The age of unintended consequences

12.10.2025

There are few words as emblematic of modernity as Fortschrittsglaube, the faith in progress. It carried humanity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like an invisible current, an unspoken conviction that moving forward is, by definition, moving toward the good. That goes from the steam engine engine to the microchip, progress was and is not only a sequence of inventions but a kind of moral direction. To believe in progress was to believe in ourselves, in the ability of reason, science, and will to repair what nature had left incomplete.

Yesterday I read an article about Fortschrittsglaube in the German news magazine Der Spiegel. It talked about Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who belong to this lineage and capture both the glory and the tragedy of that faith.

When Haber managed to draw nitrogen from the air in 1909, he seemed to have solved one of civilisation’s oldest fears — hunger.

Nature’s limited supply of fixed nitrogen had always constrained agriculture, and by the early twentieth century Europe’s fields could no longer sustain its growing population. The discovery promised to break that natural ceiling. Bosch turned it into an industrial process, and with it began the age of synthetic fertiliser. It is difficult to overstate its impact. Without it, perhaps half the current world population would not exist. But the same process that made food abundant also made explosives more efficient. The same chemist who fed millions also developed the chlorine gas that first rolled across the trenches of the First World War.

Haber is often portrayed as a man who gave life and death in equal measure, but perhaps he is less an exception than a prototype. He represented this mindset of progress, the belief that every improvement is right by itself, 

no matter its consequences. His work did not begin in malice or greed, but in the rational desire to overcome limitation. The catastrophe came later, almost automatically, as if built into the machinery of progress.

The industrial revolution had already set this pattern. Once the machine entered the factory, production became not only faster but limitless in principle. To produce was to master scarcity, and mastery was moral. Each advance erased the memory of its cost. The more efficient the system, the less visible its dependencies became: coal, workers, colonies, and rivers turned into conduits for waste.

The same pattern reappeared in the twentieth century, only now the raw material was not iron or coal but life itself — genes, atoms, data, energy. Each innovation promised emancipation, and each expanded the radius of control.

We are heirs to that momentum. Electric vehicles, for instance, were meant to correct the ecological errors of the internal combustion engine. Instead, they have become larger, heavier, and more resource-intensive than the machines they were meant to replace. Artificial intelligence, born from the dream of reproducing and amplifying human intelligence, threatens to absorb it by turning cognition into a service and judgement into automation. In both cases, the motive is not evil but improvement: cleaner, faster, smarter, more. The road to our epoch, which some call the Anthropocene (I would rather call it the Capitalocene), was and is paved with good intentions.

That’s why Fortschrittsglaube is not simply an ideology; it is a psychological infrastructure. It has shaped our perception of what it means to be human. The first tools, the first shelters, the first fires were all acts of preservation. Each invention sought to protect life, to make existence a little more secure. Over thousands of years, that protective instinct hardened into an obligation: we must improve or suffer inconvenience. Today, not innovating feels like failure, limitation like defeat, not growing like losing. Even when we know that our inventions destabilise the planet, we cannot stop inventing, because invention has become the way we justify our place in the world.

It is tempting to think the problem lies only in capitalism, in the creation of profit that turns every breakthrough into an industry. That is true, but only partly. The deeper layer has its roots in the Enlightenment, in the belief that human reason can and must complete the work of nature. Once that belief fused with industrial economy, progress became both metaphysics and material system, faith embedded in machines. To doubt it is to doubt civilisation itself.

The twentieth century should have cured us of this faith. It gave us chemistry that poisoned cities, physics that vaporised them, and biology that turned into eugenics. Yet each disaster produced its own wave of innovation, another round of salvation. When technology destroys, we respond with more technology, convinced that only a better version of the same logic can undo the harm. We build carbon capture to fix emissions, algorithms to detect algorithmic bias, synthetic food to repair the soil that synthetic fertiliser destroyed. The pattern repeats because it is cultural, not technical. We no longer build tools to solve problems; it looks more like we create problems to justify tools.

What began as a liberation from nature has become a dependency on intervention. The earth’s ecosystems now rely on continuous technological correction just to remain habitable. We are like patients who cannot stop taking the medicine that caused the illness, because withdrawal would be fatal. The more we innovate, the more fragile the system becomes, and the more innovation it demands. The trap is elegant and complete.

None of this means that progress itself must be abandoned. The human impulse to invent is inseparable from curiosity, compassion, even love. To imagine another way of living is a creative act. What we have lost is not innovation but proportion — the ability to see invention as one gesture among others, not as destiny. When the chemists of the early twentieth century looked at their experiments, they saw the future as something to be made. Today, the future feels more like a debt, something we owe to the damage already done.

Perhaps the task now is not to dismantle Fortschrittsglaube but to outgrow it, to move from faith to awareness. Progress as belief has run its course; progress as reflection might still be possible. This would mean reclaiming the capacity to stop, to consider, to refuse the automatic equation between change and improvement. It would mean designing for sufficiency rather than growth, for resilience rather than speed.

The problem of our age is that to preserve the achievements of progress, we may need to abandon the religion of progress itself. The nitrogen in our fields, the plastics in our oceans, the data in our clouds are all residues of a century’s faith that every question has a technical answer. What if the next step in evolution were not another invention, but the recognition that the world does not need constant solutions that feed our need for convenience?

History may judge Haber less for his invention than for what it revealed: that the line between nourishment and destruction, between ingenuity and catastrophe, runs through the very structure of our belief in progress. To understand that is not to condemn him, or ourselves, but to see clearly the world that faith has built and to decide whether we wish to keep living inside it.