Continuous Progress, 2026, Anon
Of Mice and Metrics
Many moons ago, in the time we sometimes refer to as ‘the past’, your stumbling Director was an equally stumbling student. As such, I recall having to answer an Oxford interview essay question along the lines of: Is continuous progress possible?
I remember the room vividly: it was a space that seemed to have reached its own personal ‘End of History’ somewhere around 1740. The air was thick with the scent of beeswax, disappointment, and the quiet, heavy judgment of several thousand dead philosophers. There I was, an adolescent in a suit that fitted me only in the most optimistic sense of the word, being asked by a man who looked like he had been carved out of a particularly stern piece of oak whether or not the world was always getting better.
That particular inquiry has haunted me ever since, rising like the unbidden ghost of Banquo at every staff meeting, curriculum review, and prize-giving ceremony, though thankfully with less shaking of the gory locks. I suspected at the time that the question was designed to weed out those who offered a spirited, entirely hollow, defence of the Victorian ideal of the onwards and upwards march of progress i.e. the sort of person who believes that the invention of the steam engine was the definitive answer to the problem of human unhappiness. But you dear reader, will not be surprised to learn that your Director offered a far more sceptical response even then. And so, perhaps as a moment of personal exorcism, allow me to direct a few paltry words in its direction.
At first glance, the notion of progress appears reassuringly straightforward. It arrives, uninvited but entirely at home, often in the form of an upward line. One imagines a line on a graph; neat, obliging, and remarkably devoid of the messy reality of human error, rising swan-like from the x-axis steadily from left to right. We are, after all, a species rather fond of graphs. They possess the rare and enviable quality of suggesting profound understanding without requiring us to linger too long over what, precisely, is being understood. To see a line moving upward is to feel that the universe is, at last, behaving itself.
This faith in the upward line is a heavy cultural inheritance, rooted firmly in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. We have discussed this period before, you and I, for it is a movement which gave birth to many beasts still roaming free amongst us. This is the period when humanity seems to decide, with a collective and rather brisk efficiency, that the universe is essentially a question waiting for a sufficiently clever answer. At the heart of the Enlightenment project is a shiny belief: that the application of Reason will eventually lead us to a total knowledge of everything. IKR?!
The thinkers of the age, the Diderots, the Voltaires, and the Kants for example, viewed the world not as a mysterious or capricious place, but as a vast, intricate mechanism governed by universal laws. To them, the universe was a big clock, and human reason was the set of screwdrivers required to dismantle, understand, and eventually improve it. If we could only map those laws, they reasoned, we could fix the machine. Progress, therefore, was not a matter of luck or divine whim, but an inevitable byproduct of inquiry. We were no longer at the mercy of the gods; we were the apprentice architects of our own perfection…or at the very least, really good DIY enthusiasts with access to an instruction manual.
Since then, we have grown accustomed to the idea that history is a grand, unfolding project of improvement. Such an idea means we can look back at our ancestors with a mixture of pity and patronising affection, as if they were merely a ‘beta version’ of ourselves, struggling along without the benefit of our superior data and fibre-optic cables. We can believe that because we have more information, we must necessarily have more wisdom. Witness how we are increasingly invited to worship in those cathedrals of information; the data centre, where the hum of the cooling fan is our modern Gregorian chant.
However, if the Enlightenment gave us ‘light’, it has also given us a peculiar kind of tunnel vision. Our old friend Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!) offers a profound, and somewhat stinging, counter-challenge to this linear obsession. In his exploration of the divided brain, McGilchrist suggests that our modern world has become a prisoner of the Left Hemisphere. This, he explains, is the part of the brain that loves maps, categories, and, most crucially, little upward-trending lines.
The left hemisphere’s job is to manipulate the world, to break it down into pieces, and to keep track of the metrics of progress. It is excellent at building the machine, but it is fundamentally incapable of understanding what the machine is for. It sees the notes but misses the music and is likely, if left unattended, to mark the music for effort but sternly question its relevance to the specification. McGilchrist’s warning is that by prioritising this narrow, linear version of progress, we have effectively handed the steering wheel of civilisation to a part of our minds that knows how to do everything but has no idea why it is doing anything.
We are, in his view, like an explorer who has become so obsessed with the accuracy of his map that he has forgotten to actually look at the landscape. Our ‘progress’ may simply be the left hemisphere’s triumph in creating a world that mirrors its own mechanical nature; a world where everything is measured, but nothing is truly felt. This Enlightenment dream of total knowledge, when viewed through McGilchrist’s lens, begins to look less like a triumph and more like a retreat. We have become remarkably adept at dismantling the clock, but we can no longer tell the time.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, that most formidable and dense of German philosophers, provided the intellectual scaffolding for the Enlightenment’s optimism. He viewed history as the slaughterbench upon which the Spirit (or Geist) realises itself. For Hegel, every conflict and every setback was merely a thesis meeting an antithesis, eventually resulting in a higher synthesis. It is a comforting thought that even our catastrophes are just the growing pains of a cosmic promotion scheme leading toward Absolute Knowledge. It suggests that history has a destination, and that we are, however clumsily, holding a ticket to ride.
Yet, as I sit here in the sink attempting to navigate a modern automated phone menu or synchronising a wireless printer that seems to possess its own malevolent consciousness, I find Hegel’s Absolute Spirit rather hard to locate. One suspects that he never had to reset a password he had forgotten, only to be told it cannot be the same as his previous ten passwords, all of which he also cannot remember, and none of which appear to have contributed meaningfully to the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. Against Hegel’s grand staircase, the Stoics and the ancient Greeks offered a rather more sobering alternative: the Eternal Return. To them, history doesn’t so much climb a ladder as run laps around a track. There is something strangely comforting, if a little exhausting, in the idea that we aren’t failing to move forward; we are simply participating in a very long, very dignified circle.
