These are fearful times. The fall in the birth rate across the West is testimony to a growing pessimism about the future; the menaces that together seem to make the good life unattainable range from fear that science is running amok to terrorism and climate change. Live for today and don't have children is a rallying cry finding more adherents.The world is not a pleasant place and seems to be getting less pleasant fast. Above all else, we seem powerless to control and shape these forces; they exist as ominous influences that can no longer be contained.In this sense, the very idea of progress is now contested. No contemporary historians would trace British history, Macaulay-like, as an account of how democracy, the rule of law and the extension of British values have steadily increased their influence. We have no Sidney and Beatrice Webb dedicated to the possibility of social improvement. We have no Nye Bevan who can convince us that political action can shape the world.There is no Keynes to guide our economic thinking. There are no inventors or scientists so celebrated that when they die, London's streets would throng with mourners, as they did for Brunel and Stephenson in the nineteenth century.  Instead, there is a rise in credulity accompanied by an insistence that we must not meddle with natural verities. Religious fundamentalism, in the Christian and Islamic worlds alike, insists that religious texts should be interpreted literally. Christian creationists, arguing that God and not natural selection created the world, find a market as ready for their views as their counterparts in Islam.There is a small industry attacking the very idea of scientific method; for it, there is no objective material reality and the search to discover, explain and master the natural world has reached the ethical and moral limits. From now on, warn writers such as Francis Fukuyama, science is taking us into territory where it sets up men as gods able to manipulate the very marrow of humanity.This veneration of nature and suspicion of human agency makes conservatives of Right and Left alike. Political activism, even when allegedly radical, is imbued with a conservative streak. What is held out as the desirable norm is some Elysian state of nature in which there are no GM crops, only sustainable energy use, science is caged and communities are self-sustaining, trading as little as possible with the outside world. Prince Charles and the Greens make common purpose.This seeps into how we feel about social experimentation generally. New ways of teaching, of parenting, of living with other races are frowned on. We must stick to natural rules. David Goodhart, a liberal intellectual, wins an astonishing number of column inches arguing that as we prefer to associate with our own, there is a necessary and inevitable trade-off between solidarity and diversity.When the Left criticises Blair and New Labour for their lack of radicalism and their caution, it rarely places the criticism in this wider context. A progressive party can't flourish in an environment where the currents feeding progressivism are in retreat. The character of politics has a symbiotic relationship with the society of which it is part. If the cultural, intellectual and social forces that underpin progressive politics are themselves challenged, even the most inspired political leadership will only change matters at the margin. It's a fair complaint that New Labour attempts that only fitfully, but let's put the complaint into context.Blair and Brown are more conscious of this missing component of the progressive project than most commentators concede and Brown, particularly, thinks deeply about how to resurrect some confidence in the idea of progress. Which is why his breakfast meeting last week with 30 leaders of Britain's scientific community was of more importance than just to British science. Brown, and Blair for that matter, not only see British scientists as a core part of the New Labour progressive coalition, they see a revival of science and recovery of its self-belief as a handmaiden for advancing the economy and the idea of progress.Brown committed to a 10-year build up of investment in Britain's science infrastructure which will be the centrepiece of this summer's comprehensive spending review. He wants the share of GDP devoted to scientific research to rise towards the top of the international league table. He wants more collaboration between universities and business; more scientists and more science taught in schools, reversing the alarming decline in scientific GCSE and A-levels over the last 15 years.Moreover, the Government is prepared to take risks to make researchers feel that Britain is science-friendly; it countenances stem-cell research, wants to agree wider trials with GM food and will have no truck with the anti-vivisection movement. More investment is being accompanied by a cultural commitment to science; here, the Government shows a leadership that eludes it over Europe and the euro or the case for higher taxation.Which is all to the good, but I fear it underestimates the scale of the task. In the nineteenth century and for a good part of the twentieth, science was underpinned by a widespread understanding that it underwrote progress and prosperity alike. The shrinking of Britain's manufacturing base means that the number of sizable science-based companies hardly extends beyond aerospace and pharmaceuticals.  Today's prosperity is built on a credit-backed consumer boom and a service-sector economy that push forward independently of the state of science. In the US, some of the most dynamic parts of the country are the new 'ideopolises', where science-based universities spearhead the growth of new industries; apart from Cambridge, there are no British ideopolises, although Manchester has ambitions.But we need not just companies and parts of Britain which we can hold up as exemplars of the prosperity science can bring. We need a wider cultural acceptance that where science is currently taking us - understanding the building blocks on which life is constructed - is not terrifying but exhilarating.While scientific method does work to push back the frontiers of knowledge, it is also true that we need ever more robust mechanisms to discuss its implications and ensure that the benefits are universally shared and ethical risks universally guarded against.Science, paradoxically, has always flowered best when society has a strong public realm which allows it to have confidence that science ultimately can be made to serve us rather than be used against us - the fear of those who want to ban stem-cell research, cloning and GM foods.  Today's public realm is shrivelled and under siege; it, too, needs to be shored up. To revive the idea of progress is to revive the public realm that allows us to shape the world, rather than be shaped by it. New Labour is undertaking a proper fight, but it needs to think much bigger if it wants to win it.