The cult of disruptive innovation: Where America went wrong | Jill Lepore | Big Think

[Music] To my view, a lot of our contemporary political crisis derives from an abandonment of the idea of moral progress. So, when the country was founded in the 18th century, its framers subscribed to an idea that progress is moral, and that idea of progress came from Christianity. That Pilgrim's progress is a journey from sin to salvation. Enlightenment philosophers, like the guys who drafted the founding documents of the United States, didn't necessarily share that particular Christian notion of a journey from sin to salvation, but they understood progress and the United States and its founding as an experiment that would lead to political progress.

Because it was designed to improve the lives of the most people, people would act with, in a sense, a common endeavor as a republic. Our obligations would be to one another in a form of community, and then we should understand achievement as moral progress. That changed over the course of the 19th century when progress came to have a real technological cast. Think about the railroad, the telegraph, the camera. People began to think about progress as advancing like a train on a linear track, and each machine would make the world better because things would go faster, and goods would become cheaper.

Very quickly, that idea of moral progress was replaced by progress as prosperity. So, if you were asking how things were going for the country, where the country is prospering, we have made progress. The slippage from, "We've made a more just society," to, "Certain people, a lot of people, are making a lot more money, and a lot of goods are cheaper for people to buy," that's a real slippage, right?

So then, in the 20th century, progress is even sort of less about new forms of production and accelerated production, but accelerated consumption. The more people are buying, the more goods people have; like the standard of living is rising. Therefore, we have progress. In the second half of the 20th century, the idea that there even is progress, especially technologically driven, begins to fall apart because of Hiroshima. So, people look at the world with, "What's technological progress gotten us?" In the middle of the century, we have built a bomb that can destroy the whole planet.

By the 1950s, we're destroying the environment, and it may be possible that human life cannot live on this planet indefinitely under these circumstances, or even for the next several centuries, right? So, there's a real crisis in the idea of progress. By the time you get to the 1980s and 1990s, there's a new generation of technological utopians, and they start talking about innovation as progress.

Innovation, historically, as a word means progress without any concern for morality. Innovation in the 18th century sense is bad; innovation is novelty for its own sake. Just invent it, and who cares what the consequences are? Innovation, historically, is actually quite a dreadful and damning thing to accuse somebody of. If you're innovating, it is a very grave accusation.

So, by the 1980s, there's such a kind of reckless heedlessness in American businesses, and it's kind of the great mergers age. They kind of like a Wall Street grubby-ness, kind of like that Michael Douglas movie moment, right? Like the "greed is good" kind of thing. That innovation, this "innovation's Helix," innovation is fine because this is how this creative destruction—this junk term that gets recycled—is the engine of economic growth, and nothing else matters.

The public good, moral integrity, decency, goodness for more people, the health of the Republic—all that matters is, is it innovative? Is it, is it? And then by the 1990s, is it disruptively innovative? Which is even more radically innovative, but it disrupts existing models of business and disrupts existing industries. And so, you get this real embrace of heedlessness as an American value or as a corporate value, which is a complete abdication of the spirit of progress. Right? And it also, it's also designed—the whole ideology; it really is like a religion. It's very culty—the idea of disruptive innovation.