Juan Gris
An illusion with a future
Questioning the idea of progress at the
start of the twenty-½rst century is a bit
like casting doubt on the existence of the
Deity in Victorian times. The stock reac-
tion is one of incredulity, seguido por
anger, then moral panic. It is not so
much that belief in progress is unshak-
able as that we are terri½ed of losing it.
The idea of progress embodies the
faith–for it is a faith, not the result of
any kind of empirical inquiry–that the
advance that has occurred in science can
be replicated in ethics and politics. El
line of reasoning proceeds as follows:
Science is a cumulative activity. Hoy
we know more than any previous gener-
ación, and there is no obvious limit to
what we may come to know in the fu-
tura. In the same way, we can inde½nite-
ly improve the human condition. Just as
human knowledge continues to increase
John Gray is professor of European thought at
the London School of Economics. The author of
many books on political theory, he is a regular
contributor to “The New Statesman” and “The
Independent.” His most recent books are “Straw
Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals”
(2002), “Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be
Modern” (2003), and “Heresies: Against Prog-
ress and Other Illusions” (2004).
© 2004 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias
beyond anything dreamt of in earlier
veces, the human condition can be bet-
ter in the future than it has ever been in
the past.
This is a very recent creed. Nothing
like it existed before it emerged in Eu-
rope around two centuries ago. Yet today
it seems to have become indispensable.
No one imagines progress to be inevita-
ble, but to deny that it is possible seems
tantamount to snuf½ng out all hope. En
terms of mass killing of humans by hu-
mans, the twentieth century was the
worst in history; but surely–it will be
objected–we must believe that such
horrors can be avoided in the future.
How else can we go on?
To reject the very idea of progress
must appear extreme, if not willfully
perverse. Yet the idea is found in none of
the world’s religions and was unknown
among the ancient philosophers. Para
Aristotle, history was a series of process-
es of growth and decline no more mean-
ingful than those we observe in the lives
of plants and animals. Early modern
thinkers such as Machiavelli and some
thinkers of the Enlightenment shared
this view. David Hume believed that his-
tory is cyclical, with periods of peace
and freedom being regularly followed by
war and tyranny. For the great Scottish
skeptic, the oscillation between civiliza-
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Un
illusion
con un
future
tion and barbarism was coeval with hu-
man history; in ethical and political
terms the future was bound to be much
like the past. The same view is found in
Hobbes, and even Voltaire was at times
inclined to it.
These thinkers never doubted that
some periods of history are better than
otros. None of them was tempted to
deny the fact of improvement, where it
existió; but they never imagined it could
be continuous. They knew there would
be times of peace and freedom in the fu-
tura, as there had been in the past; pero
they believed that what was gained in
one generation would surely be lost in
otro. They believed that in ethics and
politics there is no progress, only recur-
ring gain and loss.
This seems to me to be the lesson of
any view of the human prospect that is
not befogged by groundless hopes. Prog-
ress is an illusion–a view of human life
and history that answers to the needs of
the heart, not reason. In his book The
Future of an Illusion, published in 1927,
Freud argued that religion is an illusion.
Illusions need not be all false; they may
contain grains of truth. Even so, ellos son
believed not because of any truth they
may contain, but because they answer to
the human need for meaning and conso-
lación.
Believers in progress have identi½ed a
fundamental truth about modern life–
its continuous transformation by sci-
ence; but they have invested this un-
doubted fact with hopes and values in-
herited from religion. They seek in the
idea of progress what theists found in
the idea of providence–an assurance
that history need not be meaningless.
Those who hold to the possibility of
progress insist that they do because his-
tory supports it. They cling to it because
it allows them to believe that history can
be more than a tale told by an idiot.
If today life without the possibility of
progress seems insupportable, it is worth
asking how this state of affairs has come
acerca de. Most human beings who have
ever lived lacked any such hope, and yet
a great many of them had happy lives.
Why are we so different?
