PROGRESS: REAL OR FANTASY?

Today I want you to engage you in a mental exercise: is progress a thing in reality or just some people's perception? "Reactionary Feminist" Mary Harrington in a video we posted earlier this week (link) expressed her conviction that progress is not real. I have posed the question myself may times and I have not yet been able to answer it one way or the other. The notion that the progress of time also means a improvement in the human condition, is a fairly young idea that stems from the Enlightenment era. For the most part of human existence there was little or no real development in the quality of life of man. We lived from bronze age to iron age, but most people had a back breaking life as farmers, artisans or peasants without any noticeable change. Technological developments were few and far between.

           
     The first time history recorded a break with that status quo was during the Renaissance when after the sack of Constantinople by the Latins, Greek artifacts and scholarly documents reached the West, resulting in a reappreciation of Greek pagan civilization.

Roman Catholicism was put on a more philosophical footing inspired by Thomas Aquinas who based his findings on Aristotelian principles.

In the Germanic region the first tentative effort to 'reform' Christianity was launched, calling itself Humanism. Many atheists and agnostics and not a few Christians today have adopted its principles unawares.

The invention of the printing press triggered the next development, Protestantism. Wars between states adopting either Catholicism or Protestantism kept Western civilization occupied for the next couple of centuries.

While that was going on, the Scientific Revolution put the crown on the mechanistic world view that would dominate thought in Europe and the rest of the West, henceforth.

Until Enlightenment thinkers started to question how we can know anything at all and relativism sowed the seed of doubt about the reality of reality itself.

Now I am not a historian and I may have missed earlier progressive efforts, but as far as I have been able to ascertain, Enlightenment thinkers Kant (link) and Hegel (link) were the first to describe how in their view moral human progress would develop.

In spiritual fantasies they describe how human progress was still very much rooted in some form of Christianity, culminating in Christ's Second Coming during which humanity would be reunited with God. 

Of course Hegel's follower, Karl Marx did away with all that. He also provided an eschatological fantasy, but this time culminating in World Communism.

After Marx we have reached the era of progressivism proper. It existed in Europe of course, but in the United States a specific period has been historically identified as The Progressive Era, roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s. 

Excerpted from the The Gilder Lehman Institute (link).:

By the turn of the century, American factories produced one-third of the world’s goods. Many negative consequences accompanied this change. Cities, polluted and overcrowded, became breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid and cholera. A new unskilled industrial laboring class, including a large pool of child labor, faced low wages, chronic unemployment, and on-the-job hazards. 

Progressives accepted the new modern order. They did not seek to turn back the clock, or to return to a world of smaller businesses and agrarian idealism. Nor, as a general rule, did they aim to dismantle big business. Rather, they wished to regulate industry and mitigate the effects of capitalism. To secure the public good, they looked to an expanded role for the government.

Theodore Roosevelt declared in a 1910 speech that the government should be "the steward of the public welfare." Progressivism was a reform movement that, through a shifting alliance of activists, eased the most devastating effects of industrial capitalism on individuals and communities. 

More on The Gilder Lehman Institute (link).

I was struck by a message on X the other day -- regrettably I did not bookmark it -- of an American talking about technological growth as if it is an inevitable law of nature, while at the same time warning that if growth would not be stimulated enough, the world would collapse.

There is a class of people for whom (technological) progress is the standard and the sole condition that sustains human life! 

Calling to mind the state of the human condition in which very little essentially changed for thousands of years without anyone noticing a force of nature called 'progress', how come humanity in this day and age seems to think we are doomed without it? 

There are countries in the world -- and the Orthodox Christian nation of Greece is one of them -- where the basic state of mind is still oriented on the static world view. Of course Greece is being swept up in the technological progress along with the rest of the world, and things do change.

But I have yet to meet the first Greek who believes the fate of humanity is interlinked with our technological progress. Which is a blessing when the rest of the world is basically going insane. The perception of the progress of time is of course highly dependent on your world view and the metaphysical nature of your beliefs.

And here's what I do know: technological progress does not go apace with moral and spiritual progress. If anything, it is as if inventions like the Internet and social media have made humanity progressively worse and markedly more stupid. While we also had to conclude that the existence of AI requires more awareness and mental acuity than ever before!

As said from the beginning, this is a mental exercise and it poses a question to which I have no answer. It is true we no longer torture enemies of the state to death. On the other hand, there are political prisoners like Tommy Robinson in the UK and the J6'ers in the US who have been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, without any 'human rights lawyers' batting much as an eyelid. 

Signing off to work on this year's Easter Concert.

Wishing all the readers a peaceful Holy Week and a blessed Resurrection.