The myth of “progress” is the de facto official religion of Western democracies. Broadly speaking, this myth serves as the justification for the current liberal worldview, attributing superiority to the current state of the world by virtue of its recentness without any further justification besides its novelty relative to forms which existed historically.
I, as you might surmise, don’t believe in progress, or at least not the historiography which attributes superiority to forms on the basis of contemporaneity. The notion of progress as is promoted by modern Westerners is severely flawed, and is actually dependent on a particular trope which Westerners have been overly eager to apply in their understanding of historical development. This trope is that history is linear or oriented towards a particular goal.
The linear view of history is largely unique to Westerners, perhaps derived in part from the view Christianity takes of the world as being oriented towards a day of judgement and having been recycled back into secular mythos. Rather, however, than viewing history as a downward trajectory of decay before a day of judgement, the modern Westerner views the world as developing on an upward trajectory to some goal of “progress.”
This concept of progress is never defined in except the most nebulous of terms. Broadly, the 19th century view might have defined it in scientific-technical terms, which can arguably make sense when considered that science is an additive pursuit. In the 21st century, this has largely been defined in terms of “liberation” and takes a strongly anti-rational perspective when defined by progress’s most ardent proponents: third wave feminists, the Social Justice movement, etc.
The West’s civic religion, being transformed from a scientific-technical one to a religion oriented towards “liberation” of the individual. Because the strictures of society and culture have largely been eliminated by the Enlightenment's excesses, the only strictures which “oppress” the individual now are those of science and reality. This gives rise to the modern gender theorists who push against genetic and biological objectivity in favor of justifying transsexualism. What is occurring is that “progress” has turned against the scientific-technical framework in favor of one of pure, nihilistic liberation.
This development, which is really a kind of profound decadence, is hard to explain by the traditional framework of progress, but very easy to understand when viewed from alternative models of historiography. My preferred view is that of random-walk. Another is that history is cyclical, perhaps likening the modern world to that of the Kali Yuga in Hindu mythology. Corresponding to the collapse of authority of all forms, the Kali Yuga precedes a return to the highest authority following a collapse of the current order from aggregated and total decadence. We might view that particular kind of cyclicality as occurring within Western history as well: low authority of the late Roman Republic preceding the heights of the early Imperium under Augustus, or of the Migration Period preceding the High Middle Ages, or the era of Absolutism preceding the current age of decadence started by the French Revolution.
Obviously, these ideas are not popular, but I do have to ask. How do you justify the concept of progress? How do you filter it from the idea of decadence? And how is the modern world really achieving progress rather than falling into decadence?
