“We are long past the time for pretending that the death of God is not a political fact.” So wrote the critic Theodore Roszak in his 1972 book Where the Wasteland Ends. Like so many of the confident pronouncements of that era, this hasn’t worn well in the decades since it saw print. All things considered, God is doing tolerably well these days, not least in the political sphere, where conservative parties rooted in religious belief are on the upswing over most of the planet. Meanwhile, an obituary no one in Roszak’s time thought to write is roiling the already troubled waters of our collective consciousness. Today, we are long past the time for pretending that the death of progress is not a political fact.
It’s important to note what is and isn’t being said here. When Roszak wrote the line quoted above, there were still many millions of people kneeling in churches every Sunday, and some of them were having powerful spiritual experiences. In the same way, the death of progress does not mean that new discoveries will no longer be made in laboratories or that new technologies will stop finding their way to the marketplace.
What it means, rather, is that these, and the rest of the odd assortment of things currently lumped together under the label of “progress”, will no longer benefit from the aura of inevitability that popular culture assigned them in the past century. The once-widespread faith that what is newer must be better, just because it is newer, is already looking decidedly shopworn.
A newborn scepticism shows up in many contexts. Calvin Trillin got a nervous laugh a few years back when he pointed out that “upgrade” has become the most frightening word in the English language. We all know from bitter personal experience what evoked that laugh. Nowadays, far more often than not, a software upgrade means that the programme becomes less convenient, less effective, and more burdensome for the user. There are good reasons why Microsoft, for example, has to give away its latest version of Windows for free.
In fields where complexity for its own sake can be more obviously fatal, the same process has led to an even more striking set of outcomes. Consider the bomber fleets of the United States and the Russian Federation, the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Both nations rely on strategic bombers that first entered service in the Fifties: the B-52 Stratofortress and the Tu-95 Bear. Both nations have built and tested other strategic bombers since that time, but the B-52 and the Tu-95 remain in service three-quarters of a century later, because no more recent aircraft does the same job with the same effectiveness for the same or lower cost.
More broadly, it can be fascinating to compare the changes that swept over the industrial nations between 1825 and 1925 with the changes that followed between 1925 and 2025. The earlier century saw the introduction of nearly all the technologies that still shape modern life, from indoor plumbing and electric lights to telephones, automobiles, diesel shipping, airplanes, radio communication, and the list goes on. The century since then, by contrast, has seen only one new technology on the same revolutionary scale — the digital computer. We may get another, or we may not; the jury’s still out on whether AI will turn out to be a revolution or one more flash in the pan like nuclear power. The rate of technological change has turned out to be much slower than most people expected.
Granted, our telephones no longer have wires, our automobiles and airplanes are faster, and a variety of other incremental changes have taken place. Someone who went into suspended animation in 1925 and was thawed out this year, however, would be shocked by our social customs but would find it easy to adapt to the updated versions of familiar technologies. Compare this to the utter bafflement of a person who spent the period from 1825 to 1925 in a similar state, and had to make the leap from horsedrawn carriages and sailing ships to air travel, radio broadcasts, movie theatres, and the cultural impact of the automobile.
What makes the difference in the rate of change so difficult for many people to grasp is that by and large, the slowdown hasn’t been caused by technical difficulty. Consider the revolutionary changes that were supposed to happen by now: space travel, nuclear power, flying cars, and the rest of it. Most of these things are well within our technological grasp. The problem is that none of them are affordable. Fission power makes a good poster child for this problem. Nuclear power plants have been technically viable since the Forties; the difficulty is that they never pay for themselves, and a society that builds them has to choose between making electricity unaffordable for most people and paying out lavish government subsidies forever.
“The jury’s still out on whether AI will turn out to be a revolution or one more flash in the pan.”
Space travel, the obsessive focus of so many daydreams about the future since the time of H.G. Wells, is another case in point. It’s technically feasible to get human beings to the Moon, or Mars, or even the moons of Jupiter. The problem is that it’s insanely expensive. The United States had to pour 15% of its national budget for a decade or so just to send a handful of men across what, in interplanetary terms, is the whisker-thin gap between the earth and the moon. A nation that set out to build a permanent settlement on the moon, or put a manned lander on Mars, could very easily bankrupt itself in the process. Nor is the financial return on any such investment commensurate with the more than sky-high costs.
This, in turn, points up the great and unmentionable problem we face. That progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns.
The classic metaphor of the apple tree is useful here. If you only want one apple from a tree, nothing could be easier: you walk up to the tree, reach up for the lowest apple that is ripe, pull it down and take a bite. If you want more than one, up to a point, it’s just as easy, because there is (quite literally) a certain amount of low-hanging fruit. Once you’ve picked all the apples within easy reach, however, getting more becomes more difficult — and getting the apples at the very top of the tree may be so difficult that it is no longer worth the effort.
