What Is Progress?

Defining the fiction that has underpinned our world for the last 250-odd years in the hopes that it can be overcome to push through our current stagnation in the face of unprecedented crises.

The concept of progress has shaped our world for more than two hundred years. Its interpretation has been at the root of some of the cruelest, deadliest, as well as compassionate and humane actions ever undertaken. It is what forms nations and guides any number of policies that have affected billions of people around the world. It has extended our life expectancy, as well as been the justification for the deaths of millions. Today, at least in what is known as the Global North, it has become somewhat archaic and is most used in a derogatory sense by conservative and far-right politicians to refer to their “progressive” counterparts. But what does it actually mean nowadays? What would we be progressing towards in the current world, or have we not fallen back to just wanting things to return to some past state? Looking at its history and usage, a good case can be made that progress never actually existed, at least not in the way we have been imagining these last centuries. The lives of countless humans have improved to previously incomprehensible standards, no doubt, but its promise rings empty today, and it currently feels like a backslide into much more uncertain conditions is very imaginable. Tracing its origin and transformation ultimately leads to understanding our idea of progress as a fiction, one that is fast becoming evident. At the same time, it opens avenues for reinterpreting core ideas within the conception, preserving their validity and offering perspectives for the future.

The origins of progress lie in movement, with ancient civilizations understanding it as an objective term of motion, scientific and towards a specific end. It was usually associated with cycles and, as such, with the journeys of celestial bodies observed from ancient observatories. Revolutions were then simply closed cycles, trajectories upon which progress was made, similar to well-worn human treks, journeys, or pilgrimages. They served a certain end, had a certain destination, and were finite. The most striking difference then was that progress had no inherent value in and of itself and was merely a descriptor or an orientation point upon which one could plan certain rituals or festivities. The result of millennia of observations and comparisons with the cyclical nature of life (and death) on Earth, progress and revolution were elements of, and embedded into, the ever-recurring nature of the universe as physical realities that seemed to mirror metaphysical truths. The permanent cyclical nature of the universe began to slow and stretch with the rise of monotheistic religions, most prominently Christianity, until one elongated, finite life cycle and state of being – creation and life on Earth – came to an end and transitioned to another infinite reality – Armageddon, the apocalypse, the resurrection of a kingdom of God and heavenly eternity (for some). If there was progress on that timeline, it was towards an end, or rather, the end of days. This was regularly predicted every couple of hundred years. Indeed, Jesus has predicted it himself. Later in a time of revolution within this trajectory, Martin Luther predicted the end to be coming some hundred or so years after his lifetime. Revolutions and progress were changes and movement, but the overall trajectory and destiny were laid out in the holy books.

It wasn’t the centuries upon centuries of continuously delayed predictions of Armageddon that finally began to dissolve the idea of an end, but the reintroduction of ancient knowledge through the Reconquista and the European discovery that the world they thought they knew was much larger than they could have ever imagined. Most importantly, because they hadn’t been able to imagine it, as none of their holy books, ancient literature, or bodies of knowledge had made any mention of these huge continents to their west, not to mention the even bigger ocean that lay beyond them. Grappling with a doubling in the size of the planet accelerated the dissolution of the old conceptions of the world, and new ideas were born and took shape over the following centuries as to what the essence of humanity was or could be. With the unravelling of old-world ideas would eventually come the breaking open of potentially endless horizons, and the future being born as something that can be changed and worked towards. The end of days stretched further into the distance, until it became something faint and nearly invisible. In the European mind, what had been cyclical and then eschatological time unfurled into a straight line that led into a future that was there to be filled with possibility, but also contested, and worked towards a malleable end. Looking back, teleological trajectories of development could be made, piecing together how human civilizations had advanced through time. Bubbling up in the Renaissance, mixing with various branches of knowledge, and being infused into new age European concepts of time and advancement was the root of the progress that came to define us over the last centuries. But this idea of progress as the betterment of certain things, conditions, society in general, and the accumulation of certain values or ideas came at a huge cost for those for whom it was not intended.

As the new age gave way to the Enlightenment, many European thinkers were grappling with what had been and what could be, and how understanding these things could help humans actively shape a better world. Ideas of personal freedoms, the ends towards which people toil, and how humans have formed their societies through these values over time, began to reinforce the power dynamics that had immediately come into play following the European expansion into the Americas and Asia. Meaning, the equality of man was built around the superiority of Northern European men. The leaps and bounds made in the sciences, in trade and industry, and the great imperial riches that fueled the blossoming of the arts, medicine, and philosophy were built upon the excess capital provided by an economy built around slavery and colonial exploitation. Even those Europeans and European colonialists who did not directly profit from slavery were themselves beneficiaries of societies that were hypercharging their economies on free labor and the freedom to seize land at will. Beyond the large imperial powers, economic powerhouses such as the Netherlands and its East and West Indian companies, combined with its foothold in North America and the Pacific, cemented the network of slavery, trade of goods, and the huge injection of money this provided for the European markets. All these geopolitical points are important because they created the wealth that could fund universities, science, and the arts, allowing scholars to devote their time to pondering the greater questions in life. Moreover, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had vested interests in colonial projects. Spinoza’s brother and extended family were involved in the slave trade via the plantations they owned at first in Brazil and later in the Caribbean. But the aim here is not to pick apart Europe’s original sin(s), nor erase lineages of thought deemed unseemly by association to historic crimes. At the same time, it is particularly important to highlight connections as they relate to the usage of certain ideas, concepts, and values, and how they have been implemented, especially when they are as prominent in discourse as progress is in our society. So, what is progress if it is built on these foundations – what does it, or can it, mean?

Conservative commentators over the last couple of decades have taken to questioning what exactly progressives are “progressing” towards. This is a very strange thing for anyone of a classically European bent to take aim at, as it was exactly all of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment and European philosophers credited with forming the views that shaped modern liberal democratic societies, who put forward this idea. The march of knowledge and civilization into a brighter future, the invisible hand of the market that guides commerce and liberal nations to unleash creative impulses that push scientific and technological progress, grow economies, and enrich the citizens of those nations. What are now classically conservative ideas, though under attack from the far right, are ones based on progress. The world was progressing, expanding, and speeding up, supposedly thanks to all of this European ingenuity. But where did this leave everyone else in the world? Hegel would look on what he saw as the decrepit civilizations of Asia as having been surpassed, having had their day, and the torch having been passed to Europe. Africa was stuck in a primordial state, and it apparently needed the Europeans to harness the resources of the continent. Ideas of progress here obviously had racist connotations, most criminally as an ongoing justification for slavery. Once slavery was abolished, social Darwinism and ideas of evolution picked up on this type of progress to further enforce racist colonial stereotypes, thinking, and laws. Even many scientific and medicinal breakthroughs can be traced back to what are essentially criminal studies that used colonial subjects as guinea pigs for European trial and error, which aimed at solely benefiting – both financially and in terms of health outcomes – a European and American market. Progress in Europe and the Americas came at the price of the colonial world, but also the European lower classes, who were fodder for the industrial juggernauts shaping the world.

The struggles of the 19^th and 20^th centuries that shaped our world and the way we understand it and ourselves were, and still are, focused on these interpretations of progress. Ideas of progress and revolution are so thoroughly ingrained in our world that we tend to only think of them as modern phenomena, something taking place within the last 250 years or so, when the Enlightenment bore its fruit and the revolutions of the United States and France ushered in the world as we know it. But it was precisely the antecedent marination in centuries of religious dogma and ideas of higher powers and destiny that made superficially secular ideas into ideological creeds, made modern progress into a cult, both left and right, and the idea of revolution the tool by which to bring about a paradise on Earth. All modern nations can trace their roots back to this belief that progress and industry will unleash the power of the people to shape a bright future for the respective nation. This was the idea underlying the Communist world as well, with Marx having laid out a prophecy to follow through on, which should create a utopian world for workers. With sciences, medicine, the arts, and the general ingenuity of human beings, a nation could create any kind of society it wished. It is laid out in the national anthems (that all sound the same because they were all composed in the same era, some 200-250 years ago), and even adorns some of the flags, either symbolically or literally in the case of Brazil’s flag, inscribed with “Order and Progress.” Even when allowing for less literal interpretations of either the left or right’s idea of progress and what various authors laid out, their quasi-religious belief in the power of progress as tied to human historical development is inextricable from their ideas, our world, and our understanding of ourselves.

Yet here we stand in the early(ish) 21^st century, ostensibly at the end of progress, and we have to ask ourselves what it means. Is it the liberal progress of a more financially based conservative valued meaning, or progress in terms of the betterment of people’s standing in society, which morphed into the valuing of individual liberties, not in financial terms, but in terms of identity? The question has been bubbling up since the 1970s, most acutely since 1973, when the stagnation of culture, the loss of the future, and the understanding that a larger transformation was underway began to take shape. An understanding that meant we might be heading into an uncertain future that could leave many in a worse state than they were before. The stuttering of the welfare states in the social democracies, the felt unravelling of societal norms, the obvious and bloody pointlessness of the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, the unfolding Watergate scandal, Pinochet’s coup in Chile ending a socialist dream outside of the communist sphere, the political and economic stagnation within the communist world, a growing awareness of the damage industrialized humanity was reeking on the environment – it all signaled a loss of future potential, the gradual understanding of the limits to human agency as it had been understood for the last centuries. With the growth of civil rights movements across the board, the birth of nations out of the last colonial states – often after intense struggle –, and the violent death of many of the leaders of these movements, the myth of a progressive development and equality solidified into an understood fact. The struggles to attain and keep rights became the political landscape we know today, the trenches still being fought over in political battles that, in their way, mirror the senseless slog (and carnage) of the Western Front in World War I. It has come so far that many of the achievements of what was thought of as “progress” are being attacked and rolled back in the face of environmental, economic, and geopolitical strains. This is precisely because what was thought of as progress wasn’t.

Yet, taking stock, we know that life expectancy has soared, child mortality has dropped from a historical (as in hundreds of thousands of years) constant of around 50% down to below 1% in some countries. This is astounding. We have travelled to the moon. We have connected the entire world and made education available to almost all of humanity. We have technologies that allow for the treatment and care of humans through every phase of their lives, with many illnesses now treatable if not curable. Even those deemed fatal a couple of decades ago are now manageable. We are entering an era of renewable energies that may see us finally freed from fossil fuels to move into a cleaner and more equal future, thanks to the dropping costs of energy. All these things are true and countless others, but we feel ourselves to be on the precipice of something destructive. We have been rushing ahead for two centuries now, but something has begun to feel off. Should we be headed into cataclysmic destruction on account of climatic shifts with effects that last for centuries, or a nuclear war, or some technological breakdown in knowledge systems and transfer, or all three and then some, the associated death tolls, plummeting of economic wealth, human health, and overall life quality for future generations will call into question just what all this progress was these last two-hundred years. If you are shot out of a cannon, it would initially feel like a rapid and self-sustaining ascent, but as soon as the energy is spent and gravity begins pulling on you, you would quickly understand that you were not flying but falling. What we understand as progress comes at a cost, and if we continue to insist that everything is either all good and virtuous or inherently evil and destructive, we will be neutered in the face of the consequences of all of this progress.

Where has this progress gotten us? A world currently dominated by anti-democratic sentiment, a yearning for authoritarian rule, anti-medical movements in the guise of natural health, not to mention overt and, ultimately, parasitic wealth that harnesses nihilistic sentiment and doubt to become even wealthier. None of the classic progressive schools of politics seem equipped to deal with our situation. Center, left, right – apart from essentially being meaningless orientation points – stand idly by as populist parties – most of whom deny any of our very real problems exist and, as such, have absolutely no solutions for them – make use of the people’s emotional, mental, and political confusion to garner votes and guide us into a nosedive of progress at lightspeed. Many things have changed for the better, but many have come at a real cost that has yet to be accounted for. Blind belief in either liberal economic progress or progress through social justice has no role to play when the physics of shifting world climate further exacerbates the end of the old geopolitical order and massive disruption caused by the displacement of millions on account of natural disasters, mounting conflicts, and huge shifts in demographics and agriculture. What place will progress have there?

We have come to the end of the line. Francis Fukuyama’s end of history was really an end of progress. Even if we could course correct right now, too much has been lost and changed to ever return to the conditions that created the liberal, social, democratic order of the 20^th century. Progress, as we understand it, does not exist, nor did it ever. It was a fiction used to orient certain populations within a changing world and history. But millions suffered and died because of “progress,” progress as a concept justified genocide and slavery, and continues to justify the disenfranchisement of billions. Social progress is a plaything for the educated middle classes and silences the voices of the world’s working class. But the advances in the sciences and medicine have entirely changed our world and all fields of knowledge, and opened up a universe of potential that is, theoretically, open to all. This cannot be denied. It is these advances, this betterment, that we can take forward, as they enable us to pay back the debt owed to humanity and the planet. Progress is dead because it never existed, and basing thoughts and political action on that past conception should be put to rest as well. It is as archaic as any thought of empire. We face reality and should do so as a mature humanity that always calculates the costs of its development and movement in any given direction and accounts for its actions for the sake of future generations.