The Price of Progress

Progress is among the most useful and most treacherous words in the political vocabulary. Useful because it names something real: the genuine improvements in human welfare that have occurred over the past two centuries are not imaginary — life expectancy, reduction of extreme poverty, access to education. Treacherous because the word imports a teleological assumption — that history has a direction and that what comes later is, in some meaningful sense, better.

The philosopher John Gray has spent much of his career arguing against this assumption, which he traces to a secularised version of Christian eschatology. The belief in inevitable or even possible long-term moral progress, he argues, is not supported by the historical record. Societies that achieved significant improvements in human welfare have also lost them. The twentieth century, by any measure of violence and systematic cruelty, refutes the idea that modernity is an improvement on what preceded it in the ways that matter most.

This critique is deliberately uncomfortable, and it has been challenged by Steven Pinker and others who argue that the long-term data do support optimism about moral progress, properly measured. The debate is partly empirical — about how to measure violence, welfare, and suffering across historical periods — and partly conceptual — about what counts as progress, and for whom.

What is perhaps most worth retaining from Gray's position, even if one does not accept its strongest conclusions, is the caution it generates about assuming that the current direction of change is good, or that the costs incurred to achieve particular gains were worth paying. Progress narratives tend to be written by those who benefited from the changes they describe. That is a perspective, not a summary.