Against Progress

Reconsidering the dominant idea of our time

I’m biased: I’m a historian.

The nature of that bias is not fixed: it’s axiomatic in the history business of our time that historians differ among themselves, arguing over, reinterpreting, and revising their understandings of the past. (Of course, the very idea of history as an argument is itself an artifact of the last century or so—more often, history has been about validating the rule of a particular regime). But I’ve got a basic disposition that the past is a place worth visiting, and that there are, in its treasure-house of people, places, and stories, lessons worth considering—and, occasionally, applying.

That’s not exactly a controversial statement. But in the new year I’ve been thinking about the way in which we are living in a moment when history has been regarded with a sense of notable disregard and suspicion, one rooted in what I regard as another disposition widely apparent in contemporary American culture: a belief in the efficacy, even inevitability, of progress—and the authority of those who see themselves at the vanguard of it.

Believing in progress is not exactly a controversial statement, either. Nor is the idea of progress exactly new—although it’s a lot newer than people sometimes understand. For most of human civilization, history has been understood in circular terms, whether as a matter of seasons or dynasties. Change was constant, but not necessarily in a particular direction. Its main driver was technology, but compared to what came later, technological change was relatively slow until a few centuries ago.

The quickening came with the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth. It was during this crucial span of time, corresponding to the rise of the West, that the notion of an objective betterment of humankind became not only conceivable, but actually achievable. Population, life expectancy, and overall wealth all increased, at first in particular nations, then in the world at large. Those gains were never evenly distributed, and they came with costs, among them economic inequality, social atomization, and environmental destruction. But the appeal and power of progress were compelling to a great many people. As were the ideas associated with it—and growing disregard, if not hostility, toward ideas that were not, often religious ones.

There are a lot of different ways of understanding the ideological conflicts of American history; the typical ones usually involve economics (more specifically, the role of government in managing the nation’s economic system). But I’d like to suggest another with a fair amount of explanatory power: the basic divide in our history and culture has been between what might be termed the Progress Party and the Tradition Party. They’ve had different names and been allied with different causes, but in their essence, there’s a throughline that runs through the past 400 years.

The essence of the Progress party is a belief that the world can and should be fixed—systematically. The Puritans, the Founding Fathers, the abolitionists: each saw fundamental flaws in the world as they found it, and moved collectively to correct the problems they identified—to achieve progress. Which, to a great degree, they did. In the case of the Puritans, it was through a more rigorous approach to Christianity; for the Founders, it was through grounding their revolution in the power of reason. Abolitionists relied on both, though the movement could never have succeeded without a firm grounding in evangelical churches (the same of course was true of the Civil Rights movement).

The right and might of all these movements notwithstanding, each had its flaws and blind spots. For the Puritans, it was a sense of intolerance toward what they regarded as heretical thought and behavior (the term “puritan” began as an epithet—“we call you Puritans, not because you are purer, but because you think yourselves purer,” noted one critic). The American Revolution was in effect a civil war, and like all civil wars, some people struggled unsuccessfully to avoid being caught in the crossfire and/or getting unjustly dispossessed. And the abolitionists’ aggressive tactics could be at least as alienating as they were persuasive, which is why Abraham Lincoln, antislavery as he was, never considered himself one—until, that is, he actually initiated the process of abolition as president.

The Tradition Party, by contrast, has always had a stronger tendency to favor precedent, to be chary of the unintended consequences of intended acts, and to express skepticism about collective solutions. (The Progress Party gave us the Revolution; the Tradition Party gave us the Constitution.) In practice, it has been reactive—some would say reactionary—in seeking to check the excesses of reform. This has sometimes resulted in blindness about the dangers posed by those, from bankers to technologists, whose innovations in emerging environments could quickly prove oppressive, as well as underestimating the need for, and benefits of, change.

Whatever your disposition in these matters—and in our individual lives, our stance on them is as likely to be a matter of temperament as it is ideology—all parties in these disputes have tended to invoke history. The Puritans saw their reform agenda in restorationst terms, seeking to overturn centuries of corrupt Catholic practice. The Founders and abolitionists rooted their arguments in traditions of British liberty going back to the Magna Carta of the thirteenth century and the English Civil War in the 17th. The issue was not whether or not you had history on your side, but rather which history you were invoking. Critics of “woke” history sometimes miss the point that their adversaries are less anti-history than celebratory of alternative histories that re-center other narratives as a means of recalibrating collective scales. It’s often said that History is written by the winners, but that’s not exactly true—sometimes, it’s winners writing losers into the story as an alternative way of validating themselves. Southern racists in the late 19th century successfully sold the “Lost Cause” of Confederate nobility through monuments that are only now coming down. But no one is immune to the charm of selective memory. See, for example, The Woman King, a recent cinematic valorization of the African kingdom of Dahomey that elides the role of its female soldiers in the international slave trade. In fights over the past, one woman’s history becomes another woman’s myth.

