that I absolutely love the title of this post. Even though it was a reference, still gold.
Some really interesting points in here, a couple counterpoints:
- I would imagine the practicality of our vision of the future is closely related to how close we are to midnight on the Doomsday clock. So it makes sense that back in the fifties, the vision was a lot brighter.
- You mentioned that those in developing economies tend to be more optimistic about the future, but I would like to also point out that in a lot of developing economies, the poverty conditions force people to focus on the present, making the future less important. When it's less important, you don't pay as much attention to it, don't see all the scary stuff on the news, so it's not as scary.
That said, I absolutely believe that we will manifest what we envision, so I'm completely on board with encouraging artists to up the ante on their visions of the future.
First I have to say that I absolutely love the title of this post. Even though it was a reference, still gold.
Some really interesting points in here, a couple counterpoints:
- I would imagine the practicality of our vision of the future is closely related to how close we are to midnight on the Doomsday clock. So it makes sense that back in the fifties, the vision was a lot brighter.
- You mentioned that those in developing economies tend to be more optimistic about the future, but I would like to also point out that in a lot of developing economies, the poverty conditions force people to focus on the present, making the future less important. When it's less important, you don't pay as much attention to it, don't see all the scary stuff on the news, so it's not as scary.
That said, I absolutely believe that we will manifest what we envision, so I'm completely on board with encouraging artists to up the ante on their visions of the future.
Thanks for today's thoughtful post by Maarten Boudry !!! 👍👍👍
Progress in itself is neutral, not aimed in a specific direction (exactly as Naturebehaves too):
In Palaeolithic times people culled each other with wooden clubs, a tiresome adventure that could backlash at any moment and bear totally unintended, highly personal consequences ...
Today we have Pfizer, Moderna, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, BAE, DARPA, Nestle, LU, Mondelez, Kraft, so-called politicians of any kind, etc., etc.
Millions are being culled 24/7
- silently, by myocarditis, rubbery clots, pregnancies gone awry, etc.,
- with a lot of blunt lies but quickly by stealth-jets, bunker-busters, drones, mines, etc.,
- slowly by starving people in front of full platters with "food" devoid of any nutitional value and
- some currently starving an entire population to death by preventing any food-intake
(after already having undergone the two previous lethal "treatments")
on a global scale,
whereas the evil perpetrators, mainly in the US, UK, DoD, CDC, Wuhan, Zioland, etc., etc. comfortably relax in air-conditioned luxury offices, having been promoted in revolving-doors, granted more funds or medals, made hundreds of billions with fraudulent contracts without ever having to face any kind of accountability.
What a progress in comparison to our poor troglodytes !!!
Thanks for this great trip through the history of how we view progress. I do wonder, though, if the tech-skepticism of our time isn't such a bad thing after all. I feel there is an important difference between a healthy belief in progress and a blind faith in it (the idea that technology will simply solve everything).
For Bacon, science was almost a religion; he wanted to use it to return to a paradise-like state, while simultaneously achieving total dominion over nature through technology. Rather than this claim to absolute control, a much better path might be the one Daan Samson seems to be exploring—not controlling nature through technology (which our time rightfully warns against because it ends in destruction), but rather finding a harmonious fusion of the two.
While I don't agree with absolutely everything, I found the piece really thought-provoking and inspiring. Thanks again for writing this!
Thanks for the kind words, and for engaging so thoughtfully! You're absolutely right that Bacon's religious framing (science as a route back to Eden) is alien to how most of us think today, and I agree that Samson's vision is more balanced and more attractive than a fantasy of total dominion. I'd happily take the SMR-in-the-rainforest over the totalitarian society of Bensalem! But I do want to push back a little on the framing that healthy belief in progress is somehow opposed to Bacon's ambition. Historically, it was precisely the audacious version that paved the way to the industrial revolution and the Great Escape from poverty and misery. The idea that we could systematically investigate nature in order to improve the human condition was genuinely radical in the 17th century, when most people accepted disease, famine, and early death as the unalterable human condition.
Btw, I have an updated version of the essay here, with more illustrations and exampels: https://maartenboudry.substack.com/p/the-future-used-to-be-better-33d
Thanks for the thoughtful reply and for sharing the updated link—I’ll definitely give it a read!
You make a very fair point about the historical necessity of that audacious ambition. Escaping the absolute misery of the 17th century required a radical shift, and it’s true that we all benefit immensely from that breakthrough today.
