Progress versus Improvement

Jill Lepore has an article, Our Own Devices, in the May 12, 2008 edition of The New Yorker. The essay is a collection reviews of books discussing technology. Towards the end, though, I found this observation particularly insightful.

In "A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium" (M.I.T.; $39.95), Robert Friedel tells a story that starts with a plow carving up the earth and ends with Apollo landing on the moon. The idea that "things could be done better" holds his analysis together, but, as he is at pains to clarify, "this is not the same as a faith in progress or the belief that the necessary trajectory of history or human experience was upward."

The subtlety of the distinction between the "idea of progress" and the "culture of improvement" is easily lost.

It is very similar to the injunction that the science writer Stephen Jay Gould used to make that biology doesn't have a direction, there is no summit to the spectrum of life.