Perhaps worthwhile to recall from almost 20 years ago the late Christopher Lasch's "True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics" (with its admittedly questionable reading of Reinhold Niebuhr, recently redivivus in the conversation of the new president...). --CGE
Carrol Cox wrote:
> Three terms creep to the "left." Wow. Progress.
>
> Three terms creep back to the right! Wow. We've got work to do.
>
> Three terms creep back to the "left."
>
> The fallacy Progress! That is almost as destructive a part of bourgeois
> ideology as that of the isolated -- abstract -- individual. The insane
> idea that history progresses.
>
> Capitalism exploded on the world and convinced everyone that it was a
> "natural" PROGRESS from an earlier barbarianism. (Hence the false idea
> of the "Middle Ages" which Jeffrey & C.G.E. have mocked.)
>
> Change comes in jumps or it doesn't come at all. The change that comes
> from slow steps always erodes.
>
> Carrol