1 Reclaiming a Pragmatic American Vision Sometimes reading can be therapeutic. We are all currently suffering through very negative public rhetoric these days about the state of our country. It can be depressing and demotivating. For those who want to rise above that negativity I recommend Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. When I read that book I also was reminded of another wonderful motivating book I read a bit ago by Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. First of all I learned, again, that the repeated claims that our country is in steep decline are not supported by the facts. As Easterbrook documents among a long list of positives: Unemployment is below where it was in the “good ol’ days” 1990s and job growth is strong; America’s economy (no. 1 in the world) is larger than China’s and Japan’s (nos. 2 & 3) combined; and Pollution, crime, and most diseases have been declining for a long time while living standards, life expectancy, and education levels have been on the rise. In short, in most areas that matter the United States and most of its states are “trending upward.” That is important for people to know because much psychological research tells us there are few more powerful human motivators than evidence of progress: a belief that what we are doing is working. If we hope to keep improving we must stay the course on the good work that has been done, sometimes over decades. Easterbrook catalogues that work in many areas including aviation safety. That reference to aviation safety was what took me back to Johnson’s Future Perfect. The book reminds us that U.S. history is replete with effective change movements made up of problem-focused optimists. Optimists who are unafraid to confront the brutal facts of the present but always believing there was a path to progress and a better life. As an old American Studies college major reading this, I remembered that about the only respectable school of philosophy this country has produced is-you guessed it-pragmatism. Thank you to George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, W.I. Thomas and others at the Chicago School. Early in Future Perfect Johnson bemoans the misconceptions that undercut our progressive spirit. Not so much the negativity and hopelessness pandered by those hoping to benefit from people’s discontent, but the belief in heroes and miracles. We fail to understand that civil rights progress was the result of thousands of people finding common cause over decades and did not spring full form when Martin Luther King had a dream. That income security for the elderly did not spring miraculously from the passage of Medicare by a heroic president. Most recently Johnson notes our (and the media’s) framing of the “Miracle on the Hudson.” A heroic captain and crew apparently made a miracle happen when birds hit an airliner’s engine over the Hudson River in New York as they landed safely in the river with no casualties. The facts, according to Johnson (and several aviation experts I consulted) are different. Long before this event thousands of experts in the May 27, 2016 A bi-weekly report from the Illinois Board of Higher Education
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1
Reclaiming a Pragmatic American Vision
Sometimes reading can be therapeutic. We are all currently suffering through very
negative public rhetoric these days about the state of our country. It can be
depressing and demotivating. For those who want to rise above that negativity I
recommend Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While
People Feel Worse. When I read that book I also was reminded of another wonderful
motivating book I read a bit ago by Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case for
Progress in a Networked Age.
First of all I learned, again, that the repeated claims that our country is in steep decline
are not supported by the facts. As Easterbrook documents among a long list of
positives:
Unemployment is below where it was in the “good ol’ days” 1990s and job growth
is strong;
America’s economy (no. 1 in the world) is larger than China’s and Japan’s (nos. 2
& 3) combined; and
Pollution, crime, and most diseases have been declining for a long time while living
standards, life expectancy, and education levels have been on the rise.
In short, in most areas that matter the United States and most of its states are “trending
upward.” That is important for people to know because much psychological research
tells us there are few more powerful human motivators than evidence of progress: a
belief that what we are doing is working. If we hope to keep improving we must stay
the course on the good work that has been done, sometimes over decades.
Easterbrook catalogues that work in many areas including aviation safety.
That reference to aviation safety was what took me back to Johnson’s Future Perfect.
The book reminds us that U.S. history is replete with effective change movements
made up of problem-focused optimists. Optimists who are unafraid to confront the
brutal facts of the present but always believing there was a path to progress and a
better life. As an old American Studies college major reading this, I remembered that
about the only respectable school of philosophy this country has produced is-you
guessed it-pragmatism. Thank you to George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, W.I. Thomas
and others at the Chicago School.
Early in Future Perfect Johnson bemoans the misconceptions that undercut our
progressive spirit. Not so much the negativity and hopelessness pandered by those
hoping to benefit from people’s discontent, but the belief in heroes and miracles. We
fail to understand that civil rights progress was the result of thousands of people finding
common cause over decades and did not spring full form when Martin Luther King
had a dream. That income security for the elderly did not spring miraculously from the
passage of Medicare by a heroic president.
Most recently Johnson notes our (and the media’s) framing of the “Miracle on the
Hudson.” A heroic captain and crew apparently made a miracle happen when birds
hit an airliner’s engine over the Hudson River in New York as they landed safely in the
river with no casualties. The facts, according to Johnson (and several aviation experts I
consulted) are different. Long before this event thousands of experts in the