Are We Making Progress?

A conservative estimate.

Written by Graham Cunningham.

I am of the Boomer Generation. In post-WW2 Britain, “progress” – or at least the hopeful anticipation of it – was the philosophical air we breathed. In very different ways, this was also true across large parts of the globe. Not all parts of course. In Britain, the mood was all “out with the old and in with the new”. This mood was manifested in (amongst other things) the demolition not just of bomb sites but also swathes of “old-fashioned” Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings to make way for futuristic urban road schemes and Corbusian concrete tower blocks. If those old-fashioned buildings had survived into the 21st century, they would now have a market value in the billions; possibly trillions.

In the capitalist West (plus Japan and Australasia) GDP certainly was booming. The Soviet Union was approaching the zenith of its sense of itself as a Marxist utopia. The People’s Republic of China had just been born. The Indian subcontinent had finally shuffled off its colonial coil. (What the balance of optimism/pessimism was in other parts of what used to be called The Third World is probably just too complex to compute.)

My own father was disdainful of both Progressivism and Capitalism but in 50s, 60s and 70s Britain, such attitudes were rare even among Tories. My own teenage political stirrings – in the time of Labour Party politics and “All You Need is Love” youth culture – were a mixed bag. On the one hand, society’s need for ‘Equality’ seemed axiomatic to me but, on the other hand, most everyone who talked about it (both politicians and my own teenage peers) struck me as have-your-cake-and-eat-it merchants. Then there was university and the instinctive sense that not being “on the Left” would be really bad for your love life.

Fast forward to career, marriage and children and, for several years, politics – Lefty or otherwise – was very low on my mental horizon. Then in the early Thatcher 80s (to the dismay of everyone around me) I emerged from my Progressive chrysalis as the small-c armchair conservative that I remain to this day.

My working days are long over but I still recall this conversation with a Lefty colleague: “The trouble with you conservatives,” he said “is that it’s all doom and gloom with you. You’re addicted to it.” My initial reaction: “Me?… gloomy!... Breath of Spring, Me.” But then, on reflection, the thought occurred that maybe he had a point. Is the grimace of the conservative, as he looks out on a rising tide of intellectual fashion or an ebbing away of some cherished traditional social mores, only a kind of sea-sickness? Is one’s dogged conservatism as out-of-balance and unrealistic as the latest progressive cause celebre of the PC fashionistas that one so despises? One thinks of the Serenity Poem and cheerfully accepting “the things you cannot change” – in this case the philosophical incontinence of some of your fellow men. (All my colleagues throughout my career, by the way, were Lefties.)

For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance, or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant. But this sort of mind-game too is not, in itself, unpleasant. Maybe progressive optimism and conservative pessimism are both – in the case of comfortable Western man – just alternative psychological “lifestyle choices”. Pessimism of this kind is plainly a quite different thing from that, say, of the inhabitants of a village facing a very real threat of genocidal annihilation.

Progressive versus conservative intellectual discourse was given an apparent sharp tilt to the left a few years back by the publication, in 2011, of Steven Pinker’s widely acclaimed The Better Angels of Our Nature – a tour de force of evidence-rich, cheerfully eloquent prose that sets out to demonstrate that we (mankind, that is) are becoming progressively less violent and that this trend can (albeit with some temporary reversals) be traced all the way back to the dawn of civilisation. In a clutch of enthusiastic (sometimes ecstatic) reviews, right across a spectrum from The Guardian to The Wall Street Journal, the book was cited as a philosophical game changer. This assessment gives the flavour: Better Angels is "a monumental achievement" that "should make it much harder for pessimists [read conservatives] to cling to their gloomy vision of the future."

But the hype surrounding it perhaps accords Better Angels a philosophical significance that it does not necessarily have. Arguably it postulates what is in effect a giant Aunt Sally (that most people have a misplaced pessimism about the future) and then mounts an 800 page demolition of it. “Believe it or not” (his first paragraph opines) “and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time.” 

