Debunking the myth of progress

Our young people need to hear the great minds of the past if they are not to fall prey to the latest ideologies, argues Toby Lees.

At a time when British universities are competing to see which can close their humanities departments at the fastest rate, it might be helpful to consider that one of the biggest handicaps in every contemporary debate in our society is a lack of historical perspective.

We rush into debating major ethical, cultural and religious issues blissfully ignorant that more gifted minds have already examined them in greater detail, and they came up with powerful arguments.

The ancients have been there and done that.

For example, it might be (though it shouldn’t be) surprising to know that one of the greatest Christian theologians of all, St Thomas Aquinas back in the 13^th century, asked himself the question “How can you believe in God, when there is so much suffering in the world?” And he wasn’t burned at the stake for doing so.

Indeed, he considered seriously the problem of evil as a possible motive for rejecting the existence of God, before then giving a powerful explanation as to why God allows evil.

But why is it that so many people ask the question as if nobody has ever thought of it before? Well, it’s not just a failure in history and religious studies classes. It’s a broader cultural failing.

You can now go through school and university and, aside from your compulsory Shakespeare text at GCSE, have read nothing else written more than a hundred years ago. We live in a culture without roots, or what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in an evocative phrase, called ‘Liquid Modernity’.

Bauman was seeking to describe a condition of constant mobility and change in relationships, identities, and economics, and a culture in which institutions no longer provide individuals with a clear sense of stability and direction.

In ‘Liquid Modernity’ we increasingly identify with our desires and what we consume, and, given the very nature of consumptive desire in a fast-paced world with fast-changing fashions designed to encourage restless consumption, this leads to an unstable sense of self. Few have a sense of belonging to a tradition, and few have read deeply enough in it to participate in, what Mortimer Adler called, ‘the Great Conversation’.

The social critic Christopher Clausen has argued that we live in ‘a post-cultural age’. Culture, according to Ralph Woods, once ‘signified the totality of learned behaviours that a particular society inculcated in its inhabitants’. These behaviours, says Woods, ‘would lead to commonly agreed upon virtues which were passed on through institutions that, whilst not static, were basically stable’.

Culture is not just religion but art, politics, education, sexual ethics, and manners and a whole host of other shared ideas and practices too, all reflecting upon and engaged in the pursuit of the good life. 

But, says Clausen, in ‘the contemporary graveyard of cultures’ the single remaining universal value is ‘self-fulfilment’ and this self-fulfilment, we might add, is ‘free’ from any commonly held conception of what human flourishing looks like. What’s good for you is . . . good for you, and I’ll decide what’s good for me thank you very much!

In the two world wars of the last century over a million British men and women offered up their today for our tomorrow, but a recent survey found that that only 11% of Generation Z would fight for Britain, compared with 22% of a similarly aged cohort 20 years ago.

Almost half of those aged 18-27 (48%) said Britain was a racist country, according to research carried out in partnership with YouGov, compared with 34% of people aged 18-30 in the same study in 2004. Only 41% said they were proud to be British, down from 80%.

The findings suggest ‘marked declines in confidence in institutions and belief in the UK as a nation’. Young people feel increasingly alienated and they feel this way because people holding to certain ideologies have taught them to do so.

Our youth are rejecting their roots not due to greater enlightenment but due to a profound ignorance as to what those roots are.

As a society we have massively underestimated the real potency for such indoctrination when combined with the isolating effects of modern technology, and what a civilisational threat this is.

A willingness to fight for your country does not necessitate unquestioning and slavish adherence to all it now promotes and to all it has done in the past, but it is indicative of some love of place and people, and I say this as a Catholic and someone who has Irish blood and neither of those groups have been particularly well-treated in the modern history of this country.

But the distinct lack of love for place that characterises modern society is not the throwing off of the chains of small-mindedness; it’s not seeing what earlier generations could not; but rather it is an obstacle to greatness.

GK Chesterton put it so well, writing of the challenge of loving Pimlico, an area of London (we need to bear in mind that Pimlico was rather dingey then, not the posh place it is now!):

“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico, we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful.

“The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

“Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

As I was thinking on and praying about our contemporary situation, one which saddens me but does not lead me into despair (thanks be to God for the virtue of hope and, in fact, an end to causes for optimism paves the way for the real hope that God gives), an image sprang to mind. It was of Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of St John of the Cross’, in which Jesus on a cross in a darkened sky floats over the waters.

As I looked at the painting, a detail I had missed before became apparent, in a nod to St Catherine Siena’s mystical insight that “it was not the nails that held Him on the Cross, but love” – there are no nails in the Dali depiction.

“Not nails … but love.” Yet there can be no love without knowledge for we cannot love what we do not know. The slashing of humanities only leads to ignorance and cynicism and opens the door to young people being manipulated by the latest ideology, as we are now seeing.

Let’s invite our youth to ask the big questions, let’s invite them to challenge the traditional tenets of morality and faith, as Thomas put God in the dock over suffering before realising that really only God has the right to be judge and we stand condemned (and then redeemed). Let’s give them the resources to grapple with these questions.

And they can only do so when they have access to the great minds and thinkers of the past. But for that, we need humanities – philosophy, theology, classics, literature in English and other tongues – and everything successive British governments seem so keen to get rid of. And if governments won’t provide this, then civil society – churches and other forms of local community – should.

We live in a time when the human predicament is regularly denied, explained away, or ignored. “I’m okay and you’re okay”, we tell one another. We bask in our culture’s reassurance that “You are beautiful in every single way” and we wear the t-shirt that says, “You’re enough!”

Despite the massive counter-evidence from the moral disasters of the last century, we are still beguiled by the myth of progress. 

With just enough technical advancement, psychological insight and personal liberation – plus better laws to regulate the bad people, not us – we will solve our problems, so we’re told.

On such a reading of the human condition, all we need is a good teacher, a guru with brilliant spiritual insights, or a stirring moral exemplar to stir us to self-actualisation. For evidence of this, have a look at the size of the self-help section compared to the religion section in your local bookshop.

Some knowledge of the past might give us a dose of humility. Whatever its particular form, every myth of progress has betrayed each social grouping which has embraced it. Knowledge of the past teaches us hard realism.

As a Christian I have a positive view of history but it only goes forward amidst the messes we humans create, and only a good knowledge of history teaches us about these.

Let’s not cut off the branch on which we sit. It’s time to give our youth reasons for hope. It’s time to help them learn from the past, with the bad it contains but also its treasury of wisdom and good.

This article is adapted from a reflection initially given on Radio Maria England, you can read the original talk here (scroll down to April 2025). It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

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