One of my more sophisticated friends, a poet and fellow teacher at Dartmouth, is firmly convinced that Americans stopped believing in the doctrine of progress about 1920. “No doubt the majority of the uneducated still believe in it,” he concedes. “I imagine they see a slightly improved version of human existence as being issued by some kind of central committee of scientists every fall, just about the time the new cars come out. But no educated man, except maybe an occasional leftover Victorian, supposes any such thing.”
I disagree. Even in, 1972, it seems to me, a majority of educated Americans believes in progress—not, obviously, as the product of a central committee but as an impersonal force. And while a wave of skepticism really did arrive some fifty years ago, it involved only a few thousand intellectuals. But I think he is going to be right within the next decade. A much larger wave is curving toward the beach right now. Before it lands, it seems worthwhile to consider what this thing is we have believed in and what the consequences will be when as a society we cease to.