If philosophy provides the map for progress, literature provides the warning signs. Literature is often the awkward and frequently cynical guest at the dinner party of modernity, whispering that the ‘new and improved’ isn’t all that new and probably not an improvement either.
We need look no further than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to hear those whispers. Written at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it remains the most potent critique of progress-as-velocity. Victor Frankenstein is the archetypal ‘progressive’ student; he has mastered the technicalities, he has scaled the heights of his discipline, and he has achieved a breakthrough that would make any modern R&D department weep with joy. Yet, scientific progress in the novel advances with admirable determination only to discover that the moral imagination (McGilchrist’s notion of the Right Hemisphere) has been left some distance behind in a cold laboratory. One of Shelley’s clear warnings is that progress without a corresponding deepening of the soul is merely the creation of monsters. In pursuing the ‘how’ to the detriment of the ‘why’, we all lose.
This theme is echoed in the dystopian anxieties of the twentieth century. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, progress has actually succeeded. The World State has solved the problems of war, hunger, and even the minor inconvenience of sadness. Society has refined itself into a state of total stability. Yet, as we navigate this sterile utopia, we are left with the uneasy sense that something essential, something jagged, difficult, and human, has been quietly mislaid. In Huxley’s world, we have progressed right out of our own humanity.
Even the hopeful energy of American aspiration is not immune. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is ostensibly a novel about moving forward, about the green light and the reinvention of the self. Yet the closing vision suggests that our forward striving is forever accompanied by a persistent, rather inconvenient backward pull: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. We move, certainly, but like those boats, our progress is often a folorn attempt to escape a gravity that we carry within ourselves.
It is perhaps in the realm of education that this modern, Left-Hemisphere faith in the upward line finds its most enthusiastic expression. Here, progress is monitored, measured, and, where possible, colour-coded. Students are expected to demonstrate ‘value-added’ improvement across lessons, terms, and years.
There is, of course, much to commend in this. But one occasionally suspects that the language of progress has begun to reshape the thing it seeks to describe. In the world of the novel, specifically the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, wisdom is rarely a straight line. If we look at the progress of a character in Jane Austen or in her nearest heir, Penelope Fitzgerald, the most meaningful ‘growth’ usually occurs when the protagonist realises they have been a complete idiot for the previous three hundred pages.
To learn is often to hesitate, to become confused, and to realise that one has misunderstood something previously held with confidence. In a classroom, the student who admits, with some discomfort, I thought I understood this, but now I am not so sure, is making far more meaningful progress than the one who continues serenely in error. The former is engaging in a Spectacular U-Turn, (SUT) which is the hallmark of genuine intellectual maturity, and, regrettably, the least present category on any known assessment rubric. SUTs do not look particularly attractive on a spreadsheet. A graph sees a dip in performance where a teacher sees the birth of a thinker.
Beyond the gates of the school, our technological achievements offer a similar ambiguity. We have access to vast reservoirs of information, indeed the sum total of human knowledge sits in our pockets. We have become extraordinarily good at doing things quickly. Whether we have become correspondingly better at doing them well remains an open question.
E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story, The Machine Stops, predicted a world where humanity progressed into a state of total, subterranean comfort. In Forster’s vision, the ‘progress’ was absolute: no one had to travel, and no one had to endure the clumsiness of physical presence. And yet, the soul of the species simply withered. It suggests that perhaps the obstacles we spend so much time trying to progress past, like the silence of a long walk or the boredom of a rainy afternoon, are actually the things that keep us tethered to reality.
If progress is to mean anything at all, it must surely imply a sense of direction. To progress is not merely to move, but to move towards something. Without some notion of the good, the true, or the ‘beautiful,’ progress risks collapsing into mere activity. We become very busy indeed, and very efficient, and not entirely certain why.
Friend of the Column, Aristotle argued that every action should aim at some good. If we apply this to the modern world, we have to ask: what is the good our progress is aiming for? Is it merely more speed? More data? More comfort? If our ‘upward line’ on the graph is leading us toward a world of total efficiency but zero meaning, can we really call it progress?
And so we return, somewhat chastened, to that original interview question. Is continuous progress possible? Perhaps it is, if one is willing to define progress broadly enough to include all manner of change, fluctuation, and failure. But if progress is to mean improvement, and if improvement is to mean movement towards something genuinely better, then the question is getting at something far more messy and interesting. And It requires us to stop looking at the graph for a moment and look at the world.
It may be that the difficulty lies not in our failure to achieve progress, but in our quiet, Left-Hemisphere assumption that we already know what it looks like. We continue plotting our lines, refining our metrics, and taking a certain comfort in the upward trends we carefully record. We celebrate the new simply because it is not the old, forgetting that the old often contained wisdom we haven’t yet learned how to replace. Maybe this idea has particular appeal to me, as I become more and more old and less and less new, with each passing moment. Who knows?
As we look toward the remainder of this term, my hope for our students is not just that they ‘move forward,’ but that they occasionally have the wisdom to stand still, the bravery to be confused, and the character to realise that sometimes, the most important progress happens when the line on the graph isn’t moving at all which, I am reliably informed, is rarely a sign of failure, despite what the graph may insist.
Until next time, Happy Reading / Making Progress!
Director’s Detritus #7
In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched, carrying a “Golden Record” of human achievement. It contains a map of our solar system, greetings in 55 languages, and the sound of a kiss. It is currently over 14 billion miles away; a tiny, gold-plated Enlightenment library shouting into the infinite silence, hoping that someone, somewhere, has the right adapter to play it.