This review first appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune Book Review, December 2003.

The Progress Paradox:
How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse

By David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2003. All rights reserved.

In 1894, philanthropist John Jacob Astor wrote a best-seller about the year 2001 -- a future transformed by science, enterprise and human good will. Keeping with the can-do spirit of his era, when men used rails and canals to subdue continents, Astor foresaw progress vanquishing inequity, reducing poverty to vestiges, conquering ignorance and offering average folk privileges undreamt-of by his millionaire peers. Why not? At the end of the 19th Century, waves of immigrants shared those hopes, eager to feed, educate and advance their children as never before. Projecting this momentum to a time of future plenty seemed credible, not arrogant or silly.

Astor died with a famed flourish of noblesse oblige aboard the sinking Titanic -- first of many garish calamities that began quenching this naive zeal for progress. Soon world war taught millions a brutal lesson -- the first use of new technology is often its horrid mis-use. Survivors of Flanders battlefields returned disenchanted with the Machine Age. Intellectuals, from Tolkien and Lewis to Eliot, veered toward romantic nostalgia while writers of the Lost Generation prescribed a compulsory literary template. Blend stylish cynicism with brooding suspicion of tomorrow. Never show enthusiasm, or admit hope for progress.

That seemed accurate. The 20th Century spent its first half wallowing in horror -- the second teetering at an abyss. Television brought countless tragedies right into our homes. Vague Sunday sermons about apocalypse were replaced by hourly talk of a civilization, a species, a planet imperiled by our cleverness, doomed by our own skilled hands.

What's the most widely shared truism -- or eternal verity -- provoking sad nods from all, conservative or liberal?

"Too bad wisdom hasn't kept up with technology."

This dour cliche was ripe for the contrarian riposte Gregg Easterbrook supplies in The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, arguing that modern civilization has accomplished not one, but two, bona fide miracles. We seem verged on saving the world. And we seem incapable of noticing.

To continue reading, please see THROUGH STRANGER EYES, a collection of my book reviews, introductions and essays on popular culture, which will soon be released in the Western Hemisphere by Nimble Books and in the Eastern Hemisphere by Altair (Australia). Included will be those infamous articles about Tolkien and Star Wars, sober reflections on Jared Diamond's Collapse, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows, scientific ponderings on Feynman and Gott, appraisals of Brunner, Resnick, Zelazny, Verne, and Orwell... all the way to fun riffs on the Matrix and Buffy! Watch for news here!

David Brin is a scientist and best-selling author whose future-oriented novels include Earth, The Postman, and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising and The Uplift War. (The Postman inspired a major film in 1998.) Brin is also known as a leading commentator on modern technological trends. His nonfiction book -- The Transparent Society -- won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. Brin's newest novel Kiln People explores a fictional near future when people use cheap copies of themselves to be in two places at once. The Life Eaters -- a graphic novel -- explores a chilling alternative outcome of World War II.

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