By Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress and speaker at the conference "Is Progress Belief or Fact?", organised by Protopia Lab.
I was raised to believe in progress – the more-or-less religious framework that governs much of modern culture in the West. This framework says there's a right side of history, and things can go on getting better forever.
It's not self-evident, though, that humans have steadily progressed. That doesn't mean everything was perfect once and we're all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject, and you'll find some things are better, while other things have become worse. If you're going to believe in progress, you have to define what you mean by progress. More stuff? More freedom? Less disease? Whatever your measure, you'll find that what looks from one vantage point like progress mostly seems that way because you're ignoring the costs.
We've grown immeasurably richer and more comfortable in the last three hundred years. But we did so on the backs of plundered, colonized, and enslaved peoples, and at the cost of incalculable environmental degradation. Meanwhile, torture in warfare hasn't gone away. Warfare hasn't gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, or human degradation.
For our purposes here, the key is to notice the underlying structure of belief: that there exists an axis along which progress can be measured, and that we're inexorably moving along that axis, from bad to less bad. Already back in 1991, social critic Christopher Lasch was asking how progressivism continued to assert such a grip when economic progress was certain to hit social and environmental limits in the end.
We need to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market. My aim isn't to stuff feminism back into its box, as if such a thing were even possible. But contra the prophets of progress, neither memes nor material conditions necessarily evolve only in the right direction.
