Progress has two aspects, one social and one instrumental.
The struggle for more representative governance, more collaborative social administration, greater transparency for institutions and agents empowered to produce and enforce laws, greater fairness in the distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of public intercourse for all of its stakeholders, the diminishment of violence and compulsion from public life, the spread of literacy, numeracy, and critical thought, the ramification of secular civilization, and the global expansion of a robust rights culture are all components in the social aspect of progress. I think of this social aspect of progress as democratization.
The struggle to increase scientific, instrumental, and medical knowledge, the ramifying accumulation of technological powers, and the ongoing developmental disruption of given capacities, norms, and expectations are all components in the instrumental aspect of progress. I think of this instrumental aspect of progress as denaturalization.
Technoprogressives maintain that any proper account of “progress” will affirm the equal and complementary indispensability of both greater democratization and greater denaturalization to the progressive struggle for human emancipation.
We already live in ineradicably technological societies, and our problems are the problems of technological societies. Any commitment to progressive democratization without a complementary commitment to ongoing denaturalization denies the terms of social struggle as they actually confront us. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about left bioconservative politics and most of the pastoral anarchisms) are to my mind false progressivisms, amounting finally to little more than conservative, and sometimes outright reactionary, indulgences in nostalgia and complacency.
Since instrumental powers can be deployed to indefinitely many ends, they can facilitate exploitation and exacerbate injustice just as easily as they can serve fairness and emancipate humanity when directed to better ends. As is always the case in antidemocratic politics, any commitment to progressive denaturalization without a complementary commitment to ongoing democratization denies the terms of social life—its ineradicable plurality, insecurity, unpredictability, interdependence—as they actually confront us. And hence any such “progressivisms” (for example, think about market libertarian technophilia and the various neoliberal and neoconservative corporate futurisms) will inevitably amount to straightforward bids for power and profit, either for personal gain or in the service of the elites with whom one identifies.
Technoprogressives cannot afford to misdiagnose as “progress” any developmental path or outcome that does not contribute both to democratization and denaturalization, and neither can we afford to misrecognize as “allies” in the social struggle for real progress anyone who is committed to only the one aspect of “progress” over the other. This is not to deny that technoprogressives will surely seize opportunistically on any event or outcome that can be made to facilitate progressive ends, just as we will make common cause with any number of allies in contingent campaigns that facilitate technoprogressive ends. But the exigencies of practical political struggle should never confuse our sense of what any progress worth fighting for finally amounts to, nor how a shared understanding of and commitment to progress in its full technoprogressive construal is all we have to ensure we never lose sight of who our friends are.
Dale Carrico Ph.D. was a fellow of the IEET from 2004 to 2008 and is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley.
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