What Does Progress Mean?

The origins of 'progress' expose the incoherence of contemporary progressive politics

“For we must not expect too much of human beings in their progress toward the better, in order that we not earn with reason the derision of the politician, who is keen on holding the hope of this progress to be the dream of an exaggerating mind.” - Immanuel Kant, 1798

What do we mean when we talk about ‘progress’? Given that entire political factions - some wielding immense international power - call themselves ‘progressive’, it must matter what it means to progress, or what progress itself means. Without this understanding, the persistent demonising of ‘conservatives’, ‘reactionaries’ and ‘the right’ that stand in the way of progress makes little sense. Yet oddly, this interest in ‘progress’ only emerged with the Enlightenment, a little over two centuries ago. Thus, in the final years of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant was able to write his extraordinary remark, above, suggesting that the politicians of his time were keen to dismiss any concept of progress as a mere phantasm of the imagination. Not so today!

Kant’s ‘politicians’ were part of an imperial state that was doing perfectly well for itself, at a time when having an Empire was the in-thing in Europe. But less than ten years later, at the very start of the eighteenth century, Prussia (soon to become ‘Germany’) was humiliated by military losses to Napoleon and enthusiastically leapt at the chance of pursuing progress, following paths opened up by Enlightenment thinkers like Kant. The Empire reformed its governmental institutions, restructured military training and discipline, instituted mass public education, declared the serfs free people, and in general shifted power away from a narrowly construed aristocracy and towards the forms of representational government we like to call ‘democracy’.

Then as now, ‘progress’ evokes many different dimensions - social, political, technological - and one does not need to endorse them all to be ‘progressive’. The key question is the desire for change. Progressive politics are invested in making some alteration to the social or institutional circumstances, and having faith that these changes will be improvements - a point Kant explicitly touches upon in the brief remark quoted above. Kant, indeed, was a moderate when it came to progress. His view was that progress was merely possible, and that we pragmatically needed to accept this possibility in order to undertake reforms of the kind he explored in his political philosophy - many of which came to underpin democratic institutions across our planet, at least up until the early twenty first century.

Conversely, another Prussian philosopher, Georg Hegel, whose writings were enormously influenced by Kant, linked progress to the idea of history having a specific purpose, namely the liberation of the spirit. For Hegel, spirit had achieved perfection in the Prussian constitutional monarchy - a view nobody is likely to espouse today. Karl Marx, influenced in turn by Hegel, built his vision of progress in terms of the transition from capitalist means of production to communist means of production - but he still ran along Hegel’s lines, imagining a specific purpose to history. I find both of these accounts absurdly metaphysical, and am much more comfortable with Kant’s more restrained view of progress as an ideal.

When we’re asking what progress means, these historical comparisons appear inadequate for capturing what’s relevant about progress today. Contemporary issues such as who is permitted to use which bathrooms, how much money raised through taxation should be distributed to which people, who should be restricted under laws regarding abortions, and which attempts to kill certain classes of people constitute genocide all seem quite divorced from any traditional conception of ‘progress’. Every single one of these issues would have been flatly incomprehensible to Kant, for whom progress meant the transition to greater collective equality.

We simply do not know what progress means any more, since we have lost any kind of shared conception of history against which progress might be measured. Any grand narrative of liberation, such as had motivated woman’s suffrage, civil rights in the United States, or the decriminalisation of homosexuality, has long since run aground against petty squabbles about which identities should get priority. Pursuing collective equality has ceased to be a guiding ideal for progressives. Today, ‘progress’ can only mean uncontrollable change, the endless application of piecemeal social hacks without any shared guiding vision beyond ‘we demand this’. The absence of any coherent pattern to whatever social and political alterations are attempted is a warning that something has gone terribly wrong with our thinking about progress.