myth of progress | Glossary Term | The Komorebi Effect

The unfounded belief that humanity is on some sort of march of unremitting progress.

There is an illusion that we are somehow moving through time along an ever ascending arc of progress. “Faith in progress is not false in every respect. What is false, however, is the myth of the liberated world of the future, in which everything will be different and good.”¹ The course of human history is less a path of ascendance than it is a series of advances and retreats. We should question whether anything is really progress if it isn’t directed toward valuable ends. No doubt, modern man is more powerful than at anytime in human history. But as Paul Tyson points out, “There is no necessary connection between advances in powerful means and progress toward valuable ends.”² We would do well “to revise the superior assumption that we understand the world better than our ancestors, and adopt a more realistic view that we just see it differently – and may indeed be seeing less than they did.”³

Without a doubt, scientific advances have made our lives better in countless ways. Diseases that were once killers are now treatable. Poverty is in decline around the world. More and more people are gaining access to safe clean water. More people in the world are now fat than are starving. No one ought to hanker for the days when cholera was a clear and present danger everywhere. But technology has also turned the heartland into oceans of monoculture. It’s given us the hydrogen bomb and the surveillance state on steroids. And it’s given us, well, steroids.

The presumption of unremitting progress is not well supported. We look back at primitive man. We consider our position today. And we simplistically draw an arc connecting us to them. In doing this we ignore the fact that throughout history societies, like all living things, germinate, flourish, and then senesce. Somehow it doesn’t occur to us that we might be on a similar trajectory. Inexplicably, things are different this time. We not only think too much of ourselves, we short-change early man in order to fit this imaginary arc of progress between us. We cherry pick examples that support this idea of unremitting progress. We look back at early man and see him very differently from how he most likely saw himself.

People have been interested in everything about the caveman except about what he actually did in that cave… like drawing or painting animals; why can’t we simply recognize the primitive man’s work as that of a man… those animals were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist… They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempts difficult things… When people of all sorts talk about the caveman, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave… so far as the evidence goes, a child would be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man, being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

We say, “Early man used crude tools so he must have been crude.” Or, “He told crude stories so he clearly didn’t share our sophisticated understanding of the world.” All while blinded to the highly compressed truths contained in many of those archaic myths. We never stop to consider who wields the cruder weapon; a stone axe or a hydrogen bomb?

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