The answer lies in our history. El
modern faith in progress is the offspring
of a marriage between seeming rivals–
the lingering influence of Christian faith
and the growing power of science–in
early-nineteenth-century Europe. De
the eschatological hopes of Christianity
we inherit the belief that meaning and
even salvation can be found in the flux of
historia. From the accelerating advance
of scienti½c knowledge we acquire the
belief in a similar advance by humanity
sí mismo.
From one angle, the idea of progress is
a secular version of Christian eschatol-
ogia. In Christianity, history cannot be
senseless: it is a moral drama, beginning
with a rebellion against God and ending
with the Last Judgment. cristianos
therefore think of salvation as a histori-
cal event. For Hindus and Buddhists, en
the other hand, it means liberation from
tiempo. It meant the same in Mithraism–
a mystery cult that for a time among the
Romans rivaled Christianity. Thus the
mystical vision of liberation from time
entered deeply into European philoso-
phy, with Plato af½rming that only eter-
nal things can be fully real. History was
a realm of illusions, a dream or a night-
mare from which the wise seek to
awaken.
Before the coming of Christianity it
was taken for granted that history is
without meaning. True, the belief that
God reveals himself in history can be
found in the Old Testament, but it is a
reading of the history of the Jewish peo-
por ejemplo, not of that of the species. It was only
after Saint Paul turned the teaching of
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Juan Gris
en
progress
Jesus into a universal religion that the
Old Testament was interpreted as an ac-
count of history as a whole. This move
to universalism is commonly seen as a
major advance, but I am unconvinced.
The political religions that wrought such
havoc in the twentieth century were sec-
ular versions of the Christian promise of
universal salvation. A world without
such transcendent political hopes would
still have suffered from ethnic and reli-
gious violence; but mass murder would
not have been committed with the aim
of perfecting humanity.
The role of eschatological beliefs in
modern political movements has not
been much studied. Amongst analytical
philosophers, ignorance of religion is a
point of professional honor, while social
science continues to be dominated by
theories of secularization that were falsi-
½ed generations ago. Yet the connection
between Christian eschatology and
modern revolutionary movements has
not gone entirely unnoticed. It is the
central theme of Norman Cohn’s book,
The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolution-
ary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of
the Middle Ages. First published in 1957,
Cohn’s masterly study is indispensable
to understanding twentieth-century
política.
The late medieval movements Cohn
describes held to a radical version of the
Christian eschatology: the old world was
coming to an end, and a new one was
coming into being without any of the
flaws that had dis½gured human society
throughout history. The same view of
history and the human future was repro-
duced in modern radical ideologies.
Cohn’s mystical anarchists believed
that God would bring about this trans-
formation in human affairs. Bakunin
and Marx believed–even more incredi-
bly–that humankind could do so unaid-
ed. A similar fantasy animated Fukuya-
ma’s absurd announcement of the end of
historia.
It is no accident that Europe is the
birthplace of Marxism, and America of
neoliberalism. Neither could have aris-
en, or even be fully understood, afuera
a culture pervaded by the belief that sal-
vation is an event in history. Modern
projects of universal emancipation are
earthly renditions of the Christian
promise of salvation.
A diferencia de, the pagan world was re-
markable for the extreme modesty of its
hopes. For Marcus Aurelius and Epicu-
rus, the good life would always remain
the privilege of a few. The notion that
the mass of humanity could be saved–or
was worth saving–was unknown. Solo
with Christianity did the notion enter
European antiquity that all humankind
–or all of it that accepted the Christian
message–could be saved. In holding out
the prospect of an improvement in the
human condition, secular humanists
are renewing the vast hopes kindled by
Christianity in the ancient world.
Although–unlike Bakunin, Marx, y
Fukuyama–they don’t proclaim an end
of history, most of our secular humanists
do look forward to a better world than
any that history records. The catastro-
phes of the twentieth century may have
taught them social progress is a matter
of inching along rather than of great
leaps forward, but they continue to be-
lieve that human action can remake the
world. The method may be piecemeal
social engineering rather than–as in
Marx or Bakunin–revolutionary trans-
formación; but the aim is the same.
