Over the relatively short period of our nation’s history, and after hard struggles, liberal democracy and capitalism have created one of the world’s highest standards of living, and have guaranteed civil rights and expanded personal freedom to all. Within living memory, black Americans were forbidden in some parts of the country from voting or eating at the same restaurants as whites. That ended, in large part because the US federal government finally acted to make the Constitution’s promises good for black Americans too. Sometimes, progress is real and tangible.
We also believe in progress because of its Judeo-Christian roots. Most ancient cultures have a cyclical view of history, but Hebrew religion—and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam—describe history as moving in a linear direction, from creation to an ultimate redemption. In Christianity, that redemption will come after the Apocalypse and Last Judgment, in which God’s justice will triumph.
Again, progress can be real, and for Christians at least, history is moving toward a glorious end (after a violent apocalypse), but this does not mean that all changes improve upon the past inevitably. It also doesn’t mean that “progress” divorced from God is progress at all. In fact, progress can become very dark in a secular context, without a biblical understanding of human fallibility and without the God of the Bible as the author of history and the judge of the earth.
Today’s progressivism dates back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when its more radical Continental exponents secularized Christian hope by replacing faith in God with faith in man—particularly science and technology. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was a French thinker who became one of the founders of socialism. Saint-Simon and his comrade Auguste Comte (1798–1857) were exponents of positivism, a philosophy built on the idea that science was the source of all authoritative knowledge.
Positivists believed that history was primarily the story of the advance of science and technology. They believed that science would eventually end all material suffering. And as science advanced, so too would morality, because it would be based on scientific knowledge, not religion and custom.
In England, philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) incorporated positivism into the classical liberal political tradition. In Germany, Karl Marx put it to use in building a radical politics. Marx and his disciples replaced the Christian hope in a reward in heaven with the belief that perfection could—and inevitably would—be established on this earth, after a savage apocalypse, and through the application of science and science-based politics.
Though Marxists took positivism in an extreme, utopian direction, positivist values are at the foundation of free-market liberalism. Both traditions believe that science drives progress and that progress can be measured by the alleviation of material needs. Contemporary philosopher John Gray says that there is much less distance between liberal democrats and Marxists than we like to think: “Technology—the practical application of scientific knowledge—produces a convergence in values. This is the central modern myth which the Positivists propagated and everyone today accepts as fact.”6
The original American dream—the one held by the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers—was religious: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to serve God as dictated by their consciences. In our time, the American dream is not a religious ideal but rather one informed more by positivism than Christianity. For most people, the term means wealth and material stability and the freedom to create the life that one desires. The Puritan ideal was to use freedom to live by virtue, as defined by Christian Scripture; the modern American ideal is to use freedom to achieve well-being, as defined by the sacred individual—that is, a Self that is fully the product of choice and consent. The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.
In modern politics, anyone who can be portrayed as an opponent of progress is often at a disadvantage. To oppose progress, to be against change, is to stand against the natural order of things. In liberal democracies, the struggle between the Right and the Left is really a contest between conservative progressives and radical progressives over the rate and details of change. What is not in dispute is the shared belief that the good society is one in which individuals have enough money and personal autonomy to do whatever they like.
Progress as Religion
For classical liberal devotees of the Myth of Progress, the ideal society is one in which everyone has equal freedom of choice. For radicals, it is one in which everyone is living with equality of outcome. Belief that one’s circumstances can be improved by collective human effort, though, is a powerful political motivator. It is difficult to see this from the perspective of the twenty-first century, but to believe that poverty, sickness, and oppression are not destined to be one’s fate was a revolutionary concept in human history. It gave people whose ancestors had scarcely known anything but want and suffering hope for the future.
Marx likened religion to a drug because it blunted the pain of life for the masses, and in his view, took away from them the consciousness that they had the power to overturn the social order that immiserated them. Unlike progressives in the classical liberal tradition, Marx and his fellow radicals promised that radical politics, harnessing the power of science and technology, really could establish heaven on earth. They were atheists who believed that man could become like a god.
As a perversion of religion, Progress as an ideology speaks appealingly to hungry human hearts. As Miłosz and other dissidents testify, communism answered an essentially religious longing in the souls of restless young intellectuals. Progressivism in all its forms appeals to the same desire in intelligent young people today—both secular and those within churches who are alienated from authoritative ecclesial traditions. This is why Christians today must understand that, fundamentally, they aren’t resisting a different politics but rather what is effectively a rival religion.
This is how it was for young Russians of the late nineteenth
