Progress to what?
I have the same problem with this admiration for classical slavery and its fans Plato and Aristotle, and for the Founding Fathers, and so on, as I had with Hayek's efficiency. There is this tremendous _thing_ in the background which is the _unsaid_ -- the thing that gives all these people and the crimes they committed value which transcends the poor flesh they ride on and crush. One used to call it God, perhaps. What is it?
Nietzsche, at least, was direct about it: "Man is a bridge over which something travels; he knows not what, but the bridge trembles." Good old Nietzsche.