Celebrating the Real Progressives
by Thomas Walker-Werth
What does it truly mean to be an advocate for progress?
Since the late 19th century, the term “Progressivism” has been associated with a specific political philosophy. This philosophy argues for a politically powerful government with vast reach—one tasked not with protecting individual rights but rather, with using its coercive power to violate them in order to “manage” the economy in the supposed interests of the majority, undo alleged historic injustices, and achieve some kind of egalitarian, utopian society.[1] In recent decades, this concept of Progressivism has grown to include government action to “protect” the environment from human activity.
The word “progress,” in its basic sense, means advancement toward any given goal (e.g., progress on your daily step goals or progress on a construction project). In this sense, the term is morally neutral—you can progress toward a goal that is good for human life (such as these examples) or bad for human life (such as progress in planning a bank robbery). But in common usage today, the word “progress” has a positive connotation, which is problematic if we speak of progress as such as a good thing. The modern “Progressive” movement uses the term in this way, smuggling its goal of creating an egalitarian, centrally planned, “zero-environmental-impact” society under the positive-sounding title of progress.
So, what is the basic standard by which progress can be considered positive? Progress is morally positive when it describes advancement toward human beings being better able to live and flourish. Many of the Progressive movement’s historic goals were somewhat in this direction. For example, many Western “Progressives” sought to achieve improved legal protections for women in a time when they did not enjoy equal recognition of rights. Many also claimed to want higher living standards for poor or disadvantaged people.
But the Progressive agenda of central planning and government control is not a valid or proper means to those ends. It stifles human freedom and, in so doing, destroys people’s ability to pursue values, create wealth, and achieve meaning.
But some people do advance a proper conception of progress, at least in general terms—people who advocate true human flourishing in technology, industry, and all other fields of human endeavor. These are the people who deserve recognition as the true progressives. The time has come to reclaim the term “progressive” for the real heroes of human progress, a few of whom I will celebrate.
Peter Diamandis and the X-Prize Foundation
I first became aware of the X-Prize Foundation in 2004 when a little-known aviation firm called Scaled Composites became the first private company to put a human being into space. It won the Ansari X-Prize, a $10 million reward for the first private company to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.
The X-Prize was the brainchild of Peter Diamandis, who sought to re-create the pioneering spirit of the early days of aviation. In the 1920s, entrepreneur Raymond Orteig had offered a prize for the first aviator to fly from New York to Paris, spurring Charles Lindbergh to achieve that feat in 1927. Diamandis realized that such prizes could inspire all manner of world-changing innovations. He founded the X-Prize Foundation, which brings together wealthy people who want to see a particular technological breakthrough happen and sets up prizes that businesses then compete to win.
Since the Ansari X-Prize (which was mainly funded by Anousheh and Amir Ansari), the foundation has offered prizes for fuel-efficient cars, oil cleanup, Moon exploration missions, medical diagnosis tools, women’s safety devices, clean water extraction, seafloor mapping, literacy tools, and most recently, avatar robots to enable people to virtually travel and directly interact with people and environments around the world and beyond.
The Thinkers: Stephen Pinker, Johan Norberg, Robert Zubrin, and J. Storrs Hall
Thousands of thinkers write and speak about how technology and innovation can improve human life, but I want to highlight a few who I’ve found most inspiring and effective in spreading this vital message:
Stephen Pinker: Perhaps the best-known advocate of science and technology, Pinker is the author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, an Amazon best seller that pushes against the growing tide of pessimism about humanity’s future. Pinker’s optimism about the human ability to improve our lives, discover the truth about reality, and build a better future is infectious. “We will never have a perfect world,” he admits, “but it’s not overly romantic or naive to work towards a better one.” Fostering optimism is crucial if we are to continue inspiring the innovators and entrepreneurs of the future. A qualified linguist and psychologist, Pinker has also written extensively on language, human thought, and what he believes is the demonstrable trend in recent human history away from war and toward peace. He is also a staunch advocate of intellectual freedom, arguing that “morality and conformity are the opposite of each other.”
Johan Norberg: Like so many people today, Norberg was once a pessimist about the future of human civilization. “When I was around fifteen,” he recounts, “I was very unhappy about modern, industrial civilization. I looked upon highways, cars, trucks, and factories as blights on the landscape. I thought the hustle, bustle, and stress of consumerism and modernity were unnatural and unhealthy.”[2] He looked back romantically on the “good old days” of preindustrial life . . . until he began to study that time seriously. The more he studied, the more he realized how much highways, cars, trucks, and factories have radically improved human life. Since then, he has become one of the most inspiring advocates of technology and freedom, writing such powerful books as In Defense of Global Capitalism (2001), Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (2016), and The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023).
