

Why Doesn’t Anyone Talk About Progress Anymore? - npguy
http://statspotting.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-anyone-talk-about-progress-anymore/

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Millennium
Because there's a sense of directionality in the term "progress": you cannot
have progress without something to progress toward. One of Marx's key ideas
was a belief that such a direction is inherent in the course of humanity: a
kind of implicit default that the terms "progress" and "progressive" could
point without further qualification.

In recent years, it has become apparent that either this "natural direction"
doesn't exist, or it exists but is not as well-understood as we thought it
was. Not only do our predictions fail as often as not, but our writers of
fiction may actually have a better track record with their predictions than
our scientists do.

This makes a generalized sense of "progress" more or less meaningless. One can
still speak of progress in particular desired directions, but the implicit
default is gone.

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maxharris
The reason is the split in the 1960s between the Old and New Left. The Old
Left championed (publicly controlled) industry, and material progress. The New
Left, however, is ultimately nihilistic: at its core, it wants man to renounce
any alteration of nature that will benefit him.

Fortunately, there are groups that explicitly are explicitly championing
progress again, without committing the errors of either movement. See:

<http://industrialprogress.net/>