All this said, there really has been a relatively new feature in the ongoing battles between the Progress Party and the Tradition Party. It emerged in what was tellingly named the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—and has re-emerged in a distinctive new flowering in the 21st. What distinguishes these movements is the growing displacement of history as an engine for driving social change in favor of foregrounding one of the hallmarks of modernity: expertise.

The first wave of Progressives, whose heyday stretched from about 1890 to 1920, certainly had plenty of moral fervor, and they had a strong sense of History. But the real engine of their movement was what they understood to be science. Not just traditional branches of science like biology, chemistry, and physics—all legacies of the Scientific Revolution, and well-established bulwarks against superstition and a priori assertions of sovereignty—but the new social sciences of economics, sociology, and psychology, as hatched in the growing culture of research universities. History, traditionally a branch of the humanities, was retooled to suit the new regime of academe, seeking to borrow the prestige and authority of science. Words like “data,” “evidence,” and “hypothesis” began entering the “discourse” of the “field,” terminology that has been with the “discipline”—no longer “art”—of history ever since.

It would be hard to overstate the impact of these developments. To those who embraced them, the basis of a course of action was less a matter of what had happened, or even what should happen, but rather what objective circumstances dictated will happen—if those who stood in the path of progress didn’t mindlessly gum up the works. History was no longer a useful guide: indeed, it was often a record of what had gone wrong or a problem to be overcome. Experts became the new priests, at times echoing the severity of the Puritans (some of the Progressives were literally their heirs).

This new iteration of the Progress party met determined resistance. Sometimes this was a matter of pointing out the internal tensions within the new social sciences (mindful of the unpredictable course of human behavior, there have always been those who consider the discipline of political science a contradiction in terms). Sometimes it was a matter of noting the self-serving qualities of their prescriptions, whether as a matter of reinforcing their own authority—or their prejudices. (Expertise-based racism has been among the most virulent forms of bigotry, which may be why some would like to forget it, even as there are signs it is reappearing, for example, in the treatment of Asian Americans in college admissions that echo the treatment of Jews a century ago.) And sometimes it was a matter of the way the Progress Party could ride roughshod over the values and ideals the members of the Tradition Party held most dear.

By the second quarter of the twentieth century, the Progressive movement had largely burned out. Those who had considered themselves Progressives now became “liberals”—a term that emphasized an effort to broker interests rather than formulate top-down social solutions to collective programs. The term could be confusing, because liberalism had traditionally been associated with economic notions of laissez-faire, while this variety emphasized pragmatic government intervention—with a dollop of expertise—in the name of the collective good, which has been the hallmark of liberal economic theory since the time of Adam Smith. But like all compelling political formulations, this wave also eventually ran its course, leaving the field to Traditionalists who gained the upper hand in American political culture in the closing decades of the century. Supply-side economics, conservative family values, and the need to overcome the “Vietnam Syndrome” in foreign policy had the upper hand in mainstream discourse.

The advent of the Information Revolution at the turn of this century shifted the playing field. Once again, expertise was regnant, as terms like “data points,” “modeling,” and “algorithm” entered common parlance. Now we had a new wave of progressives—lower-case “P,” to emphasize a commitment to democracy (increasingly, if at times misleadingly, regarded as synonymous with diversity). Computers, programs, and spreadsheets were hailed as more reliable guides for human action than the prejudices of the economically privileged or the ways of the benighted past. Trust the experts, we were told. Those who didn’t were “denialists”—people who stood in the way of progress.

Clearly, there were, and are, people whose resistance to the culture of expertise is irrational and counterproductive, most obvious in the alarmingly large number of people willing to cast their ballots for a morally bankrupt charlatan in 2016 and 2020. But once again, the Progress Party has had its blind spots, which are all the more aggravating for its seeming inability to believe that it can be legitimately questioned. This is especially true when the Progress Party ignores empirical evidence that undermines its most cherished assumptions, whether as a matter of how to control a pandemic, whether transgender therapies can actually be harmful, or when a cluster of human cells becomes worthy of 14th amendment protection.

You get my drift: I’m a member of the Tradition Party. Which, among other things, means that I tend to value history more than expertise. I know my history is selective; all history is. But like religion, which I also honor, history is most valuable when it tells me what I don’t particularly want to hear, and when I remember that which I do want to hear is a matter of faith, not self-evident truth.

I’m biased: I’m a historian.