Progress

 By Lasch

A Secular Religion? 

THe idea of progress, according to a widely accepted interpretation, represents a secularized version of the Christian belief in providence. The ancient world, we are told, entertained a cyclical view of history, whereas Christianity gave it a clearly defined direction, from the fall of man to his ultimate redemption. “It is no accident,” Carl Becker wrote in 1921, “that the belief in Progress and a concern for ‘posterity’ waxed in proportion as the belief in Providence and a concern for a future life waned. The former belief-illusion if you prefer-is man’s compensation for the loss of the latter.” Thanks to its Christian background, the Western world found it easy to imagine history as a “process generally moving upwards by a series of majestic stages,” as Ernest Lee Tuveson explained. For twentieth-century historians, skeptical about the value of religion in any form, an understanding of the Christian origins of progressive ideology reveals the “radical inconsistency” at its core, in Becker’s words, the untenable assumption of historical “finality.” Almost everyone now agrees that progress-in its utopian form at least-is a “‘superstition” that is ‘nearly worn out,” as Dean William Ralph Inge put it in 1920; that we can now appreciate its religious roots largely because “the idea has begun to lose its hold on the mind of society,” as Christopher Dawson pointed out a few years later; and that the hope of some final state of earthly perfection, in short, is the ‘‘deadest of dead ideas,” as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1932-“‘the one notion that has been thoroughly blasted by the facts of twentieth-century experience.” 

Utopian visions of the future were definitively discredited by their association with the totalitarian movements that came to power in the thirties. Belief in a secular millennium, rooted in the Christian tradition, seemed to have furnished modern barbarism with much of its spiritual energy. “The more carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm during the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements,” wrote Norman Cohn, “the more remarkable the similarities appear.” Fascists and communists replaced supernatural explanations of history with secular explanations, but they clung to the apocalyptic fantasy that a final, decisive struggle would establish absolute justice and perfect contentment. “What had once been demanded by ‘the will of God’ was now demanded by ‘the purposes of History.’ ” 

The collapse of utopia made it clear that a belief in progress could be salvaged-and the same calamities that discredited utopian hopes seemed to make it all the more important to salvage some form of hope-only by disavowing its perfectionist overtones.* “The world today believes in progress,” Sidney Pollard flatly declared in 1986, because “‘the only possible alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair.” Faith in progress could no longer rest on a vision of human perfection, but a more modest conception of progress was not only possible but essential to the “survival” of human society, as E. H. Carr put it in 1963. Since “some such conception” alone could “‘persuade the present generation to make sacrifices for future generations,” Carr proposed a more thoroughly secularized doctrine of “unlimited progress.” Without postulating an end to history, he argued, men and women could still look forward to improvements “subject to no limits that we can... envisage, towards goals which can be defined only as we advance towards them.” Only intellectuals questioned the reality of progress. The condition of the masses had undeniably improved. The “mere accumulation of resources,” to be sure, was not enough to justify a belief in progress, unless it brought “increased technical and social knowledge, . . . increased mastery of man’s environment.” But progress in this broader sense, Carr maintained, could still not be ruled out. 

His observations exemplify the dominant view of the matter. If “the belief in progress has exhibited remarkable toughness in twentieth-century America,” as Clarke Chambers noted in 1958, it is because liberals and socialists have divorced it from the “‘heavenly city of the eighteenthcentury philosophers,” tied it to the cause of democracy and abundance, and brought it down to earth. No one claims any more that progress is inevitable or that it will culminate in some state of final perfection. No one denies that moral improvement often fails to keep pace with material improvement. But the general rise in living standards 1s obviously desirable in itself. The “average length of life has been steadily extended,” Charles Frankel wrote some time ago, illiteracy “progressively eliminated,” work made less back-breaking, leisure time increased, and the “basic conditions of human life,” in short, “changed for the better” and “changed more radically in the last hundred and fifty years than in all history before that time.”* The fact of technological progress simply cannot be denied, according to Barrington Moore, and it is “accompanied by changes in social structure” that provide the “prerequisites of freedom.” Material comfort does not assure a good life, but a good life is impossible without it. Material improvements, moreover, can be taken as evidence of a refusal to tolerate conditions formerly taken for granted-poverty, hunger, epidemic disease, inequality, racial bigotry. “Despite the difficulty of balancing gains and losses,” Morris Ginsberg argued in 1953, humanitarian sentiment “is gaining in strength. ... In no previous age has so much been done to relieve suffering, and to abolish poverty, disease and ignorance in all parts of the world.” A. J. Ayer likewise sees the “average man” as “more humane, more pacific and more concerned with social justice than he was a century ago.” 

Progress is the “working faith of our civilization,” wrote Christopher Dawson in 1929. Later writers agree. ‘“‘No single idea has been more important in Western civilization,” Robert Nisbet argues. “‘. .. This idea has done more good over a twenty-five-hundred-year period .. . and given more strength to human hope... than any other single idea in Western history.”* J. H. Plumb joins Nisbet in upholding the idea of progress as a “great human truth.” Warren Wagar condemns the “‘neo-Augustinian theologians, the obscurantists, and all the pious and aesthetic and mystical refugees” who question man’s ability to prevail. A. J. P. Taylor, along with Wagar and Carr, dismisses cultural pessimism as the vice of disgruntled intellectuals. Talk about the decline of civilization, Taylor says, means “only that university professors used to have domestic servants and now do their own washing-up.”