the politics of progress has matured. olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò makes the argument for a “constructive politics” rather than “a politics of deference” in his book elite capture, with the rationale that focusing on purity and symbolism detracts from concrete meaningful progress.
A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process—the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.
the cultural shift from identification and correction toward integration and action moves us once again toward agency and frees us to think more about what we want to do, rather than who we are and how that positions us within a system. and, as zygmunt bauman notes in liquid modernity, an increase in agency is what widens the potential for progress:
To people confident of their power to change things, ‘progress’ is an axiom. To people who feel that things fall out of their hands, the idea of progress would not occur and would be laughable if heard.
defeatism is an unstable state; people can remain paralyzed for long periods of time, but the urge to break free slowly becomes irrepressible. we’re seeing it happen with the resurgence of the simple but effective meme that’s bounced around silicon valley for many years and taken hold again: “you can just do things.” this refrain is so obvious on its face that it only really makes sense as a counter to an implied dominant narrative: that you can’t just do things. few would describe the culture of this era this way, and yet the resonance of the counternarrative points to a truth to it.
The ’90s was as era of agency and individualism, the 2010s an era of systems thinking and paralysis via analysis…