The War To End All Progress?

Wilfred McClay interrogates the common notion that “the Great War’s chief accomplishment was its wanton destruction of an entire political and social order and, with it of a certain blithe European optimism about the future.” Not so fast, he argues – it’s more complicated than that:

[O]ne of its lasting consequences has been to make us uneasy with the very concept of progress. We are not prepared to give up that concept entirely. That would be nearly inconceivable. … [O]ur culture is borne along by the flow of enormous progressive inertia. It does not necessarily have to affirm its earlier commitments, or even be aware of them, in order to be propelled or guided by them for a very long time. We teach our children that it is good, nay imperative, that they should want “to make a difference.” But there is no doubt that we do not feel quite as ready as we once were to endorse explicitly the idea of progress, without always employing the protective mechanisms of qualifiers or quotation marks. We live with a certain split-mindedness in that regard.

To further explain his point, McClay describes going to an academic conference on moral progress in history – timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. He was surprised to find himself the only participant overtly defending progress, though upon closer inspection he noticed even his colleagues hadn’t quite let go of the concept:

That said, the opposition to the idea of progress that I saw in my colleagues did not seem to me to go very deep. It seemed almost entirely professional and notional, without any echo in the conduct of their busy, well-organized, ambitious, and purposeful lives. No such thing as progress? Seriously? Who actually lives with such an assumption? Even our occasional efforts to sound fatalistic in our speech betray all the things that such speech silently presumes: that, as free and purposeful beings, we cannot help projecting certain ideals or goals, if even only short-range or proximate ones, into the inchoate future. This is particularly so in the United States, where every lamentation has a way of turning into a jeremiad, and thereby into a form of moral exhortation and a call to improvement, and thus to become the polar opposite of fatalism. The language of true fatalism would be stony and resigned silence, and that is not what we see or hear. There is a difference between what we think, and what we think we think.

(Image: British 55th Infantry Division soldiers, blinded by tear gas during the Battle of Estaires, 10 April 1918, via Wikimedia Commons)