Celebrate progress - restore its popularity
We must start telling stories again that don't confuse pessimism with sophistication or, conversely, demand that optimism be naive.
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AS A KINDERGARTEN student a half century ago, I read the same book over and over again, nearly every day. My favourite in our classroom's little library, it had a title imbued with confidence and promise: You Will Go to the Moon. Needless to say, I have not done so.
So I sympathise with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose new books lament the demise of grand 20th-century dreams and the optimistic culture they expressed.
"I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space programme might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done," writes Mr Stephenson in the preface to Hieroglyph, a science-fiction anthology hoping "to rekindle grand technological ambitions through the power of storytelling".
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