On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

secularity, according to Taylor, is that human flourishing becomes the highest good.86 Although a pilgrimage—whether literal religious travel or metaphorical spiritual journey—involves both linearity and change, it differs subtly but significantly from the modern idea of progress, the foundation for the secular notion of human flourishing. Postapocalyptic stories confront the myth of progress. Progress is not the same as hope. The modern idea of progress is founded on a belief in the perfectibility—or at least the unbounded improvability—of humankind. Progress is an Enlightenment idea, grounded in the obvious and measurable progress of science but erroneously applied to the human condition. This explains why the science that informs medicine improves over the ages but our poetry does not. Although human manners and morals shift and change, and human cultures exchange one systemic sin for another, human nature does not change, let alone progress.