While researching Bacon recently for an essay, though, I couldn't help but feel a certain unease about the specific flavor of that ambition. It really shines through towards the end of New Atlantis, where the objective of science is described as "the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible." Or in the violent metaphors he explicitly uses in his Novum Organon, where nature must be "put on the rack" to force her to reveal her secrets.
It makes me wonder if this desire for dominion wasn’t just a vision for progress, but actually a kind of trauma response. Bacon’s era was anything but comfortable. Between the "Little Ice Age," widespread famines, economic collapse, and the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, nature was experienced as an unpredictable and deadly force. The scientific revolution, in its early days, seems partly driven by an existential fear—an attempt to forcefully control a world that felt completely out of control.
This might explain why modern science—which per se is a great achievement—came wrapped in such a strange philosophical package. Shortly after Bacon, Descartes provided the perfect psychological coping mechanism by declaring nature (including all animals) to be mere soulless machines. If nature is just mechanics, it’s no longer terrifying, and it can be dismantled and mastered without moral hesitation.
Of course, this is just one angle on the scientific revolution, and I completely agree with you that the scientific method itself was a triumph. I just suspect that the foundational mindset it was born into—this paradigm of extraction and domination—is exactly what we are struggling to outgrow today.
https://felixernst.substack.com/p/the-paradise-machine?r=63s9wx&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I find it interesting that you see higher optimism in China and Indonesia as a cause of their growth, rather than the other way around. Just from a personal narrative perspective, if you talk to people from these regions then they frequently frame their optimism in terms of having gone through a period where they have seen great strides across multiple generations.
The dystopian turn in the west at the start of the 21st century coincides with the emergence of a halting of improvement (or even reversal) in life quality for younger generations, measurable in terms of housing situation, social mobility, economic, political and environmental stability, and life expectancy.
The reaction to modern day aspirational artwork is very much tempered by beliefs emerging from material conditions. To me it very much seems Western people are losing faith in progressive beliefs because they aren't feeling the relative intergenerational material improvement that developing world people do.
I always love the posts on this newsletter, but I am stuck on the comfort with convention and status quo. Of note, referring to “climate terrorists” in “The Ministry of the Future.” Using the terminology of terror is inherently status quo, even when those agents in the book are critical for the survival of the species.
I think we stop believing in progress not because of a failure of the polity to have optimism, but because of the success of the political system in creating epistemological traps where we simply cannot conceive of anything being different than it is.
I know that confronting this is in many ways the purpose of this newsletter, and I deeply respect it. But I also wanted to observe the status quo bias that even you are not immune to. The machine future is a dead future, but the machine age has only been around 250 years, so who really cares. It had a good run.
What we need is different thinking, and in a world that is so powerfully oriented to conformity this is insanely hard. We cannot imagine even well-trodden alternatives like Democratic Socialism, which makes us incapable of conceiving truly new ideas that will meet the situation.
I have to ask, was the utopian Black Mirror episode San Junipero? Hands down, San Junipero is my favorite Black Mirror episode. It’s the total opposite of the Matrix and suggests that it is possible to write a story that portrays the future in a positive light.
We do need to promote a more optimistic vision of the future in the media, but let’s face it, that’s an uphill battle. We naturally give greater emotional weight to negativity (hence why almost all news in negative), but tend to suppress negative memories over time.
Thus, the present always appears worse than the past is remembered, suggesting a downhill trajectory.
Yes, it's San Junipero, arguably the best episode of the whole series! Incredibly moving. Having said that, I'm an admitted "apocaholic", with a serious addiction to disasters and dystopias. ;-) So I like the dark episodes as well, like the terrifyingly simple "Metalhead".
Nobody ever talks about San Junipero, but it really shines as the best
Absolutely the best episode. I can't even watch any of the others haha
I love it when movies and TV shows keep you guessing. San Junipero is great in the sense that there are these odd time jumps, you have no idea what is going on, the music changes, the clothing changes...etc.
But then, suddenly it makes sense, it's the chosen time period of the user.
I agree with your psychological explanation, but then it's puzzling why that negativity bias was less prominent in earlier eras. Our psychological make-up didn't change, so it must have been something about our culture.
