Progress: Progressivism
The belief that history is an ascending movement toward the constant improvement of the human condition.
The idea of progress has been in crisis for a long time (the famous ‘disillusions of progress’), since progressivism insists that things are always getting better. The idea, however, is undermined from within by a generalised pessimism and the collapse of any confidence in the future, just as its achievements constantly fall short of expectation. The ‘happiness of peoples’, rhapsodised by Victor Hugo,[1] had no rendezvous in the Twentieth century — just the opposite. What’s particularly mind-boggling is that progressive ideology (like its modernist counterpart) continues to run in circles, even though the world it has created is heading, full speed, in a fog, toward disaster.
The idea of progress — central to the ‘modern’ vision of the world since the Seventeenth century — is a secular and materialist offshoot of the religious doctrines of salvation. The Twenty-first century will not bring the end of history, nor the world prosperity of a universal state, but a terrible acceleration of history and a heightening of its tragic essence. Against progressivism, we would do well to substitute the metamorphic vision of history that Heraclitus[2] and Nietzsche inspired: nothing is immutable, nothing is linear. Life is becoming and thus full of surprises. Through a dialectical contradiction that frequently occurs in history, progressivism and ideologies of history’s end have actually provoked a resurgence of history — because of the catastrophes they themselves are producing.
As for ‘scientific progress’, it possesses, let us repeat, nothing that is qualitative; it is purely quantitative and neutral; it even leads to disaster if not mastered (such as when it succumbs to purely market or profit motives) — or it can lead to significant benefits if thought out, planned, and ordered by the cold lucidity of a political will.
