Frames of progress
Sara Robinson, at Orcinus, has just posted a list of different frames that people use for evaluating how change happens.
One of the grandest — and most frustrating — things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. […]
You often find these meta-level disconnects at the core of online flame wars. […]
A goodly number of these online disagreements are based in our fundamental assumptions about how change happens. Believe it or not, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what’s likely to happen next. […]
My professors have, over the years, boiled the basic change drivers down to about nine. (There may be others; I’m open to suggestions.) In brief, here are the main assumptions people use to explain why change happens:
1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.
Her other entries include Development, Technology, Ideas, Markets, Cycles, Conflict, Power, and Evolution. Most people are partial to a few of these, and repulsed by a few. Some of them may be legitimately invalid. But they’re not mutually exclusive, so when two people argue over whether they should use one or another to evaluate the implications of some policy or moral stance, there’s often a neglect of a need to apply both frames in the analysis.
Sara thinks that these frames are behind most of the deep, hard-to-resolve disagreements between people, but I doubt it. I think that these are probably only a subset of all the different frames with that effect. There might be two or three higher-level categories that each contain a dozen basic frames, and this is only one of them. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Sara is a wonderful writer and an insightful futurist. For more of her writing, see her Cracks in the Wall series, about the psychological roots and sociological roots of authoritarianism (especially religious).