Thanks. Excellent post from the ever optimistic Maarten Boudry. As a contemporary artist and sci-fi filmmaker I resonate strongly with Maarten's post. I often find myself disappointed by the pessimistic narratives presented to me in movies and art exhibitions. I suppose that it's much easier (and safer) to complain than to offer plausible solutions to problems.
I wonder if the origins of the disillusionment came from the 2008 bank crash which destroyed the belief in the economy. The pandemic showed the limitations of science and Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine questions the whole geopolitical world order. The thought of war has returned to Europe and countries are arming themselves. But the problem with this thought is that WWII and the cold war are bigger crises and people seemed to have been more optimistic.
The self fulfilling prophecy of the dystopian future should be taken more seriously because we build what we believe and the believes are pretty negative now.
What a lively history of futurism. Thank you also for introducing me to Daan Samson's work. It speaks to me of a utopia perhaps disassociated from the Enlightenment. In his art, nature and artifact seem to find their extremes in an Edenic past without humanity's influence and a futuristic perfection through humanity. This pairing suggests to me modernity’s false binary of humanity and nature. Real nature is artificial, I think, the work of both creation and humanity. The desire to recreate a past located in "untouched" nature or to construct a future in technology made impervious to nature seems to avoid the kind of longstanding artifice (in the old sense of the word) that many indigenous cultures mastered. So his art strikes me as a means of suggesting how these two desires may stem from the same broken worldview but point to a particular utopia--the new expression of an artificial nature.
Very cool ideas here, thank you! I wonder if the loss of hope is linked to the greater availability of news and social media, which tends to skew negative. So we all get the impression that things are going downhill when they're really not, and then we project that image to our expectations for the future.
First I have to say that I absolutely love the title of this post. Even though it was a reference, still gold.
Some really interesting points in here, a couple counterpoints:
- I would imagine the practicality of our vision of the future is closely related to how close we are to midnight on the Doomsday clock. So it makes sense that back in the fifties, the vision was a lot brighter.
- You mentioned that those in developing economies tend to be more optimistic about the future, but I would like to also point out that in a lot of developing economies, the poverty conditions force people to focus on the present, making the future less important. When it's less important, you don't pay as much attention to it, don't see all the scary stuff on the news, so it's not as scary.
That said, I absolutely believe that we will manifest what we envision, so I'm completely on board with encouraging artists to up the ante on their visions of the future.
First I have to say that I absolutely love the title of this post. Even though it was a reference, still gold.
Some really interesting points in here, a couple counterpoints:
- I would imagine the practicality of our vision of the future is closely related to how close we are to midnight on the Doomsday clock. So it makes sense that back in the fifties, the vision was a lot brighter.
- You mentioned that those in developing economies tend to be more optimistic about the future, but I would like to also point out that in a lot of developing economies, the poverty conditions force people to focus on the present, making the future less important. When it's less important, you don't pay as much attention to it, don't see all the scary stuff on the news, so it's not as scary.
That said, I absolutely believe that we will manifest what we envision, so I'm completely on board with encouraging artists to up the ante on their visions of the future.
Thanks for today's thoughtful post by Maarten Boudry !!! 👍👍👍
Progress in itself is neutral, not aimed in a specific direction (exactly as Naturebehaves too):
In Palaeolithic times people culled each other with wooden clubs, a tiresome adventure that could backlash at any moment and bear totally unintended, highly personal consequences ...
Today we have Pfizer, Moderna, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, BAE, DARPA, Nestle, LU, Mondelez, Kraft, so-called politicians of any kind, etc., etc.
Millions are being culled 24/7
- silently, by myocarditis, rubbery clots, pregnancies gone awry, etc.,
- with a lot of blunt lies but quickly by stealth-jets, bunker-busters, drones, mines, etc.,
- slowly by starving people in front of full platters with "food" devoid of any nutitional value and
- some currently starving an entire population to death by preventing any food-intake
(after already having undergone the two previous lethal "treatments")
on a global scale,
whereas the evil perpetrators, mainly in the US, UK, DoD, CDC, Wuhan, Zioland, etc., etc. comfortably relax in air-conditioned luxury offices, having been promoted in revolving-doors, granted more funds or medals, made hundreds of billions with fraudulent contracts without ever having to face any kind of accountability.
What a progress in comparison to our poor troglodytes !!!
How about a total PARADIGM-SHIFT ???
HIGH - TIME !!!
Isn't it ??? ... 🤔🤔🤔