It’s very easy to read this as a call to mostly bring back the old philosophy of progress, despite what I recognize as attempts to avoid that reading.
My take is that a genuinely new philosophy of progress needs to transcend the old battle by positioning itself as heir to both sides. Increased understanding of the environmental and other costs of industrialization is no less a form of progress than new industrial technology. Environmentalists seeing industry as the enemy and industrialists seeing environmentalism as the enemy are both missing a larger picture.
In this vision, there would be Roots of Progress posts on topics like CFCs/ozone layer and acid rain, or maybe broader things like “how we stopped dumping so much stuff in rivers”, without any sense that these posts are opposed to or in a different category from the rest. You could still discuss the disagreements around how to solve these issues, but even those judged completely wrong should not be cast as villains any more than proponents of “beating”-type threshing machines.
(I realize I’m sort of describing Mistake Theory. Mistake Theory being the philosophy of progress should be no surprise!)
It’s very easy to read this as a call to mostly bring back the old philosophy of progress, despite what I recognize as attempts to avoid that reading.
My take is that a genuinely new philosophy of progress needs to transcend the old battle by positioning itself as heir to both sides. Increased understanding of the environmental and other costs of industrialization is no less a form of progress than new industrial technology. Environmentalists seeing industry as the enemy and industrialists seeing environmentalism as the enemy are both missing a larger picture.
In this vision, there would be Roots of Progress posts on topics like CFCs/ozone layer and acid rain, or maybe broader things like “how we stopped dumping so much stuff in rivers”, without any sense that these posts are opposed to or in a different category from the rest. You could still discuss the disagreements around how to solve these issues, but even those judged completely wrong should not be cast as villains any more than proponents of “beating”-type threshing machines.
(I realize I’m sort of describing Mistake Theory. Mistake Theory being the philosophy of progress should be no surprise!)
I haven’t covered it yet, but Works in Progress magazine did something on ozone: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/how-we-fixed-the-ozone-layer/
I’ve recently been studying the history of factory accident rates and factory safety, hope to have something on this soon.
Perfect! Glad to know you’re on it.
Here you go: https://rootsofprogress.org/history-of-factory-safety