A response to The Harper Review’s Autumn 2025 proposition, “we should still believe in progress.”
Dear editors,
“We should still believe in progress” is a depressing statement, but one that is important to discuss. “Should still” is not a term anyone enjoys using, signifying the weight of resignation. We believe out of obligation, not true conviction. However, perhaps the bigger issue is that the statement nominalizes progress and renders it agentless. Thus, it acts like an entity—untouchable, inevitable, and not something that is caused by our actions. This is why we treat progress as something that needs to be believed in, rather than created.
Pretend we replaced “progress” with a name: I’ll pick Felicia. “We should still believe in Felicia” makes it seem like she has made a grave mistake, but she can improve herself. “Oh no, Felicia screwed the pooch, but she can figure it out,” may be an appropriate attitude if Felicia were real, and not the embodiment of the concept of progress. We have spent so much time viewing progress as an occurrence we cannot affect that we have forgotten the concept only exists when we act on it, rather than just believing it’ll happen.
In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, sociologist Jean Baudrillard argues that we live in a state of hyperreality, where media dictates what we believe is “real.” When reality is mediated by curated content, we fall into the belief that our actual reality cannot be changed, like the Instagram Reels we constantly scroll through. From Labubus, to Love Island, to the song of the summer, we have been groomed to view anything beyond our immediate bubble as distant and unchangeable. We are aware of global trends in consumerism that may foster community but at the expense of taking away the spotlight from the real struggles that people live, making the general population unaware of even how to become active when everything they see is meant to be unimportant and insignificant to their daily lives. When our top priority is to wait hours in line for a Labubu, I think we’ve forgotten what it means to actually fight for something. Perhaps it’s those who control the media who want us to believe progress is passive. They have painted a portrait of society for us to stare at, never to interact with.
A lack of belief in progress leads to complacency, then stagnancy, and then the lines between reality and reality TV are blurred. We start treating the news cycle as if it was a scripted dating show. It is important to believe that our actions lead to progress, not the other way around. Maybe it’s difficult to believe that one person’s actions can create worldwide progress, and that is what is stopping us all from working. Or maybe we’ve forgotten that progress is the sum of everyone’s actions, and the little characters that dance around on our Instagram feeds are real people with real desires and real personalities that, when combined with other real people, can create “progress.”
Progress is hard under scrutiny from the media, the government, parents, and any other naysayers. But every deliberate step is one that creates progress, and a step that changes progress from a passive ideal to an active pursuit.
“We should still believe that our actions can create progress” is a much more acceptable statement. It pairs the weariness of “should still” with the hopefulness of “our actions” to shed light at the end of the tunnel. If virality dictates our passions, maybe we should curate our feeds as a source of human stories instead of a form of escapism from a society that needs us to pay attention.
Proactively,
Adiyaan Ahamad
Image: Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, oil on canvas, 1913–14 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven).