In philosophical terms, the concept of progress is concerned with how advances in, for example, knowledge, technology, and social and economic organization can drive ongoing improvement in the quality of life. Since the Enlightenment period, much of our collective thought has been informed by the idea that progress will come from the application of reason in addressing problems.
Yet it was not always thus. Many cultures believed (and some continue to do so) that the fate of our species is divinely ordained and cannot be fundamentally changed by our actions – although there were always some dissenting voices. It was not until the Enlightenment that ‘progress’ started to become a widely accepted element of philosophical and intellectual discourse. In an increasingly secularized age, humanity came to be seen as having its fate in its own hands.
The great tenets of the Enlightenment – scientific reason, the rights of the individual, liberalism, democracy – were held up as beacons, lighting the path to a better world. As the French statesman Turgot wrote in 1750: ‘the whole mass of humankind, alternating between calm and agitation, good and bad, marches constantly, though slowly, toward greater perfection’.
Such ideas were integral to the American Founding Fathers and the leaders of the French Revolution. Both insisted that ‘the people’ could (and should) actively determine their own fate. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as an ‘inalienable right’ is perhaps the most famous expression of the idea of progress in history. Into the 19th century, the theory of evolution (see here) seemed to bolster the idea that progress is a natural state of existence, while Herbert Spencer developed the concept of social Darwinism – the now largely discredited theory that certain social groups are subject to the same laws of natural selection as species of plants and animals.
The weakling’s doctrine of optimism
Some significant voices remained doubtful that progress was inevitable, or even desirable. Thomas Malthus (see here) argued that progress brought with it the conditions that would lead to eventual regression, so that progress is merely a cyclical phenomenon. Nietzsche (see here), on the other hand, derided the idea of progress as among the ‘weakling’s doctrines of optimism’ that stood in the way of the emergence of the Übermensch. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), alternatively, suggested that progress was only inevitable within the context of the broad sweep of history, being a painful and slow business only moderately influenced by such Enlightenment values as reason and knowledge-acquisition.
The idea of progress has proved a potent concept. From the French Revolution to the establishment of the United States, through the revolutionary politics of Karl Marx (see here), the development of liberal economics, the great advances in modern medicine, the technological revolution, right up to the promises of modern politicians to make everything better, it is evident in virtually every significant area of modern life. As the professor of political and social ethics, Felix Adler, put it in 1913:
The condition of all progress is experience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.