Ask almost anyone, and they’ll tell you that ours is the most progressive of eras. We live longer than we did before, have more wealth than those who preceded us, and know more about the physical universe around us than at any other point in human history. We’ve gotten to the point where paradigm-shifting technological advancements occur not over the course of centuries, but mere years. If change in general was a variable that could be measured, most would agree that its trajectory has followed an exponential course.
Necessary casualties in this alleged progression have been the black-and-white ideas of our forefathers, those that maintained things like sexuality or society or religion have both a definitive purpose and an ideal form. A worldview that espouses such rigid absolutisms, that emphasizes the reason and not the result, is a hindrance to the pursuit of comfort, which, as Dostoevsky presciently pointed out over a century ago, is “now being preached as the aim of life.” With our own material well-being as our chief concern, questions that examine why we exist and what we’re doing here are swept under the rug in favor of a tranquil relativism.
For these reasons, many Catholics recoil like a cat from water at the mention of “progress.” It’s a frightening word, the battle cry of a movement that seeks to abolish the concept of objective morality and wishes to redefine the Church as nothing more than a charitable organization. In this day and age, anything deemed “progressive” should rightfully make us wary.
But in truth, Catholics should EMBRACE the word progress. In fact, they should strive to be the most progressive of people. The problem is not with progress itself, for as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “[p]rogress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning.” The real calamity, the actual injustice, is that it has been co-opted by a faction with the least right to claim it.
Today, relativism is considered an integral component of what it means to be progressive. But Chesterton said:
“Nobody has any business to use the word ‘progress’ unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible– at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.”
True progress is not merely a matter of movement, about change for change’s sake, just as one doesn’t build hammers simply so they can build more hammers. Rather, progress is necessarily concerned with DIRECTION, with the belief that there is a single destination worth reaching. Progress is only realized when you set yourself on the correct path, face the right way, and begin to walk.
Of course, acknowledging this directional component makes the misuse of progress in our day and age all the more sinister. Not only are misguided claims to progress empty and baseless, but in many cases they are actually REGRESSIVE. That is, they take us further away from the place we should be heading. As the novelist Ellen Glasgow succinctly put it, “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.”
We must not fall victim to what Chesterton called “the huge heresy of precedent.” It is wrong to believe that the course we are on is our inevitable future, “that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it.” When mankind finds itself on the wrong road, a path that will lead them in the wrong direction and to the wrong outcome, C.S. Lewis smartly described that “the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
Paradoxically, we must return in order to progress – to “black-and-white” ideas, to a period when things were in fact believed to be objectively right or wrong, to a time when WHY was more important than HOW, and the result of something was only made worthwhile by the reason behind it. We must heed Chesterton’s advice, and no longer “shirk the problem of what is good.” Instead, we must dive full-long into it. For as he so cheekily phrased it, “what is the good of begetting a man until we’ve settled what is the good of being a man?”
Jonathan is in the private sector, doing on-site consultation and management. He specializes in consumer psychology and product quality assurance. Though he is reluctant to admit it, his Meyers-Briggs personality type is INTJ. Contact him at jonathanliedl@gmail.com.
