Whither Progress?: Is Progress an Insupportable Myth

Use this philosophy forum to discuss and debate general philosophy topics that don't fit into one of the other categories.

This forum is NOT for factual, informational or scientific questions about philosophy (e.g. "What year was Socrates born?"). Those kind of questions can be asked in the off-topic section.
Post Reply
User avatar
Michael James
New Trial Member
Posts: 1
Joined: March 7th, 2017, 10:56 am

Whither Progress?: Is Progress an Insupportable Myth

Post by Michael James »

[Note: This post was becoming too long, so I didn't finish writing it. I can complete it in another one or two parts, if someone wants me to.]


Greetings,


This is my first post to Online Philosophy Club. Although what follows could’ve been posted in a number of different forums on this site, since it touches on many different philosophical topics – epistemology, religion, science, politics – I chose to place it here in the General Philosophy section. Hopefully that won’t be an issue....


The purpose of this post is to explore the possibility that we are living at the end of an age. I’m going to assert that our current age, what I will here call Late Modernity, is on the cusp of being replaced by some kind of postmodern age. This isn’t to forecast the triumph of postmodernism, the philosophical school of thought that declares that the only truth that exists is that there is no truth, but rather to argue that the arrival of a postmodern age will commence when a modern (re: progressive) mindset becomes no longer tenable. I think the transformation from Late Modernity to post-modernity, and therefore the widespread abandonment of a modern mindset due to the imperatives of a radically altered state of affairs on the global scene, will be a sudden and chaotic event instead of an incremental and orderly one. In other words, a postmodern age will come to fruition in the aftermath of a globe-spanning discontinuity. Such an event I believe is imminent, and I will elaborate on why I think this is the case later on in this post.


Intrinsic to a modern mindset is a belief in the idea of progress. In this post I’m going to contend that the idea of progress is a secularized version of a particular strain of religious thought: monotheism. However, unlike the three faith-based Abrahamic monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – progress is supposed to be based on a non-supernatural and non-miraculous rationalism. So while monotheists can claim the existence of phenomena beyond human experience to buttress their systems of belief, believers in progress have to stick to observable reality. In consequence, the idea of progress can be debunked.


One of the goals of this post is to make a persuasive case that progress is a chimera – an illusion that has long outlived its “best before” date. Furthermore, in order to stand a chance of creating a humane and reasonably prosperous new order whenever the current order goes kaput, I maintain that a post-progressive outlook on politics and philosophy will be direly needed. Perhaps this post can spark a discussion on post-progressivism – a discussion that, as far as I know, isn’t occurring anywhere else. Yet even if this doesn’t transpire, I welcome all feedback, especially any reasoned criticism of my ideas. Indeed, I find the best way to learn new perspectives and to sharpen an argument is through spirited debate, so I look forward to your critiques (should you have any).


Before I venture further, I’m going to be upfront about a couple biases in my worldview that is germane to this post. The first bias I have is that I believe the truth is out there, that it is universal, and that it can be discovered by humans. I’m not a relativist/postmodernist, in other words. My second bias is that, when it comes to discovering how the material world really works, the three foundational fields of study of the material sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – are the only means of sorting out potential truths from fictions. In consequence, I agree that natural laws govern naturally occurring phenomena, and that these laws and their specific properties can be ascertained by humans through the use of the scientific method. But all discovered natural laws in the material sciences are provisional truths rather than immutable ones, being permanently subject to revision whenever new and contrary evidence to their workings crops up.


Universal natural laws, such as evolution by natural selection and the theory of relativity, exist irrespective of whether humans are actively engaged in observing them, and will continue to exist after humans go extinct. Some people, namely progressives of all stripes, believe in the existence of universal laws in history, economics and society that are on par with natural laws. But these so-called universal laws, which are usually an attempt at imparting a purposeful, logical and linear pattern to human events past, present and future, exist only in the human psyche. They are figments of peoples’ imagination, not accurate depictions of how the world really works. Taken as a whole, the material sciences refute the possibility of there being universal laws in the social sciences and humanities (more on this in a few moments). Universal laws that are passed off in scientific garb but that are in reality in conflict with natural laws found in the material sciences are pseudoscience.