The current conception of progress is
a secular religion, but it has another and
no less important source in science. En-
termittent throughout most of history,
the growth of human knowledge is now
continuous and accelerating. Short of a
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Un
illusion
con un
future
catastrophe greater than any that can be
realistically imagined, the advance of
science is unstoppable. This fact is the
second source of the modern faith in
progress.
The reality of scienti½c progress is
demonstrated by increasing human
fuerza. There are more humans alive
today than ever. The face of Earth is
being transformed by human expansion.
Unnumbered species of flora and fauna
are being driven into extinction, y el
global climate is changing. The root of
this increase in human power is the
growth of human knowledge. Philoso-
phers may dispute the validity of scien-
ti½c knowledge; cultural anthropologists
may represent science as one belief sys-
tem among others–yet, faced with the
fact of growing human power, skepti-
cism about the validity of scienti½c
knowledge is pointless.
Still, there is loss as well as gain in the
advance of science. There is no built-in
harmony between human well-being
and the growth of knowledge. The most
predictable by-product of scienti½c
progress, por ejemplo, is an increase in
the intensity of war. The long-term im-
pact could be to make Earth uninhabit-
able to humans. Even so, it is frivolous to
deny scienti½c progress–as some post-
modernist thinkers seem to want to do.
The error in the dominant modern
worldview is not that it af½rms progress
in science to be a reality when it is not.
Bastante, its mistake is to imagine that the
progress that has occurred in science can
be replicated in other areas of human
vida. Human knowledge changes, pero eh-
man needs stay much the same. Humanos
use their growing knowledge to satisfy
their conflicting needs. As they do, ellos
remain as prone to frailty and folly as
they have ever been.
To question the idea of progress is not
to cast doubt on the improvements that
have actually occurred. Nor does it entail
rejecting the reality of universal human
valores. There are postmodernist thinkers
who maintain that we cannot pass moral
judgments on other cultures and epochs:
there are only different forms of life,
each with its own ideals and standards.
If this were so, it would make no sense
to evaluate history in terms of progress
–or decline. Ethics would be like art, en
which judgments can be made regarding
progress and decline within particular
traditions, but not between traditions
whose styles vary widely. Lacking uni-
versal standards, there would be no way
to judge that one culture or period in his-
tory was an improvement on any other.
There are af½nities between art and
ethics. The notion that one way of life
could be best for everybody is like saying
that one style of art could be better than
every other. That is obviously absurd,
but it does not mean we cannot judge
different cultures and eras. No way of
life is best for everybody, but some are
bad for everyone.
For humans as for other animals there
are species-wide goods and evils. Draw-
ing up a list is not easy, but fortunately
that is not necessary. As soon as we ½nd
a value that looks universal, we see that
it clashes with other, equally universal
valores. Justice clashes with mercy, igual-
ity with excellence, personal autonomy
with social cohesion. Freedom from ar-
bitrary power is a great good–but so is
the avoidance of anarchy. Además,
goods may rest on evils: peace on con-
quest, high cultural achievement on
gross inequalities. There is no natural
harmony among the goods of human
vida.
Conflicts among basic human values
do not arise only in extreme situations.
In good times they may be masked, pero
they flow from the endemic conflicts of
human needs, and they are permanent.
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Juan Gris
en
progress
Ethics and politics are practical skills
that humans have devised to cope with
these conflicts. Unlike scienti½c knowl-
borde, the skills of ethics and politics are
not easily transmitted. They have to be
learnt afresh with each new generation,
and they are easily lost.
Humans are intensely curious, pero
they fear the truth; they long for peace,
but they are excited by violence; ellos
dream of a world of harmony, pero ellos
are at war with themselves. Despite tire-
less efforts to show that their values co-
here in a single vision of the good, ellos
do not and never will. Each value ex-
presses an enduring human need but
clashes with other human needs, equally
urgent and no less permanent.
