The Dark Side of Progress

Abstract

The issue of progress as a feature of human history has come under question in the west since the Enlightenment, but at no time more profoundly than toward the close of the second millennium. The “end of History” was prophesized and a malaise, increasingly associated with the growth of science and technology came to replace the unquestioned faith in progress that loomed large in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. While there is no reason to reject the possibility of progress, especially in the moral and social realm, it is no longer possible to assume it will happen, as post-Enlightenment thinkers so often did, as an inevitable product of developments in science and technology. The link between scientific and technological progress and the sort of social/moral progress envisioned in the Enlightenment, is clearly no longer realistic. However, history is still an open book and the idea of progress especially social progress not dead. But clearly for such progress to occur the same amount of time and attention must be paid to understanding the principles of social science that has previously been lavished on the natural sciences.