I agree completely about the downside and the ambiguity of secular progress. I've written a lot about that, so I'm no cheerleader for modernity. The modern humanistic faith is that we'll solve our problems, so our attempt to progress by building an artificial world will have been worth it. If it fails it will have been a noble effort. But the victims of this progress (including all the wild animals, as it were) will see it differently. They'll say modernity is monstrous, infantile, egoistic, and self-destructive. I'm ambivalent about this huge problem, and I try to give voice to both sides of it.

I could certainly be wrong here, but my understanding is that basic Buddhism is only instrumentally rational. Yes, there's an implicit goal, but Buddhists don't focus on affirming the rightness of that goal. They hold up the four noble truths and the eightfold path as the means of achieving a certain goal or end state (the end of unnecessary suffering), which can be achieved as a matter of causality. The reason for that, as I see it, is that evaluations are more tenuous from a standpoint of psychological unattachment.

I think that saying Buddhists have no goal is just being coy. I see how it might be counterproductive to think of it as having a goal, since that might presuppose egoism. But there is an implicit means-end relationship in Buddhism.

You say that Buddhism is a way of living with unpleasant realities without turning away from them. I wonder, though, whether that steadfastness is made easy because Buddhists learn not to care so much about those realities. Isn't there a tension between caring about something and being unattached to it? Or between having compassion for someone and thinking that that other person doesn't exist? The concept of compassion is inherently altruistic, which means it assumes at least a pair of persons.