Progress is defined as movement forward, toward some goal deemed to be good. It connotes the steady development or gradual improvement of a civilization. While many Americans take the idea and reality of progress for granted, there are, nevertheless, profound difficulties attending the concept.
In the first place, what is “movement forward”? Whose criteria will be enlisted to determine whether a society is progressing or regressing? Unavoidably the question of progress involves deeper questions concerning the nature of human existence and the existence of human nature. If the ultimate goal of human beings is to find and remain in a state of happiness, by what means can that state be achieved? Answers to this question differ markedly. For traditionalist conservatives, the recovery of the sacred may be reckoned as true forward movement; for libertarians, the recovery of the unregulated marketplace.
This leads to a second difficulty, which involves the spheres of life in which true progress is possible. Since antiquity, most observers of the human condition have recognized that progress is possible in science, technology, and the professions. If or when progress occurs in a society’s laws and institutions is more debatable and depends on the context and consequences of change over time. Whether significant forward movement takes place in literature and the fine arts is dubious. And whether advancement is possible in the realm of human nature and morality is, for most conservatives, altogether doubtful. In fact, since antiquity, technological progress among a people has been seen as perfectly compatible with moral regress.
A third difficulty arises out of decades of historiographic debate. Scholars are not agreed as to when the idea of progress was invented. It was once popular to assert, after J. B. Bury’s landmark study The Idea of Progress (1920), that the notion was not invented before the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. That opinion has been vigorously challenged by Ludwig Edelstein, E. R. Dodds, and others who believe that the conception was at least imperfectly known to the ancient Greeks.
The conservative historian and sociologist Robert Nisbet argues in his History of the Idea of Progress (1980) not only that the notion originated in ancient Greece but that it “subsequently achieved its fullest expression in [the] Christian philosophy of history.” In their writings church fathers such as Tertullian, Eusebius, and St. Augustine combined the Greco-Roman appreciation for cultural advancement with the Jewish conception of sacred history to develop the notion of material and moral progress for all mankind. Salvation history was for them a drama that gradually unfolds in time and reveals direction and purpose. This notion of progress, asserts Nisbet, would exert a powerful influence on Western thinking long after the decline of the Middle Ages, not only in believers such as Bodin, but in non-believers such as Condorcet. The latter’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795, trans. 1955), composed ironically when he was anticipating his execution by French revolutionaries, is widely considered to be the first major statement of modern secular progress.
Another enduring influence from the Judeo-Christian heritage issued from the Apocalypse of St. John of Patmos and shaped the thought of medieval millenarians like Joachim of Fiore, who developed a progressive, three-stage view of human history that culminated in the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. The historian Stephen Tonsor points out that secularized versions of millenarianism persist in modern utopian thought of all stripes, especially Marxian.
It would thus be a mistake to overlook the intellectual link between early Christian conceptions of progress and their modern secular counterparts. Both entail historical necessity whereby either supernatural Providence or a natural law of progress effects changes in human affairs and directs the course of human development.
Faith in secular progress gained converts in the milieu of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, gathered momentum during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, then peaked in the heyday of the Victorian Age, the early decades of which historians have dubbed the “Age of Progress.” During the nineteenth century there was widespread confidence in America and Britain that the methods of science, applied to all areas of life, would usher in an epoch of unending material, social, and moral improvement. The doctrine of progress was variously expressed in the rhetoric of classical liberalism (with its emphasis on the providence of the free market), in the rhetoric of statist liberalism (with its emphasis on political planning and social welfare), and in the rhetoric of socialism (with its emphasis on state control of the means of production).