“Most people” he suggests a few paragraphs further on, will be inclined to greet his revelations with “scepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” But how does he know what most people do, or do not believe in this regard? I for one have never entertained this idea of a historic growth of violence and neither, I suspect, have most people with a reasonably developed interest in history. And people with the kind of Daily Mail “Oh my God, what on earth are things coming to” perspective are unlikely to be his readership anyway. But the really skewiff thread of the argument is when he starts to speculate (about 600 pages in) that his statistics on the more recent downward trends in violence can best be explained as resulting from the so-called Rights Revolution.  

Mankind may be progressing but that does not mean that this is down to our much vaunted 19-21^st century philosophies of progress. Pinker is one of those who take the recent Rights Revolution (one of his “Six Trends” that help to account for the decline of violence) entirely at face value. A campaigner for Social Justice is, to Pinker, simply driven by a desire for ... social justice (whatever that might actually mean). Gay-Rights and anti-Racist campaigners are simply dovish souls just wanting to be accepted for what they are. The conservative however is likely to also detect a souring whiff of cant; he notices the champagne in the socialist, the thought-policeman in the Gay Pride marcher, the racist in the anti-Racist, the have-your-cake-and-eat-it coquetry in the Cosmopolitan feminist. He is likely to exclaim to the pages of his Better Angels book: “Yes but souls like Me – and throughout all of history - probably never were violent, never were misogynistic, never did join a mob”. Just as when, on the TV news, he hears that the violent street protest was “caused” by X, Y or Z, he will exclaim: “No! It was caused by people with a mob mentality”.

What then of the conservative’s alternative perception: that the human condition – in terms of the affairs of the heart, of the interplay of desire and fear, of the capacity for what used to be called good and evil – is fundamentally unchanging? The skepticism that fills the columns (and comment threads) of conservative media, on both sides of the Atlantic, is not in fact especially about violence or even about the long term fate of humanity. It is skepticism about the chances that swathes of one’s fellow men in the here and now will ever emerge from their lefty PC arrested adolescence and grow up. For is that not what the politically correct version of progress is really about? Ever since Rousseau (ever since Marx) it has been, in essence, an arrested-adolescent mind-game – and a deliciously cost-free one for the well-healed middle class virtue-signaller. Not surprisingly, succeeding generations of real adolescents have lapped it up in spades. Thus have rhetorical utopias been amazingly seductive to the modern consciousness, especially in their hijacking of ego-flattering, nice sounding words like progress and radical.

Whereas the conservative is unlikely to identify himself as part of some great undiscriminating “we”, progressing or otherwise. He/she is circumspect and sceptical. At their best they aspire to be a wiser but not necessarily any less cheerful soul than their Progressive neighbours. But the conservative is unlikely to grab the megaphone to tell you all about it.

For these reasons and more, conservatism has been asleep for most of the last 70 years, allowing Progressives a clear run through the commanding heights of the burgeoning mass education and mass media establishments. So much so that now, to voice the truth – that crass “progressive” progress is mostly counter-productive (Mao was a real first rank Progressive) and that real human advances tend to happen in spite of, not because of it – seems paradoxical and invites blank disbelief. Conservatism has long been in retreat throughout the Western world and is in dire need of somehow finding a new way to express its alternative vision in seductive terms.

Certainly some conservative pessimism about progress is mere grumpiness and some of it – just like its counterpart in the infinitely larger progressive media – is 21^st century-style tribal bigotry. But at its best it is a wry observation (based on close observation of friends and enemies, family and colleagues, literature and ‘current affairs’) that there are, and always will be, honesty and self delusion, real and faux expressions of generosity of spirit, bullies dressed up as champions of liberty... wise men and fools in other words. Conservative may also have taken note from their reading of history that progress – real improvements in the quality of life of the average man or woman – mostly spring from man’s technological ingenuity rather than his ideological mind games.

This article was originally published at Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Graham Cunningham started Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 2023, having previously been a freelance contributor to various conservative-leaning magazines, including The American Conservative, The American Mind and The New Criterion. He is a retired architect.

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