Only Progress Is Sustainable

Definition

Deutsch argues that "sustainability," in the sense of preserving a stable way of life against change, is not a safety strategy but the mechanism by which static societies eventually fail: since problems are inevitable, a system that refuses to change accumulates unaddressed problems until one becomes fatal. He distinguishes two senses of "sustain" — providing for people's needs, versus preventing things from changing — and argues these are nearly opposite: solving a real problem (curing a disease, improving farming) is inherently unsustainable, because it changes the population and its needs, requiring further solutions in turn. The only genuinely sustainable strategy is continuous problem-solving itself, not any particular fixed arrangement.

In the Book

The chapter opens with dueling documentary readings of Easter Island's statues: Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man treats them as evidence of a static, failed civilization that "never took the first step" toward rational, cumulative knowledge, while David Attenborough's later series uses the same island as a "Spaceship Earth" warning — a miniature world with "ample resources" destroyed by the islanders' unsustainable behavior. Deutsch sides with Bronowski and argues the "resource management" framing explains nothing (comparing it to explaining Julius Caesar's death as "imprudent iron management"). He recounts his own encounters with 1970s prophecy — Paul Ehrlich's lecture predicting imminent mass starvation from overpopulation, and a graduate student's argument that colour television was doomed because of finite europium reserves — both refuted when new knowledge (increased food production; liquid-crystal displays needing no europium) made the "fixed resource" framing moot. He also rebuts Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel thesis that geography (e.g., the unavailability of llamas outside the Andes) is the "ultimate explanation" of differential civilizational success, arguing that ideas, not biogeography, determine which resources ever become resources at all.

Why It Matters

This reframes "sustainability" as a category error whenever it means freezing a current arrangement rather than maintaining the capacity to keep solving problems. It applies directly to any domain where resource-limit or equilibrium framing is used to argue against growth or change — climate policy, population, technology, institutional design — by asking not "how do we preserve the current state" but "how do we preserve and grow the problem-solving capacity that will be needed for the next problem," which by definition cannot be foreseen in detail.