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Re: Cult of Progress
[Caleb Stegall 03/21 03:45 PM]Come, come. There are multiple treatments of the negative aspects of progressivism or the "cult of progress" in the conservative canon. In some respects this discussion proves difficult if not impossible due to an apparent lack of a common lexicon. From the Puritans to today's secular progressives, the idea of man's perfectability and the notion that we can in some real sense remake this world according to our own dictates has had a strong grip on the modern mind, and it has often fallen to the conservative to apply the brakes. The conservative recognizes that there can never be any "progress" in a meta sense. That for every gain there is likely a loss. That the work of right ordering is often the work of weighing between one good and a competing good because one cannot have both. Material gain on the one hand, yes. The conservative wants to count the cost. Who stands to benefit? Who loses? The answer to these questions is not prejudged, but the fact that they are asked at all sets one apart from progressives of all political stripes.
There are so many serious conservative thinkers to which one can turn to find an analysis of the problem of progress that one hardly knows where to begin. But let me start with a passage by Eric Voegelin — in my view our best and most comprehensive thinker on this problem — from his 1952 book The New Science of Politics (emphasis mine): On the one hand ... there begins in the eighteenth century a continuous stream of literature on the decline of Western civilization; and, whatever misgivings one may entertain on this or that special argument, one cannot deny that the theorists of decline on the whole have a case. On the other hand, the same period is characterized, if by anything, by an exuberantly expansive vitality in the sciences, in technology, in the material control of environment, in the increase of population, of the standard of living, of health and comfort, of mass education, of social consciousness and responsiblity; and again, whatever misgivings one may entertain with regard to this or that item on the list, one cannot deny that the progressivists have a case, too. This conflict of interpretations leaves in its wake the adumbrated thorny question, that is, the question how a civilization can advance and decline at the same tiem. Voegelin then says that an understanding of what he calls "modern gnosticism" — that is, the attempt in modern people to overcome the uncertainty of faith by endowing this world and our range of action in the here and now with an ultimacy of meaning that properly lies over the eschatological horizon — will help us to understand this quandry of a civilization moving forward and backward at the same time. After which, he continues:The spiritual strength of the soul that in Christianity was devoted to the sactification of life could now be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise. Civilizational action became ... a divertissement that demonically absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man and substituted for the life of the spirit. Nietzsche most tersely expressed the nature of this demonic diversion when he raised the question why anyone sould live in the embarrassing condition of a being in need of the love and grace of God. "Love yourself through grace" was his solution — "then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." And how can this miracle be achieved, this miracle of self-salvation, and how this redemption by extending grace to yourself? The great historical answer was given by the successive types of gnostic action that have made modern civilization what it is. The miracle was worked successively through the literary and artistic achievement that secured the immortality of fame for the humanistic intellectual, through the discipline and economic success that certified salvation to the Puritan saint, through the civilizational contributions of the liberals and Progressives, and, finally, through the revolutionary action that will establish the Communist or some other gnostic millennium. ...
The historical result [of the gnostic idea of self-salvation through progress] was stupendous. ... On this apocalyptic spectacle, however, falls a shadow .... [W]hat should in this order of things become of men who would rather follow God [than the priests of self-salvation]? ...
The death of the spirit is the price of progress. ... The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time — but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect that represents the gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization. There is something worth meditating on.
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