Before I move on to an analysis of the idea of progress, it is necessary to state the original meaning of the word apocalypse. Today, an apocalypse is popularly understood to be a great catastrophe that leaves immense death and destruction in its wake. Under this common understanding of the word, an apocalypse is a very bad thing that people should avoid at all costs.


From the perspective of monotheism, however, an apocalypse is the “uncovering” of the last mysteries of God’s plan at the end of time (Greek: apo – “un” + kalyptein – “to cover” = apocalypse – “to uncover”). For an Elect, the coming of an apocalypse means not catastrophe but salvation, and is therefore something to be desired rather than feared. Because God is pure goodness, an apocalypse is akin to utopia – it signifies the creation of a new and everlasting celestial age in which harmony and justice prevail. In the history of religious thought, apocalyptic religions are extremely rare. Of the thousands upon thousands of types of religious experience humans have engaged in throughout history, there are only four apocalyptic religions of note, all from the Middle East region: the three aforementioned Abrahamic monotheisms, plus Zoroastrianism, a dualistic monotheism from ancient Persia that predated the Abrahamic monotheisms and was in many ways their forerunner. (The theological concepts of heaven and hell, free will, and an apocalyptic end-time leading to a general resurrection of the dead and a paradisiacal renewal of the world began with Zoroastrianism.)


As a coherent intellectual doctrine, the idea of progress was invented during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. The idea achieved its apogee during the North Atlantic world’s “long” 19th century, which began in 1776 when the thirteen American colonies embraced republicanism and created the United States of America, making the new country the world’s first full-fledged Enlightenment state, and ended in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Five factors made the long 19th century the “century of progress”. The first factor was the rise of revolutionary republicanism/democracy, which succeeded in the United States and failed just about everywhere else it was tried – republics in this era had a tendency to either degenerate into despotism (the Latin American republics of the early 19th century) or succumb to monarchical counterrevolution (the fate of the republics formed during the revolutions of 1848 in Europe), or both (the French Revolution). The second factor was the historically unprecedented transformations in travel, communications and manufacturing brought on by the industrial revolution. The third factor was the long era of relative peace achieved in the North Atlantic world from 1815 to 1914, the ghastly American Civil War notwithstanding. The forth factor was the abolition of the international slave trade, and of slavery more generally. And the fifth factor was the continued accumulation of scientific knowledge, with Darwin and Einstein making arguably the greatest discoveries in the history of the material sciences during this period.


The 20th century is another “long” century, in my opinion, spanning from the beginning of the First World War to whenever the current American-led international order unravels. Since the end of the Second World War, a globe-spanning American informal (re: economic and maritime) empire has managed to maintain relative world peace and to safeguard persistently expanding international trade and capital flows. While the idea of progress is still dominant in at least elite circles – the omnipresent buzzword “globalization” is a progressive concept, for example – the long 20th century hasn’t been an unsullied “century of progress” like the long 19th century seemed to have been. Industrialized total war that killed tens of millions of soldiers and, especially, civilians, and levelled entire cities; the return of slavery (or de facto slavery) on a colossal scale, such as in Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags; the rise of totalitarianism in many parts of the world; the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation; and a mounting ecological crisis have made many people either ambivalent about progress or have caused them to reject the idea entirely. To many, the long 20th century has been, commensurately, a century of progress and a century of anxiety.


I here define progress as the belief that advances in technology, scientific knowledge, and social organization can potentially produce permanent improvements in the human condition. Or, more generally, progress is the idea that history is moving in a definite and desirable direction (although this also works as a definition of providence).


The idea of progress is supposed to be entirely based on rationalism, rejecting all supernatural explanations of phenomena as superstition. But rather than the pre-Enlightenment rationalist thought found in either Europe or elsewhere, it is supernatural apocalyptic religion that the idea of progress most closely resembles in both structure and objective. Like the Abrahamic monotheisms (and Zoroastrianism), the idea of progress is based on the belief that history is a linear process that is following a glorious anthropocentric and benevolent narrative (or teleology) full of meaning and purpose. Thus history isn’t an endless cycle of ups and downs, with the sound and the fury that these cycles inevitably engender signifying nothing. Rather, history seen from either a providential or progressive outlook is inescapably moving toward an emancipative and redemptive culmination. Because both monotheism and progressivism place humans centre stage in an unfolding drama that will eventually see them triumph in a radiant and harmonious transformation in their own affairs, history becomes “History”, an apocalypse of transcendent human liberation.