The same thing, it turns out, is true of technology. The great inventions that revolutionised life in the industrial world were made with tools and instruments that seem impossibly simple these days. Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who invented the airplane, did it in their spare time with the tools they happened to have in the bicycle shop that paid their bills. Compare that with the gargantuan sums governments had to spend in order to put human beings into orbit and you have a good first approximation of the way that the law of diminishing returns is tightening its grip on the throat of technological progress.
Whenever the law of diminishing returns comes into play, the only rational strategy is to find the point at which the returns are still large enough to justify the outlay. That’s what our civilisation needs to start doing at this point: backtracking to the last point at which the results still justify the investment. Most of our technology is either near or already past the point at which diminishing returns give way to negative returns.
The stakes involved may be quite a bit higher than most people realise. In his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argued that one of the things that the failed civilisations of the past all have in common is that they pushed the complexity of their societies and technologies past the point where further complexity made any sense at all. Then, just as we are doing, they kept on pushing — and collapse followed promptly. It’s quite believable that our civilisation could end up in the same predicament, pouring so much of its available wealth, talent, and resources into technologies that will never pay for themselves that it becomes unable to maintain essential infrastructure or provide adequate food, housing, and other needs to its citizens. A case could be made, in fact, that this is already beginning to happen.
Thus, it may not be any kind of accident that so many people, in so many fields, are backing away from the latest hypercomplex technogimmickry and turning instead to simpler technologies that do a better job of meeting their needs. Most of us still recall, for example, when ebooks first hit the market, and corporate media was bursting with confident predictions that books printed on paper would soon be as obsolete as Babylonian clay tablets. Since then, millions of readers have defied the predictions and kept on buying printed books. At this point ebooks have claimed a handful of market niches, but sales are stagnant and only the most incremental improvements in ebook technology are forthcoming, while printed books still hold the place among readers that they won in Gutenberg’s time.
In exactly the same way, but even more dramatically, vinyl records are staging a comeback decades after they were consigned to the dustbin. The issue here is simple enough: analogue recordings have a richness of sound that digital formats can’t match. As a result, classic albums are being produced again and sold at premium prices, while more musicians every year are releasing their new albums on vinyl. Now that direct and indirect subsidies for the internet are starting to fall away, and web-based music services have to find some way to monetise themselves and pay for their share of the internet’s vast infrastructure, it is by no means certain that digital formats will hold onto their temporary dominance. The supposedly outmoded analogue stereo LP may turn out to be the wave of the future after all.
If we were rational about the future of our societies, applying this same principle generally would be the obvious choice. Across the board, from cars and planes to household appliances, it would be easy enough to replace complex devices that don’t work well with older, simpler, and more reliable technologies that do. Microsoft, for example, could regain some of the reputation it’s thrown away in recent years by taking one of the older and more reliable versions of Windows, and reworking it just enough to make it handle current computers and programmes. (Although I doubt they’ll do anything of the kind — the myth of progress is particularly strong in the computer-geek subculture.) Among its other advantages, that strategy would lower consumer prices, raising the standard of living measurably for many people, and especially for the poorer and more vulnerable among us. For that matter, since none of those older technologies would have to be invented, and all their strengths and weaknesses are already well known, such a project would encounter few if any technical challenges.
The difficulties are cultural in nature, not technical or economic. Comparing the death of progress to the death of God, as I did earlier, is far from absurd, for progress has taken on the same kind of cultural aura in our time that religions have in ages dominated by more obviously theological faiths. A great many modern people have taken their hopes of salvation and their dreams of a utopian future out of their natural habitat in theology and applied them to progress instead. You can see this clearly enough in the way that advocates for space travel insist that if humanity never settles other worlds, our species will have failed in its “cosmic mission”. The stealth theology underlying claims like these is clear for all to see.
So the revival of God tells us something about the death of progress, and also about the slow, unwelcome dawning of public recognition that we really have gone far down the rathole of diminishing returns in response to that crumbling secular faith. It does seem to be true, after all, that people cannot live without a religion. If they abandon one, they’ll find or make another, even if they have to build it out of so absurdly untheological a theme as infinite technical complexity. The turn back to more obviously theological forms of religion is part of that same story; it’s the normal response when secular pseudofaiths falter.
Of course the ersatz religion of progress is far from the only example of this type. Marxism is another. It used even more unprepossessing material to create an even more exact imitation of Christian theology, with the eventual utopia of true Communism hovering in the air like a mirage, filling the same role that the Second Coming plays in so many Christian sects.
Yet the god of dialectical materialism fell over and died once he too obviously failed to make good on his promises. The god of progress is clearly headed the same way. The sooner we reshape our technological choices on reasonable grounds instead of forcing them to conform to the failed pseudoreligion of progress, the better for everyone.
