A notion of "bare progress" is the elephant in the room. Progress is a vector. It has magnitude and direction. People talk of moving "forward or back", but science also has a steering wheel.
> and the Americans and Chinese will make us adopt their ways.
This very notion of "progress" as a totalitarian force is also dangerous. The boot is on the other foot from 80 years ago. When Europe was starting a 1000 year technological master-race, more measured minds had to extinguish that fire. I see many similarities today - people seeing "progress" simply as dominance.
I liked the brain-dump in TFA, but I think it's over-complex and too tied to a contemporary interpretation of capital investment.
We've been spooging away our talent for generations here. Look at how we treated Turing. We mismanage or sell-off everything cool we invent.
What Britain still suffers from is class disloyalty. We still have a strong but invisible class system which is now international financiers. Those sorts "float above" the ordinary economy, they are disconnected from UK interests and don't give a toss about engineering, science, knowledge, education...
A lot of the measured minds were saying eugenics was a good idea. It took the horror of seeing experiments and concentration camps to make it so deeply unfashionable the idea couldn't even survive in academia.
But look at this post made here a couple of days ago [0]. It's absolutely back in fashion. I think technofascism really is a thing now - you can feel certain people getting quite giddy with thoughts of power.
Eugenics was the same. It was a Progressive way of thinking, if I remember correctly.