Dystopias, authoritarianism, technological threats... Is progress over?

The world is always getting better. We are moving on to greater levels of well-being, respect, happiness. This idea, the idea of progress, has seemed natural to human beings for the last three centuries. It is embedded in our psyche and we have a daily way of thinking about it: children will always live better than their parents. But the idea of linear and ascending progress has not always existed, nor does it have indisputable benefits, nor does it seem to hold up in times of abolished futures, when civilization hits a wall. Children, we discover with alarm, will be worse off than their parents. The menu of daily apocalypses never seemed so full at a time when Donald Trump has returned to the White House leading a wave of far-right populism that threatens democracy, as wars drag on in Ukraine and Gaza, and the shadows of the climate crisis and runaway technology loom over the future. It is difficult to imagine a future at all. And even more difficult to imagine an appealing future. Does it make sense to think about progress today?

There was a time when the world seemed static. People were born and died, they did not move from their homeland, they did not know what was happening in the rest of the planet, and everything remained more or less the same. Changes happened slowly and the idea of a circular time was predominant, as Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions, explained in The Myth of the Eternal Return. In archaic thought, the events of life were only repetitions of other events that had occurred in a mythical time, hence the sacred nature of activities such as hunting, fishing, sex and the veneration of ancestors. Everything was repetition, just as days and seasons are repeated. Although Christianity put a beginning and an end to history (the Creation and the Last Judgement), this feeling of circularity persisted in the common people.

Linear time, and with it the idea of progress, arrived with Modernity, the fruit of the Enlightenment, the scientific and industrial revolutions and their sociopolitical consequences: capitalism and liberal democracy. The world began to move at increasing speed, pulled forward by the enlightened thinkers and their triad of reason-progress-well-being. It was the age of Enlightenment that overcame the medieval darkness (a darkness that is now being questioned) and led to our world of progress and wonders. The current idea of the future emerged: a glorious place towards which we are heading almost out of necessity.

“The idea of progress created the modern world,” explains Johan Norberg, author of books such as Progress: 10 Reasons to Look Forward to the Future and Open: The Story of Human Progress, by email. He provides examples of its benefits: the decrease in global extreme poverty, the increase in life expectancy and the reduction in infant mortality. “This happened thanks to wealth and technology, but people would not have worked hard to invest, innovate and create if they did not believe that their efforts could work. We need a culture of hope and possibility if we want human progress to continue,” says the Swedish historian, considered part of the new optimists, a movement that is also associated with, among others, the psychologist Steven Pinker.

Criticism of the sense of history

But the bright idea of progress has been heavily criticized. The 19th-century Romantics saw industrial progress as the cause of disconnection from the environment and dehumanization, reducing people to mere cogs in the production process. Already in the 20th century, prominent members of the Frankfurt School, such as Adorno and Horkheimer (in their Dialectic of Enlightenment), considered the desire for progress, through instrumental reason, to be a path towards the domination of nature and the alienation of human beings; it was a line followed by postmodern thinkers, critical of the great metanarratives (in the words of Jean-François Lyotard), among which the idea of progress was included (along with Christianity and Marxism). History was not heading in a straight line towards a better future, but was a web of more complex and unpredictable processes.

In short, Western capitalist civilization was presented as progress, while other cultures were considered uncivilized and backward. “Although the myth of modernity portrayed Western expansion as a benevolent mission, in reality it was linked to great atrocities: from genocidal colonization and enslavement of the non-European world to an endless chain of increasingly devastating wars or the planetary ecocide we face,” says by email the German historian Fabian Scheidler, author of The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization, where he goes through 5,000 years of history to explain how civilization, pushed by militarization, the expansion of capital and ideological control, has reached the brink of collapse.

The world today is founded on the injustices and destruction of that vision of the enlightened man who excluded, dehumanized and dominated everything else, armed with the weapons of reason and science. The palpable end of progress, for its critics, is the atomic bombs, the extermination camps, the destruction of the planet. In the 20th century, then, the idea of progress entered into crisis and Scheidler points out an irony: those who have fought against this type of progress are those we now call progressives.

Because, as Scheidler points out, there is no single way of understanding the term: on the one hand, there is economic and technological progress that pursues greater production and domination; on the other, progress in the way that progressivism understands it: the attainment of greater levels of social justice and common welfare. These are often contradictory visions. “Progress in the sense of economic development is over; we have entered an era in which all economic expansion implies a deterioration of ecological conditions. What we need is a redistribution of wealth without eco-destructive expansion. But we know that this cannot happen because the paradigm of accumulation and profit prevents it,” reflects via email the Italian thinker Franco Bifo Berardi, author of books such as Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. It is a dead end: Bifo does not see either of the two faces of progress as possible, neither the one that promises the abundance of growth, nor the one that promises a better life.

