To understand the disillusionment with progress that took hold a half century ago, we have to understand why progress seemed glamorous in the first place and what its grace obscured. What exactly was its allure and to whom? What was the nature of its illusion? Only then can we consider how progress might recover its glamour and what the risks might be if it does.
The glamour of progress in the twentieth-century emerged from audiences inspired by three different kinds of longing. At a given moment, an individual might partake in any one of the three, but they also formed distinct audience clusters whose different underlying desires matter to our story.
Together these groups constituted a large enough public to make imagining a marvelous future the cultural norm. Eventually, their diverging aspirations produced real-world consequences, dispelling the futuristic glamour of progress.
One audience longed for order, cleanliness, efficiency, and speed: an escape from the dirt, disorder, and constraining clutter of the past. ‘Speed is the cry of our era’, wrote industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes in 1932. Ranging from Bauhaus purists to Hollywood set designers, these were the modernists, the most politically and culturally influential of the three clusters. They sought to create plenty by eliminating waste, a category that included everything from ornate furniture and fussy wallpaper to the price system and ‘duplicative’ economic competition. Their desires expressed themselves in buildings of steel, concrete, and glass; in streamlined artifacts and open-plan interiors; in slum clearances and superhighways; and in schemes for economic planning and control. The Futurama, designed by Bel Geddes, embodied a popular version. Le Courbusier’s Radiant City of concrete housing towers sharing green space was a highbrow incarnation.
A second audience craved discovery, adventure, and meaningful achievement. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses they longed ‘To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought’. Dissatisfied with mass culture, they yearned for excellence. They saw in astronauts and scientists the glamour formerly reserved for heroic explorers, courageous sea captains, and western gunfighters. This form of futuristic glamour operated most powerfully on a relatively small portion of the population – those who, in an era that celebrated the affable average man, were out-of-step and excessively brainy. This was, in short, glamour for nerds (including little Virginia reading You Will Go to the Moon every day in kindergarten).
It was the third, far larger, audience that made progress glamour a cultural norm. These were the vast numbers of ordinary people who longed for security, comfort, and ease, a respite from struggle, drudgery, and want. Once they might have dreamed of the sudden bounty of old novels: inheriting an income from an aristocratic secret father or discovering a long-lost millionaire uncle.