Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion: Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.53 We don’t have a catchy name for a constructive agenda that reconciles long-term gains with short-term setbacks, historical
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