Saturday, May 10, 2008

• More on “The Myth of Progress,” from N.T. Wright’s book “Surprised by Hope"

  Currently Reading Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church By N. T. Wright see related

   

   

  The myth of progress has deep roots in contemporary Western culture, and some of those roots are Christian. The idea that the human project, and indeed the cosmic project, could and would continue to grow and develop, producing unlimited human improvement and marching toward utopia, goes back to the Renaissance and was given its decisive push by the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The full flowering of this belief took place in Europe in the nineteenth century, when the combination of scientific and economic advances, on the one hand, and democratic freedoms and wider education, on the other, produced a strong sense that history was accelerating toward a wonderful goal. El Dorado was just around the corner, the millennium in which the world would live at peace. Prosperity would spread out from enlightened Europe and America and embrace the world. By no means all thinkers a hundred years ago fitted into this mold, but many, including some of enormous influence such as Hegel, did so enthusiastically. This again, is precisely where some of our politicians still gain their inspiration.

   

  This utopian dream is in fact a parody of the Christian vision. The Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world come together to produce a vision of history moving forward toward its goal, a goal that will emerge from within rather than being a new gift from elsewhere. Humans can be made perfect and are indeed evolving inexorably toward that point. The world is ours to discover, exploit, and enjoy. Instead of dependence on God’s grace, we will become what we have the potential to be by education and hard work. Instead of creation and new creation, science and technology will turn the raw material of this world into stuff of utopia. Like the mythical Prometheus, defying the gods and trying to run the world his own way, liberal modernism supposes that the world can become everything we want it to be by working a bit harder and helping forward the great march into the glorious future.

   

  The real problem with the myth of progress is, as I hinted, that it cannot deal with evil. And when I say “deal with,” I don’t just mean intellectually, though that is true as well; I mean in practice. It can’t develop a strategy that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world. This is why all the evolutionary optimism of the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography, and other interesting sidelines that evolution has thrown up for our entertainment in the twentieth century. We can’t explain them, given the myth of progress, and neither can we eradicate them. Marx’s own agenda, not to explain the world but to change it, remains unfulfilled. Of course, the twentieth century provided a quite full answer to the myth of progress, as many people (such as Karl Barth) saw during the First World War, but it’s remarkable how many others have continued to believe and propagate it nonetheless. Teilhard himself was a stretcher bearer during the Great War, and the experience was influential not in leading him away from evolution but in his attempt to factor human suffering into his equation.

   

  Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient. It reminds the politicians that there is a gap in their thinking. The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light.

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