"As a consequence, progress has come to mean simply more power, more profit, more productivity, more paper prosperity, all of which are convertible into standards concerned only with size or magnitude rather than quality or excellence"
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“Progress” gets gutted here, reduced to a spreadsheet word that flatters whoever controls the ledger. Campbell’s sentence works because it performs the very inflation it condemns: the drumbeat repetition of “more power, more profit, more productivity” mimics the hypnotic slogans of growth politics, where accumulation passes for achievement. By the time we reach “paper prosperity,” the critique sharpens. This isn’t just wealth; it’s the kind that can be printed, reported, spun, and counted - prosperity as optics, not lived security.
The key move is his attack on convertibility. If every human outcome can be translated into “standards concerned only with size or magnitude,” then meaning itself becomes a currency exchange. Education becomes test scores, healthcare becomes throughput, culture becomes box office, citizenship becomes GDP contribution. That’s the subtext: measurement doesn’t merely describe reality; it reorganizes priorities, rewarding what scales and punishing what matters but resists quantification (trust, dignity, craft, ecological stability, beauty).
As a politician, Campbell is also staking a claim against technocratic consensus. He’s signaling suspicion toward the bipartisan religion of efficiency - the idea that if numbers rise, the public good must be advancing. The phrase “quality or excellence” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a moral counter-metric. He’s arguing that progress without judgment is just motion, and motion without ends is easy to sell to voters, donors, and bureaucracies alike. The warning lands because it targets a modern temptation: letting the measurable replace the meaningful, then calling the substitution “progress.”
The key move is his attack on convertibility. If every human outcome can be translated into “standards concerned only with size or magnitude,” then meaning itself becomes a currency exchange. Education becomes test scores, healthcare becomes throughput, culture becomes box office, citizenship becomes GDP contribution. That’s the subtext: measurement doesn’t merely describe reality; it reorganizes priorities, rewarding what scales and punishing what matters but resists quantification (trust, dignity, craft, ecological stability, beauty).
As a politician, Campbell is also staking a claim against technocratic consensus. He’s signaling suspicion toward the bipartisan religion of efficiency - the idea that if numbers rise, the public good must be advancing. The phrase “quality or excellence” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a moral counter-metric. He’s arguing that progress without judgment is just motion, and motion without ends is easy to sell to voters, donors, and bureaucracies alike. The warning lands because it targets a modern temptation: letting the measurable replace the meaningful, then calling the substitution “progress.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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