Progress and Religion

Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry by Christopher Dawson, 197 pages

In Progress and Religion Dawson analyzes the spiritual roots of modernity, finding the animating religious impulse of modern culture in the cult of progress which triumphed in the Enlightenment.  However, he also finds this idea spiritually impoverished - so much so that its religious nature is invisible to most people - and therefore concludes that it cannot serve as a great unifying principle for the West, even if it could survive the scientific advent of Darwinism and thermodynamics.  The choice, then, is between recovery and disintegration.

Progress and Religion was originally published in 1929, and like many of Dawson's works it is full of moments of unexpected brilliance, such as his explanation of the emergence of primitive religion, not from an early attempt to master the material world but from a primal intuition of Being.  It is also, ninety years later, prophetic, both in Dawson's realization that the failure of utopianism would merely displace the goal of progress from social perfection to infinite consumption, and the warning that this would lead to an anti-culture "which will acknowledge no hierarchy of values, no intellectual authority, and no social or religious tradition, but which will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation."