Yesterday, I explained a bit about my fondness for the historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch, as well as my newfound interest in the idea of progress. Here are some questions I will try to deal with over the next few days: What is progress? Who believes in it? And why is it so important?

Lasch’s preface to The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991) is a good starting point. He begins with a simple question:

How does it happen that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?

There are many ways of understanding the ideology of progress, but Lasch gives a basic rundown in the preface. In short, humans must infinitely increase the size of our economic systems in order to satisfy our exponentially increasing desires. Whereas medieval Christians and virtuous republicans saw civilization as a process that imitated the cycles of life—birth, middle age, death—progressives see civilization as a process of incremental material improvement that is destined to continue indefinitely into the future.

Lasch traces the idea back to the founders of 18^th-century liberalism (liberalism, in the European sense), meaning Adam Smith, the philosopher-apologist of the capitalist revolution. But the ideology of progress is not simply tied to capitalism. It is the logic of industrialism. It means that humans, using the tools of scientific rationalism, can permanently subdue the forces of nature, and ultimately create ever-expanding material abundance for all.

During the Enlightenment, Lasch writes, there were utopian progressives. The forces of logic, rationalism, and technological innovation were held to be ushering in a new heaven on earth. In the postwar era, even after two world wars and a sustained flirtation with nuclear holocaust, the idea of progress lived on, albeit shorn of its most obviously utopian suggestions.

The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect. The elasticity of demand appeared to give the Anglo-American idea of progress a solid foundation that could not be shaken by subsequent events, not even by the global wars that broke out in the twentieth century. Those wars, indeed, gave added energy to economic development.

Indeed, the great economic stimulus of World War II pulled America out of the Depression and into an unprecedented era of abundance. Although humanity’s great technological “advances” seemed to be pulling civilization into an ever-more precarious and dangerous position, they had also bequeathed a new era of unheard-of material wealth. Whereas utopian progressives held that the Enlightenment heralded the arrival of the True and Only Heaven, contemporary progressives (which would include both laissez-faire conservatives and Keynesian revivalists) hold that civilization will continue to climb the never-ending ladder of progress once a robust economic recovery returns.

To Lasch, the ecological crisis throws the entire project of Industrial Progress into question.  “Now that we have begun to understand the environmental limits to economic growth, we need to subject the idea of progress to searching criticism,” he writes. It should be noted that Lasch takes the limits-to-growth argument for granted; the idea is hotly disputed today, amidst soaring commodity prices, the plateau of crude oil production, disastrous climate change, worldwide economic stagnation, ever-widening income gaps, and other associated problems. If Progress is stripped of its Utopian vision, all that remains is the promise of steadily-increasing economic development. But if endless economic development now invites civilization-ending global warming, and widespread resource depletion threatens the viability of economic growth itself, what realistic hope does the ideology of progress provide beyond endless incantations about the miracles of markets and technology? Continue reading →