In my book, I bring up the visit the Dallas Morning News editorial board received from a delegation of Latin American ambassadors and U.S. business representatives, lobbying for our backing for a regional free-trade agreement. I was struck by a part of the meeting in which the visitors spoke of a group of small Mexican farmers who opposed the deal as troubled eccentrics who could be taken care of without much difficulty. There was not the least question but that the new trade deal, which would wipe these farmers out, was progress. There would be more commerce among nations, and the collective GDP would rise. That’s certainly progress from a certain perspective. But nobody thought to examine what social and cultural things of value would be lost as well. Perhaps in the end, they wouldn’t be worth saving. But the cult of progress doesn’t think to ask.

Another example, also from the book. I tell of a friend in DC who worked at a university there. He overheard one day his boss, a black woman of a certain age, talking to a childhood friend from the old neighborhood, reminiscing about back in the day. My friend said it eventually dawned on him that they had grown up poor, and had lived through seeing their traditional neighborhood destroyed to make way for Great Society public housing projects. We all know how well that turned out. My friend told me he had never stopped to consider what a complex and fragile web of social relations had been destroyed by the Master Planners who only set out to do good, and to bring Progress to the benighted residents of Washington DC. The cult of progress strikes again, with unintended consequences.