Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

by Johan Norberg

In the mid-eighteenth century the Western world experienced a reading explosion, and people began to read novels, with the story unfolding in a character’s own words, so that the reader got to hear her side of the story, and understand her thoughts, emotions, suffering and joy. Bestsellers by Rousseau and Samuel Richardson had female protagonists and male readers everywhere began to imagine what a woman’s life was like, from the joy of love to the horrors of arranged marriages. Later on, Charles Dickens explained what the British orphanage and workhouse looked like from the perspective of children, Herman Melville told the reader what it was like for a sailor to be flogged and Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced many to confront the human realities of slavery. It may be that novels made it easier for people to put themselves in other people’s shoes and empathize with them even if they belonged to another gender, class or ethnicity, and as a consequence people became more sympathetic to others.