According to both monotheism and progressivism, furthermore, because humans possess a special destiny, they are separate from other animals in what it is that motivates their actions. Non-human creatures only function on base instincts, such as sleeping, eating, bonding with one another, fighting over territory, and procreating. Humans, on the other hand, are different, monotheists and progressives maintain, for they exist to fulfill a higher noble purpose that will ultimately see them rise above their corrupt natures and environment.


As I’ve already mentioned, apocalyptic thinking, of either the providential or progressive variety, is extremely uncommon in the history of religious experience. The polytheism and mystery religions of pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization were without apocalypses. The major non-monotheistic religions of Asian origin: Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto, are also apocalypse free. Indeed, almost all religions in existence are without creeds, never mind apocalypses. A creed is a statement of shared beliefs of a religious community that summarize core doctrines, such as the Apostles’ Creed in Christianity and the Shahadah in Islam. As opposed to creeds, most religions are based on rituals and practice, and for this reason are often highly syncretic, being capable of incorporating the rites and beliefs of other religions into their own with ease (in monotheism, syncretism is usually viewed as heresy). In non-apocalyptic religions, history is viewed cyclically, with humans, like other animals, going nowhere in particular. In addition, nothing new under the Sun ever really happens.


Beginning with the Enlightenment, a gradual shift in the West’s psyche began to take shape, with hopes for humankind’s emancipation, redemption, and salvation being channelled away from a faith in a providential apocalypse, Christianity – and, on a far smaller scale, Judaism – to a faith in myriad progressive apocalypses: liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, positivism, Social Darwinism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and the like. All of these progressive apocalypses, except neoconservativism, originated in the salons, academies, cafés, and libraries of Western Europe. Just like apocalyptic religion, each progressive apocalypse (or progressive ideology/creed) aims to illuminate to humankind the true and only purpose behind historical development. Yet it is taken for granted that history does have an overarching goal built into it. In the Enlightenment’s wake, progressive apocalypses energized the passions of their followers as a now withering faith in Christianity had once done, providing an optimistic and coherent meaning to their lives and imbuing them with an overall sense of mission. As the North Atlantic world became the epicentre of global empire, converts to progressive apocalypses started spreading the gospel – “the good news” – of progress throughout the world, often entering into direct competition with Christian missionaries for the hearts and minds of non-European peoples.


While all of the progressive apocalypses copied from Christianity its assertion that truth is universal, its interpretation of historical development as a triumphant process of human uplift, its anthropocentrism, and its missionary zeal – albeit always in a secularized language of rationalism and science – they differed from Christianity, and from the other apocalyptic monotheisms more generally, in a couple key respects:


First, Christianity, like other providential apocalypses, interprets history unfolding according to an anthropocentric and benevolent divine plan. To what extent providence – i.e. God’s will – can be understood by humans is an open question for believers in apocalyptic monotheisms. Occasional eruptions of righteous fanaticism notwithstanding, the general view is that divine providence is largely inscrutable to humans. Aside from some core tenets, like the Ten Commandments or the Five Pillars of Islam, it is assumed that the unfolding of God’s special plan for humans is mysterious, and therefore the reason behind why he allows any specific historical event to happen is a matter of conjecture.


According to the progressive apocalypses, on the other hand, history marches forward to an anthropocentric and benevolent rational plan. Unlike the enigmatic divine plan of apocalyptic monotheism, however, the rational plan that progress is constructed from is fully intelligible to humans through the use of reason and science. Indeed, it has to be this way, because progress is a rationalist concept, being based on observable reality rather than otherworldly forces. Progress, in contrast to apocalyptic monotheism, needs scientific verification, because otherwise it is just a superstition based on blind faith.


The second difference between Christianity and the progressive apocalypses has to do with when and how salvation is expected to occur. Believers in Christianity (excluding a relatively small minority of Christian millenarians) strive to save their eternal souls on an individual level by forsaking sin, with the hopes of reuniting their saved souls with their deceased bodies in a general resurrection that occurs on Judgement Day, which is then to be followed by a paradisiacal world to come. In mainstream Christianity, salvation is not of this world and is achieved on an individual basis. The apocalyptic End-Time begins on no knowable date, but simply whenever God decides to initiate it.


