Is the World Growing Better?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests that closed systems always grow more disordered over time. Left to themselves, things get messier: your room won’t clean itself. Yet many people take for granted that the world as a whole should become better over time. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Martin Luther King, Jr., a quote that may have preceded and certainly outlived him. But it turns out that this idea that the world improves over time may be a relatively new one (alternate link). Discuss with your team: is the world growing better? Be sure to check out the artist Will Crawford’s answer to this question in this 1909 painting. What would a painting with the same title look like today?

For most of history, people saw time as a wheel — seasons turning, ages repeating, a golden past to miss. The idea that the world steadily gets better is barely three centuries old.

Key concepts

Cyclical Versus Linear Time: Two ways to picture time. If time runs in a circle, the future repeats the past, so the wise thing is to do what the ancestors did. If time runs in a straight line, tomorrow can beat today, so trying to improve things becomes a duty instead of a risk.

Every work — at a glance

The Idea of Progress (concept)

The belief that humans can and should make the world better for future generations. It feels self-evident now, but it emerged only in the two centuries between Columbus and Newton — a genuinely modern invention we mistake for the natural shape of time.

+ 12 more works explained inside

What to know

01
Is the world growing better? Because progress is a belief rather than a law — physics, if anything, predicts decay — every improvement anyone can point to was made, not given; each took someone choosing to push against the drift. So if 'things get better' is only three centuries old, then the optimist and the doom-sayer are arguing over a faith, not a fact, and the sharper question is not 'is the world improving?' but 'what are we willing to do to bend it that way?'

Across subjects

Around 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod told history as a slow fall — a Golden Age, then Silver, Bronze, down to his own grim Iron Age. That paradise behind us, not

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

'Progress' itself has a history: we treat the upward arc as natural, but it is a modern idea someone invented — so it can be doubted or lost. One side cites better health, wealth and rights: the moral arc does bend toward justice. The other points to entropy, climate collapse and the last century's horrors.

Practice — a sample

HISA cycle is to "we have been here before" as a straight line is to —

A We are declining
B We move by chance
C We surpass ancestors
D We cannot know
E We have arrived

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