It is time for the left to return, without apology, to the side of progress. We call ourselves progressives, after all, do we not?

The left needs to recapture the vaulting ambition of idealists like the Cosmists, of the universalist spirit of liberty, equality, democracy and reason of the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Diderot and Paine. We need to embrace once again continent-transforming projects like those of Lenin and Roosevelt. We need to paint on our placards and

Progress and growth need not hold back sustainability. But the politics of limits, like capitalism, certainly hold back progress.

Over the course of human history, we can see that energy throughput—whether via human or animal labour, wood and dung, fossil fuels or ultimately hydroelectric, solar power and nuclear fission (and one day fusion)—can be seen as a rough proxy for a society’s wealth.

Between techno-utopianism and neo-luddism there is the aforementioned Promethean optimism that recognises that while at each stage of our history, as a result of our solving past problems, new problems are created, we then must work—and often work very hard indeed—to overcome them. As Deutsch argues, problems are inevitable. But problems are also

Deutsch: we are instead, “chemical scum that dream of distant quasars.”

while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything. They are ‘universal constructors’.

Today, we can extend such lofty but specific goals to a more generalised principle of audacity: that our species must continue to achieve ever more impressive feats, that we must never stop reaching, never stop progressing. We, uniquely in nature, have an infinite capacity for ingenuity, what Julian Simon, the libertarian economist and arch-enemy

“Storm the heavens and conquer death.”201