There Is No Such Thing as ‘Progress’

September 20, 2012

Humans, being creatures that seemingly can’t live without meaning, [1] have always invented for themselves mythologies [2] that serve to provide the sort of meanings that the world doesn’t provide them gratuit. ‘Progress’ is just such a myth, operative in the political sphere that, like many myths, is taken to be literally true and which informs the sense of purpose, direction, and self of those who cling to it. However, it is ultimately a false mythology – there simply is no such thing as ‘Progress’ – and its mistakenly being taken for gospel truth is something that strikes me as potentially dangerous [3]. So on this basis [4] I have decided to provide an argument why there is and never has been Progress or Progressives.

[NB: I am not making any arguments about the validity or value of those political parties, policies, or goals that are commonly identified as being ‘Progressive’. This is not an argument against left-wing politics.]

Progress is an inherently teleological concept, a goal-oriented one. Consider that what we commonly mean when we say we are making progress is that we are moving closer towards achieving some goal, destination, or desired state, whether that is reaching a desired level of physical fitness, getting closer to our destination on a road trip, or satisfying graduation requirements in our schooling. The teleological aspect is no less true for, is in fact central to, the myth of Progress – that is, that we as a society are traversing the distance between where we are and some more (or ultimately) moral or desirable social/political order. The trouble for the myth of Progress comes from how we determine that there is such a goal and in what it consists.

There are two seemingly obvious ways of going about doing so. The first is to employ some sort of philosophical realism. One could argue that Progress is possible because there is an objective moral order and Progress occurs whenever we (re)structure society and its laws to better conform to this moral order. Similarly, one could make the case that there is an ideal (Platonic) Form of society and Progressiveness is measured by how closely our own society approximates this ideal. The weakness of such arguments is, of course, that it is impossible to demonstrate that they are true. If there really is an objective moral order, why is it so easily violated unlike, say, the law of gravity? If there is only one true morality, what are we to make of moral disagreement between individuals and societies (more on this below)? Plainly, such justifications are only convincing to those who are already on-side and, even then, only if one buys into the brand of realism on offer.

In light of the deficiencies of the above, the second route is to justify the myth of Progress on the basis of historical experience. The narrative is (crudely) as follows:

In the past people were either ignorant, deluded, or evil and so were their societies. Fortunately, history demonstrates that people and society have been growing in wisdom, justice, compassion, and morality and consequently human life has been improving across the millennia. There remains much work to be done but the trend is unmistakable – future generations of humanity will be even more compassionate, wise, and moral than our own and it is our duty (and privilege) to facilitate this process.

Here, Progress comes to be seen as something of a law of history, the goal and its contents revealed as and through an inexorable marching forward and unfolding of “wisdom, justice, compassion, and morality.” But there are two important reasons to reject this account of Progress.

One is that history is, of course, strongly contingent. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War gives us good reason to think that, had cooler heads prevailed, Athens’ devastating war with Sparta might have been avoided or that, had the plague not routed Athens’ population, it might have ended very differently. And looking to recent history, there is no reason to believe that, had Hitler’s inner circle been better strategic thinkers, Nazi Germany should not have been master of Europe to this day.

The other reason for rejecting this account of Progress is a corollary of the first. Simply put, whatever Progress we see in the workings-out of history only appears to be such because of our particular historically embedded vantage point. Our views on democracy, justice, racism, sexism, etc. by which we judge the historical process are the products of that selfsame historical process! If one is a modern, liberal democrat, then of course history looks like Progress because it is that history that engendered one’s modern, liberal democratic values. It is useful to think of it in this way: placing rocks one on top of the other only builds a pyramid if one is actively following a blueprint, otherwise it’s just a heap of rocks. Historical processes build heaps, not pyramids.

Note also that this means that to the medieval Church the early history of Christianity looked like Progress and that to radical Islamists the growing adoption of the burqa and niqab across historical time look like Progress. If historical processes can offer up different value-sets from which one can make judgements about history, then there can be no one historical trend that counts as Progress unless it leads to the end-of-history: a static, global society containing a universally assented to morality. But since, as I have suggested, history is contingent, the historical process resulting in such a society is no more goal-directed than a rudderless ship at sea – wherever it washes up, there the winds have blown it. Moreover, even were the end-of-history actually possible (a questionable proposition), why should we conclude that its values are therefore better than our own? Most large-scale societies throughout human history have more-or-less taken the view that democracy is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps they are right – maybe the end-of-history will be governed by an eternal monarchy (or something yet undreamt of). If we are to insist that it is our values that represent Progress, then we will have to do so on grounds other that those of historical necessity – that is, retreat to realism (with all its problems) or adopt a sort of values-chauvinism.

‘Progress’ is a flawed concept. This isn’t to say that we can’t make progress toward our individual or collective goals, only that we must not assume that our goals have the imprimatur of reality.

Endnotes:

[1] Nor, frequently, with meaning, e.g.: Jonestown, suicide-bombings, martyrdom.

[2] The meaning of which I must define myself since the Wikipedia article is a holy mess of missing the forest for the trees (no concise definitions for this topic). Myth, in the context of this piece, does not carry the popular definition of ‘story that is untrue’ but instead means ‘story that provides meaningful context for real-world happenings, whether or not that story itself is factually true’. By this definition all of the death and resurrection of Christ, the history of the American or French Revolutions, the self-made man, and “Yes, we can!” are equally mythological.

[3] I don’t believe that I need to elaborate too much upon why that might be (that would be a whole other discussion), but I can spare a couple of words here. The quick-and-dirty is this – when people believe that they are on the side of the inevitable march of history/good/God/whatever, it tends to make them self-righteous at best (very annoying) and, at worst, complete, raging assholes willing to railroad others to implement their vision. Examples: Nazis, Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, Jacobins, Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, anti-Zionists, medieval Roman Catholicism, Puritanism, residential schools, Richard Dawkins, the Black Panther Party, etc.

[4] And, not to mention, also on the basis that false beliefs deserve to be challenged, whatever they are – accurate knowledge of reality counts as a moral good, in my eyes.