An Understanding of Progress

“What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say ‘Look, this is new?’ No, it has already existed, long ago before our time.”

~Ecclesiastes

“...While many historians have argued that modern belief in progress came from the Old Testament, [Christopher] Dawson believed that this could only have happened as a corruption of Hebraic teaching. The views of Ecclesiastes represent much of the Jewish skepticism about the significance or meaning of man’s actions in the here and now. Still, Dawson argued, of all ancient peoples, the Jews understood that some form of grace—tangible or otherwise—would be necessary to break humanity out of its own cycles of rise and fall and its false belief that it could—through the actions of women and men—claim our own redemption.

As mentioned above, the belief in progress in history might very well have its roots in scripture, but only if those who advocate progress distort the message of scripture so fundamentally as to make it essentially unrecognizable. All modern ideologies, Dawson knew, were simply perversions of old truths, those truths taken out of context and exaggerated to insanity. Communism exaggerates the need for community, fascism exaggerates the need for patriotism, and progress exaggerates the need for meaning and purpose.

Understood properly, the Old Testament repeatedly warned man against and about his own hubris, while it also promised justice. That justice, though, came from God and could rarely be found in this world. When justice came in this world, it did so to promote eternal justice. Even when injustice (the norm) came in this world, it did so to promote eternal justice. Justice, as understood completely, would come in the next world. ‘Here then we have a conception of history which is clearly progressive,’ Dawson wrote, ‘but it is a progress which fulfills itself only through the interposition of supernatural forces, not through the natural course of human development.’

The progressives of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Dawson argued, had secularized a sacred concept, believing that God or man would create a world of justice, here and now. Thus, to progressives, those who support progress support God and man. Those who reject progress reject God and man.

In such simplicity, only bullets—especially in the back of the head in some Nazi or Communist prison—could make all good and equal.

As such, an understanding of progress and its adherents was not just of academic curiosity to Dawson. It was central to understanding the good life and preventing those who misunderstood history from gaining control and imposing the will of man upon the creation of God.”

~Bradley Birzer