One of the fundamental beliefs of modernity is the belief in progress. According to modernity, all manners of things can undergo an endless progression of expansion, improvement, and growth. Knowledge, technology, the economy, social systems, and our selves are all capable of a never-ending process of improvement. Such a notion is, however, a culturally-conditioned belief and not a given fact. In most societies in the world for the vast majority of human history, people believed that the world underwent cycles of growth and decay or that it held to a tenuous equilibrium capable of catastrophic disruption. Things might improve, but usually only through dramatic divine intervention in apocalyptic or eschatological ways. Such beliefs accorded with human experience in which life was fragile and unlikely to improve dramatically.

It was only with the advent of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that belief in unlimited progress became wide-spread. This belief in progress certainly has much to recommend it, as it is responsible for (and caused by) the dramatic increase in life expectancy and standard of living that the human race has experienced over the past several centuries. Nevertheless, there are also darker sides to the belief in progress. I would like to point out two such downsides today: unsustainability and the stigmatization of non-growth.

Some forms of progress have no inherent limits. Is there a limit to how good of a person I can be or how much I can love God and neighbors? No. So, pursuit of sanctification is an enterprise that is probably a sustainable one. For many other processes, though, there are real limits to how much we can achieve. Finite resources, the laws of physics, and other forces mean that some forms of progress cannot go on forever. Yet modernity’s myth of progress proclaims that they can, setting up the conditions for dramatic crashes between our expectations and way of living and these limits.

I find the myth of progress as it is incorporated into capitalism to be the most potentially tragic instance of this problem. Capitalism depends upon growth. The economy must grow (at something like 3% annually) and individual corporations must grow (usually at much more than 3% annually) or bad things happen: unemployment, price inflation, takeovers, lack of investment, etc. To grow, capitalism demands more workers, more resources, and more markets. Yet to have more workers, there must be more people. More people and the demand for more resources eventually bump up against very real limitations on the amount of resources in our world. There’s not only a finite amount of fossil fuels, but also of many important minerals, to say nothing about the question of food production. There are also a finite number of markets in the world. Once Coke has entered all of the countries of the world and displaced their traditional beverages, where then will its growth come from? We need to question the myth of progress and instead develop economic and social models that seek sustainability and not endless growth lest we set ourselves up for disaster.

The other problem with the myth of progress is that we stigmatize instances in which we do not see progress occurring. Humans often think in binaries, so if you are not growing, then you are declining. If you’re not going forward, then you’re going back. Since progress is the goal (and an achievable goal for all in all manner of areas), anything but great progress is seen as great failure. Instead of looking at decline and decay as part of natural processes, we are convinced that they only occur as the result of great failures (moral, intellectual, volitional, etc.) on the part of those involved. This even spills over into how we treat the aged, sick, and dying in American culture. We shunt them away from sight, for they have failed to keep progressing, and we do anything we can to avoid being like them. Yet age, sickness, and death are all instances in which decline is natural and perpetual youth and life are an illusion. Thus, we stigmatize those who are involved in declining enterprises, be they companies, churches, social movements, or even people’s bodies. While I’m not going to say that decline is a good or even necessarily a neutral thing in all cases, I think it’s in many cases at least less of a bad thing than we think it is. Only by learning to recognize and selectively reject the myth of progress can we come to have a more human and compassion attitude toward those who are not progressing.