It is important to keep in mind that the progress hoped for is not a transformation of human nature. We can assume that people’s innate capacities and dispositions haven’t changed significantly in the course of recorded history, nor will they change in the next millennium or two. Evolution works more slowly than that. The question concerns cultural progress.

Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen.

Experience shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time. One notable piece of evidence is the general success of Kant’s prediction, made in 1795, that democracies would not go to war with one another.

The reflective grounds for hope come from the moral sense itself. Most human beings would like to find standards for individual conduct and social institutions that reasonable persons could agree on. Although they now disagree, they are prepared to argue with one another in an effort to resolve those disagreements. Gray thinks the pursuit of convergence on standards is a delusion, kept alive in the face of repeated failure by cognitive dissonance. But his own pessimism seems more willful than the hope he condemns.

It is true that we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them to be good? Gray is right that some of the attempted solutions to this problem have been catastrophic. But there have also been great advances. The common desire for justice makes it unreasonable to abandon the search or the social and political experiments, now extending to international institutions, that give it concrete form.

Gray thinks the belief in progress is fueled by humanists’ worship of “a divinized version of themselves.” To replace it he offers contemplation: “Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be.” Though he distinguishes this from the ideal of mystical transcendence toward a higher order of being, it, too, seems more like a form of escape than a form of realism. Hope is a virtue, and we should not give it up so easily.