When I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favour.
~Toby Ord, The Precipice

Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history.
~Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

But there is a more literal sense in which the hand of modernity feeds its critics. When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his diatribe against the pursuit of knowledge, science had yet to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary people. In the 17th century, visionaries like Francis Bacon were predicting that the accumulation of knowledge would eventually improve the conditions of human life, but at the time, most people still lived in abject poverty, children died in droves, farmers relied on muscle power and draught animals, and even the wealthiest king could succumb to a simple infection that is now treatable with cheap, insurance-covered antibiotics.