During the closing decade of the nineteenth century, however, a darker mood shrouded Europe and la belle époque was transformed, in some minds, into the fin de siècle. This, followed by two world wars, vitiated the idea or progress but did not “kill” it, as is sometimes asserted. In the twentieth century the idea continued to be championed in the works of thinkers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Friedrich von Hayek, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. But its diminution over the past decades is undeniable and is causally linked, in Nisbet’s judgment, to the “general weakening of the Christian foundations of Western culture.” Nisbet asserts that
the idea was, in short, born of religion in the classical world, sustained by religion from the third century on, and now threatens to die from the loss of religious sustenance. For no century in Western history has proved to be as non-religious, irreligious, and anti-religious in its major currents of philosophy, art, literature, and science as was the twentieth. Faith in progress cannot long last when its historical foundations have weakened or dissolved.
Recovery of the idea, which in Nisbet’s view is “one of the West’s oldest and most fertile ideas,” will only occur when intellectual leaders recover the premises necessary for the notion of progress to flourish.
In the course of American history, the right’s view toward the idea and reality of progress has been complex and admits of no easy generalizations. Historically Puritans, Jeffersonians, classical liberals, and social Darwinists have all believed in and championed some form of progress, as have some modern conservative scholars like Nisbet. Reactionaries, Catholic traditionalists, and Burkean conservatives, on the other hand, tend to repudiate the very idea of progress if it implies that man’s nature can be improved or that society can be significantly perfected. John Lukacs has warned that while human conditions change, human nature never does. In his autobiography Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), Lukacs strikes a “reactionary” posture toward progress with which many conservatives would agree: The reactionary
knows, and believes in, the existence of sin and in the immutable essence of human nature. He does not always oppose change, and he does not altogether deny progress: what he denies is the immutable idea of immutable progress: the idea that we are capable not only of improving our material conditions but our very nature, including our mental and spiritual nature. We must never deny the potentiality of possible improvements of the human condition. But we must be aware—especially at this time, near the end of the twentieth century—of the need to think about what progress means.
Among cultural critics one of the most provocative theories of the late twentieth century—which some have mistaken for an unqualified apology for progress—has come from Francis Fukuyama. In a much discussed 1989 article in the National Interest, Fukuyama gave new life to an old theme, the end of history, which he defined as “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Based on Alexandre Kojeve’s and G. W. F. Hegel’s idealistic view of history, Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis asserts that the triumph of Western liberalism in the realm of idea and consciousness is now virtually complete. In the twentieth century, the collapse first of fascism in Germany and Italy and of communism in China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe have left the ideological field empty of any significant competition. With the possible exception of the Islamic Revolution, there are no fundamental ideological contradictions (of the thesis–antithesis sort) in the modern world. So, Fukuyama states,
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War . . . but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. . . . The victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.
It is easy to exaggerate Fukuyama’s views—and detractors have done so. First, despite some critics’ assertions to the contrary, the theory is not apocalyptic: Fukuyama sees neither the terrible Dies Irae at the end of time nor the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth: At the “end of history” human nature will not have changed. Second, “at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.” Third, Fukuyama is hardly unambivalent about the ramifications of his thesis; he writes that
The end of history will be a very sad time. . . . The worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. . . . Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.
It is worth noting that many conservatives question whether the triumph of the idea of bourgeois liberal democracy really constitutes “the end of history” as Fukuyama defines it. They question, further, whether this triumph would necessarily represent progress. For many on the right, the envisaged stasis is too reminiscent of totalitarianism, of the world of Orwell’s Big Brother, of Huxley’s Mustapha Mond, to hold great appeal. More to the point, because of human freedom, history and life are too full of the unexpected to condescend to our forecasts. Hegelian schemes may be aesthetically, logically, or pedagogically satisfying—but that does not make them true. As J. B. Bury wrote in his landmark study of the subject, belief in the true progress of humanity is, in the end, “an act of faith.”
Further Reading
Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion
E. R. Dodds, “Progress in Classical Antiquity,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Morris Ginsberg, “Progress in the Modern Era,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas
Gertrude Himmelfarb, “History and the Idea of Progress,” in The New History and the Old
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
W. Warren Wagar, Good Tidings: The Belief in Progress from Darwin to Marcuse
This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, pp. 676–679.