Robert Zubrin: The founder of the Mars Society, Zubrin is perhaps the most passionate advocate of the exploration and colonization of Mars that I know of. He has been at it since the 1980s, regularly popping up in documentaries and news items to explain the many benefits to human life that going to Mars will unlock. These aren’t limited to the scientific and material benefits of colonizing a new world—he has also overseen competitions to design future Mars city-states to highlight how colonizing the “Red Planet” could open the door to social and political innovation.[3] More broadly, he advocates for industrial development, especially nuclear power, and for humans to increase rather than decrease our use of energy to improve our lives. “A main threat to human existence today,” he argues, “is the idea that resources are limited—that there’s not enough for everyone, and we need to take what’s there for ourselves. But if we can show that it is possible to grow those resources by opening up space to human settlement and development, then it becomes clear that there’s no reason to kill each other fighting over provinces when, working together, we can open up planets.”[4] Zubrin has also been an outspoken critic of NASA’s approach to space exploration, shining a light on the government-funded agency’s inefficiency and failure to achieve a lasting human presence beyond low Earth orbit—something he discusses in my 2021 interview with him.
J. Storrs Hall: If you only ever read one book about technology and innovation, I recommend Where’s My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. Hall is a computer scientist who one day wondered why other fields of technology, especially aviation, haven’t progressed the way computing technology has in the past several decades. To answer that question, he became an expert on the aviation industry, even becoming a licensed light aircraft pilot, and did a deep dive into numerous other fields, including power generation and medicine. Where’s My Flying Car? presents his detailed findings as to why innovation outside of computing (and the progress computing has made possible in other fields) has slowed to a crawl since the 1970s.
The Think Tanks: We Are Innovation, Free Cities Foundation, and HumanProgress.org
In addition to individual personalities, several organizations are doing valuable research and advocacy toward changing the public perception of technology and encouraging more innovation. Here are a few of the most effective I’ve encountered:
We Are Innovation: This organization describes itself as “a dynamic network of individuals and institutions who deeply believe in innovation’s power to drive progress and solve the world’s most pressing problems.”[5] It produces films, research papers, and social media content about all manner of new approaches to perennial issues from progressing nuclear power to overcoming smoking addiction. It also partners with and support organizations promoting policy changes to make innovation and entrepreneurship easier.
Free Cities Foundation: Innovation depends on freedom—intellectual and material—something desperately lacking in most countries today. The Free Cities Foundation has a novel solution: Create new places where the freedom exists for innovation to flourish. Building on research into the various “special economic zones” established around the world since the 1980s, it advocates for the establishment and growth of new “free cities” and publishes research into what form these can take and the life-enhancing ideas and inventions that can and do come from them.
Human Progress: Established by the CATO Institute, Human Progress pulls together evidence from researchers and organizations across the world to demonstrate how innovation and technology are already hugely enhancing human life and could do so on a much greater scale in a freer society. All too often, the truth about our improving world and quality of life gets buried under a pervasive message of pessimism, and so Human Progress’s work in bringing that information to light and presenting it in an easy-to-understand visual form is vital for turning public opinion back in favor of progress.
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These are just a few of the true advocates for progress who deserve celebrating. If you know of others, please write a letter to the editor—we would love to highlight more of these heroes in any way we can. Otherwise, I highly recommend checking out the books, articles, and talks published by all the people and organizations I’ve mentioned here. Maybe they’ll inspire you to create something new.
This article appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.
[1] “Progressivism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/progressivism.
[2] Johan Norberg, “My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress,” The Objective Standard 19, no. 3 (Fall 2024), https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/p/my-conversion-from-anti-industrialist-to-a-lover-of-human-progress.
[3] Frank Crossman, ed., Mars City States: New Societies for a New World (Lakewood, CO: Polaris Publishing, 2021).
[4] “Thomas Walker-Werth, ”How Going to Space Can Enhance Human Flourishing, with Dr. Robert Zubrin,” The Objective Standard 17, no. 2 (Summer 2022), https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/p/how-going-to-space-can-enhance-human-flourishing-with-dr-robert-zubrin.
[5] “Our Story,” We Are Innovation, https://www.weareinnovation.global/our-story.