A response to The Harper Review’s Autumn 2025 proposition, “we should still believe in progress.”
Dear editors,
Large language models promise to liberate us both from the toils of menial white-collar work and the drudgery of human ingenuity. Social media allows us to stay connected to our distant friends and realize how short we fall in comparison to them. The internet makes it easy to immediately get anything we desire and even easier to be left desiring more. Agriculture enables us to create a constant supply of nutrition and to work more hours than our hunting-and-gathering predecessors.
Every year, a new Thing comes out and promises to disrupt our lives; are you happier than you were last year? The more we run, the more we stay in place. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
“There is a God, and His name is tradeoffs” is a phrase I once saw on my timeline. When faced with a problem today, the solution is often merely a Band-Aid that will fall off tomorrow. When my shoes become so worn down that I can no longer walk to work, I will buy a car that makes the air my children breathe a little dirtier. When society needed to extract more food from every acre of farmland, it created fertilizers that ran off into rivers and polluted the water. Is the solution to reject progress and return to where we once were?
Sometimes, I call home and ask how things have changed since I was a child. I ask how things have changed since my parents were children. My mother has so many more problems now that she lives in the suburbs of Houston than she did when she lived in a tin shack back in the periphery of Jakarta. She tells me that these problems are blessings. How blessed she is to have to worry about her car registration, to put up with her annoying boss, to be bothered by the price of gas going up by thirty cents, when she once had to worry about where she would get her next meal.
That’s how it is. Our progress will always bring about new problems. When we fulfill our old yearnings, we discover yearnings anew. How blessed we are to face problems measured in years and not the problems of daily survival. When people prophesize about progress, then, we must believe in them, not because those prophecies will necessarily come about, but because they certainly won’t if we refuse to budge.
History is a marathon, except we don’t know how long it is or where it ends. If we choose to run, we don’t know that we’ll ever reach the finish line. If we choose to stand still, we know that we certainly won’t reach it.
Optimistically,
Ted Kwee-Bintoro
Image: George Bellows, New York, oil on canvas, 1911 (National Gallery of Art, DC).