After I waded through a few chapters of Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (see yesterday’s post), I began to wonder how the self-conscious defenders of progress articulate their doctrine. Fortunately, I came across a copy of Charles A. Beard’s A Century of Progress (1932). Beard was regarded as one of the leading progressive historians of the early 20^th century. An ardent New Dealer and World War I cheerleader, Beard turned isolationist in the late ‘30s and became a great critic of FDR. A Century of Progress — a collection of essays championing labor rights and feminism, along with a piece celebrating machine “Industry” by Henry Ford, and an essay on “The Process of Social Transformation” by Jane Addams — was released the year before Beard was anointed as president of the American Historical Association. The collection begins with an essay, “The Idea of Progress,” which I will focus on today.

Beard begins by acknowledging the controversial nature of Progress, its status as a philosophical theory of history and political action, as well as its predictive pretenses. He then provides a succinct definition:

Briefly defined, [Progress] implies that mankind, by making use of science and invention, can progressively emancipate itself from plagues, famines, and social disasters, and subjugate the materials and forces of the earth to the purposes of the good life—here and now. In essence the idea of progress belongs to our own times, for it was unknown to the ancients and to the thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is associated, therefore, with every phase of the vast intellectual, economic, and rational movement which has transformed the classical and medieval heritage into what is called, for the sake of convenience, Western civilization.

Indeed, Progress, along with its associated forces of democracy, science, and technology, has a laudable list of accomplishments, says Beard: The eradication of diseases and starvation, the amelioration of pain, as well as the gift of modern comforts, long lives, and the vast dissemination of knowledge. It also fills us with a sense of hope that things will only get better.

Where the pessimist sees the worst, it proposes a search for the best and advances toward perfection by increments. The suffering, ignorance and folly which drive the timid to the Nirvana of doubt and oblivion are, under the light of progress, calls to action, to research, to planning, and to conquest.

Progress is a universal force. It has revolutionized nearly every society across the planet. Perhaps the planet, too, will be revolutionized—or “subdued,” whichever you like—by the forces of Progress.

Everywhere it makes its way, dissolving the feudal institutions of Europe, disturbing the slumbers of the Orient, arousing lethargic Russia, and finding a naked avowel in the United States of America: the earth may be subdued to the security, welfare, and delight of them that dwell therein.

As with religion or patriotism, Progress may be exploited by “pious frauds” or “munitions-makers.

In the hands of the demagogue or noisy promoter it may be manipulated to avoid questions and obscure doubts. And yet the idea survives its friends as well as its enemies.

Beard continues on to fully articulate why the Idea of Progress was unknown to medieval thinkers. Civilizations were thought to go through life cycles in those days past. Progress holds that with the right knowledge and technology, civilizations can just keep ascending higher and higher…

At the outset, the explorer confronts four fundamental questions which have perplexed thinkers since civilization began on this planet: Do nations, like human beings, pass through youth, middle life, and old age to death? Or do they revolve endlessly, as some ancient writers thought, in a cycle—despotism, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and mob-rule—or some such succession of forms. Or is it possible for a nation to stand still through countless ages, preserving what it believes to be an ideal arrangement of things? Or is there discernible, under the surface ebb and flow through the centuries, some stream of tendency, some organizing principle indicating the course of nations, and giving to their peoples some guiding rule by which to shape their activities and mold their lives and their institutions? Continue reading →