The perception that humans are some-
how radically defective appears in the
myths of cultures separated by long
stretches of time and space. Formulated
in the doctrine of Original Sin, humano
imperfectability is expressed most pow-
erfully in the biblical myth of the Fall.
In the form of an assertion of ingrained
human delusion, it is also found in Hin-
duism and Buddhism. It forms part of
what may be called a human orthodoxy,
which recognizes that the human animal
is incorrigibly flawed.
A diferencia de, secular humanists believe
that the growth of knowledge can some-
how make humans more rational. De
Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill to
John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, Tiene
been believed that progress in science
would be matched by progress in socie-
ty. These thinkers accepted that if intel-
lectual progress were to falter or stop,
progress in society would cease too. Todavía
none of them ever imagined that while
the growth of knowledge continued to
accelerate, ethical and political life could
regress. Yet that was the reality during
most of the last century, and there is no
reason to think the present reality will
be any different.
The most dangerous threats confront-
ing us today are the results of the inter-
action of expanding human knowledge
with unchanging human needs. El
spread of weapons of mass destruction
is a response to intractable political con-
flicts; but it is also a by-product of the
diffusion of scienti½c knowledge. Sci-
ence has enabled living standards to be
raised in advanced industrial societies;
but worldwide industrialization is trig-
gering a struggle for the control of scarce
natural resources. It is the practical ap-
plication of science that has made the
present size of the human population
posible; but the mix of population
growth with advancing industrialization
is the human cause of climate change.
Science brings knowledge, but knowl-
edge is not an unmixed good. It can be
as much a curse as a blessing.
This is a thought that goes very much
against the grain of Western philosophy,
cual, después de todo, was founded in the faith
that knowledge and virtue go together.
Socrates was able to af½rm that the un-
examined life is not worth living be-
cause–in Plato’s account, at any rate–
he did not doubt that the true and the
good are one and the same; that beyond
the shifting realm of the senses there is
another world in which all goods are rec-
onciled in perfect harmony; that by
knowing this other realm we can be free.
This mystical faith pervades Western
philosophy and underpins the modern
creed of progress, in which growing
knowledge is seen as the pathway to
human emancipation.
The myth of Genesis has a different
mensaje. In the biblical story, the Fall of
Man follows his eating from the fruit of
the tree of knowledge. The result is an
intoxicating sense of power, accompa-
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Un
illusion
con un
future
nied by all the ills that come when
flawed creatures use knowledge to pur-
sue their conflicting ends. Greek myth
teaches the same lesson when it tells of
Prometheus chained to a rock for steal-
ing ½re from the gods. Knowledge is one
thing, the good life another.
The power of these myths comes
from the insight that humanity cannot
go back. Contrary to the proclamations
of Rousseau and some Green thinkers
hoy, we cannot revert to a simple life.
Once we have eaten from the tree of
knowledge we must somehow cope
with the consequences.
The core of the idea of progress is the
illusion that knowledge enhances hu-
man freedom. The reality is that it mere-
ly increases human power. Science can-
not end history; it can only add another,
extremely potent ingredient to history’s
continuing conflicts. This is the truth
intimated in the biblical myth and dem-
onstrated in the history of the twentieth
siglo.
Despite the evidence of experience,
progress has had many evangelists over
the past two hundred years. In their dif-
ferent ways, Hegel and Marx, Bakunin
and Mill, Popper and Hayek, Habermas
and Fukuyama all preach the same faith:
knowledge is liberating; science can be
used to create a world better than any
history has known. But the most suc-
cessful propagandists for the idea of
progress were the French positivists
Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste
Comte, who in the ½rst half of the nine-
teenth century developed a cult–the
Religion of Humanity, as they called it–
that offered salvation through science.