For believers in progressive apocalypses, however, humankind’s salvation is forecasted to happen on a collective level in a temporal here and now. By reorganizing society to run on rational laws found in history, economics, and society, progressives imagine that humans can abolish, once and for all, the old-time scourges of civilization: material scarcity, tyranny, war, imperialism, bigotry, pestilence, and the like. Thus for believers in progressive apocalypses, salvation is terrestrial and all-embracing. What is more, whereas most monotheists believe in apocalypse later, progressive visionaries believe in apocalypse now.


The widespread adoption of progressive outlooks in the West over the past couple of centuries has resulted in millenarian expectations becoming normalized. Formerly, when Christianity dominated the mind of the West, Christian millenarians were persecuted as heretics, since prophesies about a thousand year Godly kingdom on earth in the Book of Revelation were interpreted by church officials symbolically rather than literally. Instead of millenarianism, Christian orthodoxy put an emphasis on the doctrine of original sin, in which man’s fallen state precluded the possibility of an earthly paradise. The rejection of millenarianism for original sin, plus the generally agreed upon inscrutability of God’s plan for humankind, gave mainstream Christianity an almost cyclical or tragic view of history. This conferred to Christianity an historical outlook similar to that found in pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization, as well as to the views on history that predominated everywhere outside of the Christian and Islamic worlds. In the West today, however, ideas that challenge the progressive view of salvation through reason and science, and thereby fail to flatter the human ego, are either ignored or denounced as blasphemy (mostly the former, though).


Progress is supposed to be based on a foundation of science. But for progress to be scientifically valid, a natural inclination in the material world towards greater order, with human betterment being the primary object, is necessary. Yet the theories in the material sciences, in their present configuration, supply no evidence to support this view. Indeed, if anything, these theories collectively refute the possibility of progress, since an up-to-date scientific view of biological evolution and of the physical workings of the universe is of a non-linear and non-goal-seeking randomness. Modern science has exposed the material world to be chaotic and impersonal, not orderly and anthropocentric. This finding is very uncongenial news for the idea of progress, because without a discernibly logical pattern guiding historical development in a direction that caters to human desires and ambitions, progress becomes a myth. The ball is now in the court of progressives, and has been for some time. The onus is on them to discover material evidence that disproves the material world’s randomness. Why haven’t they attempted to do this?


Material progress, the idea that humans can conquer nature in order to enduringly satisfy their material wants and needs, is today arguably the most widely believed in variant of progress. Faith in material progress has led to the present-day fetish with technology. For many progressives, technological advance has taken on a salvationary role, becoming in effect the new Jesus. But technology cannot on its own sustain the modern, i.e., industrialized, way of life. A necessary prerequisite for modernity to endure is expanding supplies of energy. For modern, industrial society to be not a fleeting historical phase but a permanent condition in human affairs, scalable alternatives to digging or pumping fossil fuels and uranium ores out of the ground on a finite sphere are obviously required (collectively, coal, petroleum, natural gas and uranium make up over 90 percent of the world’s energy supply). Yet, despite the spectacular growth in technological advances in the 20th and early 21st centuries, technology has managed to unlock the potential of only one energy source of any significance, uranium. This has been achieved through the invention of nuclear fission power plants.


A belief in a technological conquest of nature inevitably runs into the problem of thermodynamic limits. The First Law of Thermodynamics rules out the possibility of humans creating energy. Instead, humans can only change energy from one form to another, with a resultant degradation in energy quality (entropy) occurring with each transformation. Thus the First Law of Thermodynamics gives scientific credence to the old cliché that you cannot get something for nothing. The promethean view of humans popular in progressive circles – especially of any individual engaged in entrepreneurial or engineering activities – being like God at the time of Genesis by bringing a heroic new world into existence from nothing but the sweat on their brow, is false. Rather, modern physics places humans in a finite world of hard limits and hard choices, in which decay is inescapable.


