Progress Is Reversible

 John Gray makes a quietly unsettling point.

Technology tends to build. Once we figure out how to split the atom or send emails or make vaccines, that knowledge tends to stay with us. We can build on it. Add layers. Each breakthrough has the potential to become the starting point for the next.

But moral and political progress? That’s more complicated.

Gray calls it entropic. It falls apart if you don’t keep after it.

Democracy doesn’t maintain itself. If a people or a generation ignore or distort it, it won’t be automatically discovered by the next generation who can use it as a starting point. It can be lost. Rights can be rolled back. People forget. Norms get corroded. One generation's hard-won freedoms can slip away in a generation — or less.

We like to think:

"Civil rights? That was a problem in the past but we’re beyond that now."

"Democracy? Obviously."

"War? We have peace treaties now. We’re not animals.”

But history says otherwise. The Roman Empire collapsed. Its roads outlasted its laws. Technology often endures. Civilization’s ethics and social norms are more fragile.

And here’s the really sobering thing.

We’re still running modern society on ancient hardware. Our instincts, impulses, and tribal reflexes haven’t changed much in thousands of years. Civilization is a thin layer of software running on old biology. No wonder it sometimes glitches.

Parents know this.

Raising a child is re-teaching civilization from scratch. Language. Fairness. How not to hit. How to live with others. How to find meaning or recover from failure or heartbreak.

We can build on past successes but it is not automatic. The lessons have to be learned. Again. And again. They’re vulnerable. They can be lost or distorted.

Progress in ethics and politics is not permanent. It’s provisional.

Again - and as Gray reminds us - entropic. It will lose energy without reinvestment. Ignore it for too long or begin to distort it with lies and moral shortcuts, assume that it’s already been solved, and you can start to lose it. You’ll think you’re building on the third floor and you might suddenly find yourself in the basement.

Of all the investments we make, working against entropy in the realm of politics and ethics might be the most essential.