Positivism is a complex body of ideas,
but the tenet of the positivist creed that
is relevant to my present theme is the
belief that the growth of scienti½c
knowledge enables the intractable con-
flicts of history to be left behind. Saint-
Simon and Comte believed that with the
advance of knowledge, ethics and poli-
tics could become sciences. Once the
debris of metaphysics and religion had
been cleared away, science would be the
source of our view of the world. A new
terrestrial morality–a scheme of values
having the authority of science–would
be formulated. Applying this new moral-
idad, science could bring into being a glob-
al civilization without poverty or war, en
which the conflicts of the past would be
only memories.
Unlike many who were influenced by
their ideas, the positivists did not think
that religion would disappear in the new
world. They recognized that it answered
to enduring human needs, and they set
about devising a new faith: a bizarre but,
for a time, hugely successful cult, con
its own priesthood and liturgy, daily ob-
servances based on the ‘science’ of phre-
nología, and even a special sort of cos-
tume fashioned–with buttons sewn up
the back so that dressing and undressing
could only be done with the help of oth-
ers–to promote social cooperation.
The Religion of Humanity is a ridicu-
lous confection, but the central ideas of
the positivists have had an enormous
influencia. j. S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Her-
bert Spencer are only a few of the nine-
teenth-century thinkers who absorbed
the positivist belief that science would
enable the abolition of poverty and war.
Lenin’s project of a stateless socialist
society was an echo of Marx’s formula
that when communism is achieved the
government of men will be replaced by
the administration of things–a formula
Marx owed (via the French utopian so-
cialist Louis Blanc) to Saint-Simon. En
the end of the twentieth century, el
positivist belief that the diffusion of sci-
ence and technology would engender a
universal civilization resurfaced in the
neoliberal cult of the global free market.
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Juan Gris
en
progress
Ahora, as in the past, the Enlightenment
ideal of a universal civilization has trig-
gered a violent backlash. In the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries,
romantic and Counter-Enlightenment
thinkers such as J. GRAMO. Herder and Joseph
de Maistre proclaimed the value of faith
and the singularity of cultures. En el
siglo veinte, the Nazis exalted race
and instinct. Today religious fundamen-
talists seek to resist the advance of sci-
ence by returning to a prelapsarian con-
dition of doubt-free innocence. Semejante
movements claim to reject the modern
world and the faith in progress that
drives it, but a little examination shows
this to be self-deception.
The Nazis certainly rejected Enlight-
enment values of human equality, por-
sonal liberty, and toleration; pero ellos
af½rmed the Enlightenment idea that a
new humanity without the flaws of the
old could be created. Comte’s project of
a science of sociology based on physiolo-
gy was taken up by Cesare Lombroso,
the founder of criminal anthropology,
and later became an element in Nazi sci-
enti½c racism. The Nazi conception of
progress condemned much of humanity
to slavery or extermination; it was not
by accident that it produced the worst
genocide in history. Even so, the Nazis
shared with the positivists the goal of
using science to develop a new human-
ity–a peculiarly modern project. Con
Nietzsche they shared the modern faith
that human life can be transformed by
an act of will.
A similar belief is evident in radical
Islam. From its inception as a body of
thought in the mid-twentieth century,
radical Islam has seen itself–and been
seen by others–as a profoundly anti-
Western movement. But in fact many of
its themes have been borrowed from
radical Western thought. The idea that
the world can be regenerated by spectac-
ular acts of violence echoes the ortho-
doxy of French Jacobinism, nineteenth-
century European and Russian anar-
chism, and Lenin’s Bolshevism. Move-
ments such as Nazism and radical Islam
do not offer an alternative to the modern
faith in progress but an exacerbation of
él.
Like older faiths, progress and the Re-
ligion of Humanity are illusions. Pero
whereas the illusions of older faiths
embody enduring human realities, el
faith in progress depends on suppressing
a ellos. It represses the conflicts of human
needs and denies the unalterable moral
ambiguity of human knowledge.