Perhaps the ultimate irony of the modern Western mind is this: the only way to make a progressive interpretation of historical development work is for progressives to abandon rationalism for a faith in a higher power. In other words, progressives need a God in order to give plausibility to their beliefs. Of course this would not be the old God of prophetic revelation and Holy Scripture, but rather a new God of humanitarian progress. Without a “God of progress”, progressives condemn themselves to a lifetime of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, because from a rationalist perspective derived from the material sciences the idea that history is benignly guided by a human-centric logical plan just ain’t so. Paradoxically, progressives need to enter into an alliance with Christian, Jewish and Islamic creationists and champion Intelligent Design. But, alas, they seem to be either too maladroit or too intellectually incurious to figure this out.


In the apocalyptic West, it is taken for granted that history advances according to an inner logic. A few centuries after a certain babe was born in a certain manger, an apocalyptic mindset became the default lens through which reality is interpreted in the West. The aftermath of the ostensibly secular European Enlightenment witnessed an alteration in the course of apocalyptic thinking, not its overthrow. The leading idea to come out of the Enlightenment, progress, is a salvationary apocalypse that uses secular and scientific terminology to disguise its true origin. Unlike apocalyptic monotheism, however, which views human pride as a sin that is destined to lead to folly, progressivism holds fast to the delusion that humans have a godlike capacity to create their own reality.


So, in terms of Western Civilization, revolutionaries on the far Left like Marxists and anarchists are not the earth-shaking radicals they are often portrayed as and, indeed, often claim themselves to be, but instead are very much conventional thinkers, in that their way of viewing the world is severely constrained by apocalyptic patterns of thought. In truth, these forms of “radicalism” are symptoms of a deeper malady in the West, rather than a foreign menace to the Western way of life. Furthermore, observant practitioners of old-time monotheisms, like Christianity, are semi-radicals. Their beliefs clash with the dominant progressive worldview well enough. However, the religious traditions of monotheism provided the wellspring for progress, and therefore both monotheists and progressives share many fundamental similarities in how they comprehend the world around them. In the contemporary West, then, true radicalism can only be a stoic rejection of both providence and progress.
Post Reply

Return to “General Philosophy”

2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
by John K Danenbarger
January 2023

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023

The Unfakeable Code®

The Unfakeable Code®
by Tony Jeton Selimi
April 2023

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts
May 2023

Killing Abel

Killing Abel
by Michael Tieman
June 2023

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead
by E. Alan Fleischauer
July 2023

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough
by Mark Unger
August 2023

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
September 2023

Artwords

Artwords
by Beatriz M. Robles
November 2023

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope
by Dr. Randy Ross
December 2023

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes
by Ali Master
February 2024

2022 Philosophy Books of the Month

Emotional Intelligence At Work

Emotional Intelligence At Work
by Richard M Contino & Penelope J Holt
January 2022

Free Will, Do You Have It?

Free Will, Do You Have It?
by Albertus Kral
February 2022

My Enemy in Vietnam

My Enemy in Vietnam
by Billy Springer
March 2022

2X2 on the Ark

2X2 on the Ark
by Mary J Giuffra, PhD
April 2022

The Maestro Monologue

The Maestro Monologue
by Rob White
May 2022

What Makes America Great

What Makes America Great
by Bob Dowell
June 2022

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!
by Jerry Durr
July 2022

Living in Color

Living in Color
by Mike Murphy
August 2022 (tentative)

The Not So Great American Novel

The Not So Great American Novel
by James E Doucette
September 2022

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches
by John N. (Jake) Ferris
October 2022

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All
by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
November 2022

The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity

The Smartest Person in the Room
by Christian Espinosa
December 2022

2021 Philosophy Books of the Month

The Biblical Clock: The Untold Secrets Linking the Universe and Humanity with God's Plan

The Biblical Clock
by Daniel Friedmann
March 2021

Wilderness Cry: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach to Understanding God and the Universe

Wilderness Cry
by Dr. Hilary L Hunt M.D.
April 2021

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute: Tools To Spark Your Dream And Ignite Your Follow-Through

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute
by Jeff Meyer
May 2021

Surviving the Business of Healthcare: Knowledge is Power

Surviving the Business of Healthcare
by Barbara Galutia Regis M.S. PA-C
June 2021

Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure

Winning the War on Cancer
by Sylvie Beljanski
July 2021

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
by Dr. Gustavo Kinrys, MD
November 2021

Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

Dream For Peace
by Dr. Ghoulem Berrah
December 2021