“The modern idea of progress was born linked to the purpose of walking towards freedom,” says the Madrid-based philosopher Clara Ramas, author of the essay El tiempo perdido (Lost Time), where she explores the melancholy and nostalgia associated with a Golden Age that perhaps did not exist and that we only imagine. “But the foundations of modern freedom were oil and fossil fuels. Today the question arises as to whether this idea of freedom is compatible with the limits of the Earth. Meanwhile, hypertech millionaires continue with their particular idea of progress: abandoning the planet and overcoming the physiological limits of our species [through transhumanism]. Should we be content with challenging this idea?” Ramas adds.

The hunter-gatherer model is gradually gaining ground: perhaps everything went wrong 7,000 years ago, when, in the Neolithic, the human species developed agriculture and became sedentary. This is what the American essayist Christopher Ryan argues in Civilized to Death, where he fights against the neo-Hobbesian idea that considers the human state prior to this civilization as a chaotic struggle of all against all. He defends archaic societies (still found in uncontacted tribes) that were more integrated into the ecosystem, more egalitarian, in which, in addition, less work was done, taking advantage of the gifts of nature. In the Neolithic, it was not the human being who dominated nature through agriculture, but on the contrary: it was wheat that domesticated us, as the best-selling essayist Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens. The transition from a nomadic life with few hours of work in hunter-gatherer tribes to a sedentary and arduous life linked to agriculture led to slavery and control over the land. Agriculture broke nomadism, generated surpluses, and with them, wealth, property and power relations that still exist today.

Uncertainty and dystopias

Today, the idea of progress is shaken by the profusion of dystopian futures in novels, essays and audiovisual products. Choose your own adventure: nuclear war, climate change, migration challenge, growing inequality, technological threat, crisis of democracy, rise of authoritarianism and a long etcetera of possibilities in which things can go wrong. In 2017, a collective book published in Spain by Seix Barral, with contributions from figures such as Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Eva Illouz, César Rendueles, Marina Garcés, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek and Santiago Alba Rico, gave a very graphic name to the situation: The Great Retreat.

The course of things, according to this concept, is not moving forward, but has stagnated, or, worse, is moving backwards. “Our greatest challenge is that the idea of the future seems to have been cancelled,” says Ramas. “I think that a redeemable sense of progress is to imagine futures that have become impossible, that existed as failed attempts and have been buried in dominant capitalism.” She illustrates her point, following the British feminist thinker Helen Hester, with the attempts in the 1920s (in Vienna, New York, Moscow) to organize domestic work and care collectively. Ramas points out: “The interesting thing is not so much to repeat the past as it happened (which on the other hand is impossible, given the dimension of the challenges we face), but to appeal to what could not be as a program for the future.” Other alternatives to progress understood as unlimited economic growth arise in currents such as degrowth, championed by Serge Latouche, who proposes abandoning the obsession with increasing GDP (an index that ignores many facets of reality) and reducing economic activity in a sustainable way, for example, by reducing consumerism and promoting the circular economy.

Some current ideas of progress are linked to technology and to the techno-utopian ideals spread from Silicon Valley, often unjustifiably mixing the notion of technological innovation with that of social progress. Raymond Kurzweil, a former Google engineer, proposed the Path to Singularity: the exponential growth of technological development, especially artificial intelligence, will take us by the middle of this century to that point of singularity where the human will give way to the posthuman. A dazzling vision for some, but worrying for others, concerned by future inequalities in access to improvements, the loss of human essence or the domination of humanity by posthuman forms of life, for whom we will be banal and useless.

“What remains of the idea of progress is closely linked to technology, but I am concerned about the kind of individuals created by a society that cannot see its future,” says Albert J. Ribes, author of Light, Terror, Hope. The Idea of Progress (1800-1968). When this sociologist asks his students at the Complutense University of Madrid, he sees how, year after year, the number of those who believe in progress is reduced while the number of those who think that there cannot be a better future is growing. In other words, that things can only get worse. “I find the abandonment of any collective project very worrying. We were going to make a better world, and we were going to do it together. Now we live in a perpetual present, isolated, without the capacity for collective action. It would be good if we could talk about the future.” Not automatic progress, as was thought in the 19th century, but rather an exciting project to carry out,” says Ribes.

The idea of progress, then, has those who defend it. “If progress happened automatically, we could just sit around watching Netflix all day,” says Norberg. He believes that it is precisely the difficulties that make it necessary to believe that things can get better, even when some of the current problems, such as climate change, were caused by previous solutions. “We need to think that there is a way forward and invest in the work and innovations that can help us face these problems, such as non-fossil fuel-based alternatives. If we abandon the idea of progress we will simply give up, and then the problems will prevail and our civilization will be doomed,” he adds. Without forgetting that true progress does not consist only in moving forward blindly, but also in thinking about where we want to go.

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