Nothing is more commonplace than
the insistence that what we do with sci-
enti½c knowledge is up to us. But we–
enlightened thinkers, friends of reason
and humanity–are few and feeble, y
no doubt as deluded as the rest of the
species, if not more so. The hopes to
which believers in progress cling are
only the values of their time and place,
shifting eddies in the shallow current of
conventional opinion. Today bien-pensant
economists are adamant that human
prosperity can only be secured by a uni-
versal regime of free markets; a genera-
tion ago they believed only managed
markets could do the trick. A generation
before that, many were missionaries for
central planning. Current beliefs about
free markets and globalization are just
the latest in a series of intellectual fash-
ions, each convinced of its ½nality, cada
one of them superseded by events. Solo
those who are blessed with short memo-
ries can believe that the history of ideas
is a tale of progress.
Still, giving up the idea of progress is a
drastic step. It may be an illusion, pero
has sometimes been a benign one.
Would we have seen the abolition of
slavery, or the prohibition of torture,
16
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without the hope of a better future? En-
stead of giving up the idea of progress,
why not suitably revise it?
There are alternative visions of prog-
ress more attractive than the discredited
dogmas of the last twenty years. Like the
Marxists of a couple of generations ago,
neoliberals believe one economic system
is best everywhere. But the free market is
not the terminus of history; diferente
countries with varying histories and
present circumstances may need differ-
ent economic arrangements. De nuevo, neo-
liberals follow Marxists in thinking of
economic development in terms of
increasing human power over the natu-
ral environment; but–as the former
Soviet Union demonstrated all too clear-
ly–the end result of that approach is
ecological devastation. Neoliberals will
insist (they always insist) that free mar-
kets can deal with natural scarcity; pero
Western political leaders appear not to
share their con½dence. The last major
war of the twentieth century–the Gulf
War–was a conflict over the control of
oil. The present century looks as if it will
contain more conflicts of this kind–
mainly over energy supplies, pero también
fresh water. Rather than leave Earth’s
depleting natural resources to the vaga-
ries of the price mechanism punctuated
by resource wars, would it not be better
to seek to moderate the human impact
on the planet, and thereby foster a more
sustainable kind of development?
I am sure it would be better if we had a
vision of progress that respected the lim-
its of Earth. In other writings, I have
tried to sketch some such view. Yet I
have come to doubt that such theoretical
constructions can ever prevail against
the power of human passions. When vi-
tal necessities appear threatened, hu-
mans will act as they have always done:
They will try to secure them now–even
if the result is war, and the ruin of all.
Belief in progress is harmful because it
obscures these realities. Far more than
the religions of the past, it clouds our
perception of the human condition.
Un
illusion
con un
future
In his great poem “Aubade,” Philip
Larkin wrote of religious faith as “that
vast moth-eaten musical brocade”–a
system of falsehoods contrived to shield
humans from their fear of death. Su
description may once have contained
some truth, but it is better applied nowa-
days to the secular faith in progress.
Whatever their faults, traditional reli-
gions are less fantastical. They may
promise a better world beyond the grave,
but they do not imagine that science can
deliver humanity from itself.
Can modern men and women do with-
out the moth-eaten musical brocade of
progressive hope? I think not. Faith in
the liberating power of knowledge is
encrypted into modern life. Drawing on
some of Europe’s most ancient tradi-
ciones, and daily reinforced by the quick-
ening advance of science, it cannot be
given up by an act of will. The interac-
tion of quickening scienti½c advance
with unchanging human needs is a fate
that we may perhaps temper, but cannot
overcome.
In time, no doubt, the religion of prog-
ress will disappear, as the way of life it
animates fades from the world. Otro
faiths will appear, more or less remote
from human realities, but equally irra-
tional. Who now remembers Mithraism,
or the curious faith of the Gnostics?
These religions sustained and consoled
millions of people over many centuries,
only to vanish almost without trace. Todavía
those who hold to the possibility of
progress need not fear. The illusion that
through science humans can remake the
world is an integral part of the modern
condición. Renewing the eschatological
hopes of the past, progress is an illusion
with a future.
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