Today marks the launch of a new series of essays on HumanProgress.org written by Dr. Steven Davies titled Critiques of Progress. Each of the fifteen essays in this monthly series will examine the origins, nature, and validity of recurring critiques of the modern world. This introductory essay distinguishes between two broad critiques of modernity and explains which one this series will address and why.

Today’s world is one of liberal modernity, the result of a transformative process dating back to the end of the 17^th century. This process has brought enormous benefits to everyone alive today, as well as many who lived during the three centuries leading up to today. The most obvious benefit is the dramatic rise in average incomes over that period, especially globally. This rise in real incomes (and therefore living standards and material conditions) has no precedent in human history. It also started slowly and in a limited part of the globe, but it has accelerated and spread to almost every location, not steadily, but nonetheless in a progressive fashion.

However, while liberal modernity has improved human life, rising living standards are foundational but not the most important. More significant are the second-order consequences of economic growth and rising living standards, which are related but distinct. Second-order effects include a dramatic increase in the range of life options and ways of life available to ordinary people, a decline in crime and violence, a transformative change in the status and life experience of women, and improved health outcomes for people of all ranks and positions. Independent but related benefits include the enormous increase in our knowledge about, and understanding of, the natural world, and the increased sociability that comes from the shift from a rural society where most lived in small communities to a majority urban society where an increasing share of the global population lives in large cities or towns.

All of that is a transformation in the extent and variety of human flourishing. It is, by many ethical standards, the biggest improvement in human life in recorded history. Nevertheless, the modern world has as many critics as celebrants, in fact even more so. For every author or artist celebrating that things are better for most people than ever before, several complain and paint the contemporary world, or parts of it, in dark colors. At first glance, this chorus of criticism might seem united and singular, but a closer look reveals something more interesting.

On examination, criticisms of the modern world fall into two broad categories. The first are those we could call “Yes, but…”. In these arguments, critics accept the modern world as good, or at least better than what came before. Critics argue that, despite that, the modern world is deeply flawed: it is marked by deep inequality or injustice, harms the environment, or is plagued by persistent poverty, for example. In these arguments, the positive agenda is to say that the modern world needs to do better or radically reform in some way to realize its promise. It is better than the pre-modern world but has a foundational flaw that needs correction (private property and capitalism are the most common examples, but critics also cite the continued existence of the state and systemic advantages and disadvantages). These criticisms of modernity can be described as radical (or, in their milder versions, reformist).

The obvious example is Marxism. For the German philosopher Karl Marx, capitalist modernity was undoubtedly progressive at first and a clear improvement on feudalism, let alone slavery. He saw the modern world of his time as transitional, moving toward a truly liberated future where all human potential would be realized. The point of his criticisms of bourgeois society and modernity was that they had inherent contradictions and injustices that would be resolved through a dialectical process of historical development. That made the modern world unjust and flawed but also necessary and, in many ways, progressive. It was the contrast between the actuality of the modern world and what he saw as its potential that sparked his ire. He never had anything but the deepest contempt, forcefully expressed, for the apologists of the pre-modern world (as also for those whose objections to the modern world were founded in ethics rather than a ‘scientific’ approach like his own).

However, from the very first intimations of the modern world in the 1690s and 1700s, a second category of critiques emerged, of a very different type. These analyses and polemics argue that something about modernity is at least deeply regrettable, or (more often) profoundly bad. They argue that key aspects of modernity, including the ones listed earlier, should be morally condemned because of their harmful consequences for people and the natural world. The point is that these arguments don’t argue that the modern world is good but flawed, or potentially good but failing to realize that potential. Instead, they reject the modern world tout court and see the modernization process as a tragic wrong turn for all of humanity. That is a much more fundamental critique than the first type.

This second category is also more widespread, though you might not realize it because these critiques and the movements they inspire either attract little attention from scholars or are misrepresented as belonging to the first category. In reality, critiques, movements, and analyses of this kind appear in every society that begins to modernize and seem to be one of the most universal responses to that process. What is striking is how the same specific themes and arguments recur across contexts and societies that are otherwise wildly different. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit captured that in a remarkable little book, Occidentalism, published in 2004. They framed their work as a response to Edward Said’s Orientalism and presented the ideas and movements they analyzed as driven by a negative stereotype of “the West.” In reality, what they identified was the recurring tropes and arguments of anti-modernity (their framing came from the notion that modernization was identical to westernization – understandable but incorrect).

Buruma and Margalit captured how movements such as anti-imperialism, Japanese nationalism, 19th-century romanticism, and fascism, as well as individual intellectuals of many kinds, produced similar arguments against the world the modernization process produced and even employed similar rhetoric. This suggests that the shock of modernity triggers a similar response and analysis across traditional or pre-modern societies, regardless of how different those societies might be. These responses and arguments are not limited to political arguments and polemics. In fact, they are even more widespread in literature, historiography, and the arts. Many of the most important cultural figures of the last two centuries are associated with them; one could point to Wagner, Dostoyevsky, Ruskin, and T. S. Eliot, for example. In more popular culture we could cite authors such as Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, or any number of writers of fantasy and adventure fiction.

The point is that this second category of criticisms of modernity attacks the very idea and foundational features of the modern. What most people, including the first kind of critic, would celebrate is seen as something to regret or deplore. A common theme is that the modern world, or main and essential aspects of it, are incompatible with human nature, with what it is to be human and to live a truly human life. If the more familiar kinds of critique can be labelled “radical” then these can be described as “conservative” or “reactionary.” We should be cautious about those terms, however. Although many of the exponents did indeed see themselves as conservatives or reactionaries, many did not.  They are not often seen as radical opponents of the status quo – although increasingly, as time passed, that is what they were. Many also regret modernity but see it as irreversible and argue for “reactionary modernism,” in which high technology and science combine with deeply anti- or pre-modern beliefs and social structures. This kind of view is found in people as varied as fascists and Nazis, ante-bellum fire-eaters, and many nationalist movements.

What are some examples of the family of arguments we are speaking of here? To give a few: that the modern world is godless and denies the transcendent; that it degrades the nature and meaning of personal relationships, making them ephemeral and insignificant; that it destroys the concept of honor and a whole range of virtues, replacing them with base materialism; that it undermines true connection between people and true community for a deracinated individualism; that it destroys excellence in the name of bland equality and uniformity; that it separates humans from the natural world; that it destroys true masculinity and femininity and the proper relations between men and women; and that it cuts the connection between people and places, rendering all of us rootless.

Over the next fourteen essays, we will explore the second kind of critique of progress and other arguments, examining what lies behind them, the forms they take, and why they are sometimes factually incorrect and usually grounded in false moral principles. We are familiar with the first kind of critique, but increasingly we need to address these more foundational and fundamental ones.