Road to Nowhere

A Road to Nowhere: The Idea of Progress and Its Critics by Matthew W Slaboch, 119 pages

Although most cultures throughout history have tended to either view the present as the product of a decline from a past golden age or lack a historical consciousness entirely, in the nineteenth century it seemed a self-evident truth throughout the West that history was a process of uneven but inevitable - and potentially infinite - positive change.  Despite the unprecedented horrors of the twentieth century, this claim is still taken as a given in much of our public conversation.  Yet it has not remained entirely unchallenged, and in this short book Matthew Slaboch briefly reviews a few of the more incisive critiques of the ideology of progress - Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism, Tolstoy's Christian anarchism, Henry Adams' thermodynamics of history, Spengler's cyclicism, the anti-utopianism of Solzhenitsyn and the populism of Lasch.

Although it is impossible in a book this short to do full justice to the thought of any of these thinkers, let alone all of them, Slaboch ably highlights their agreements and disagreements, not only in their approaches to history, but also in their personal and social prescriptions.  This would be achievement enough, but Slaboch's wit magnifies as it ornaments his accomplishment (it is impossible not to admire a writer who quips that for Schopenhauer being born was only "the start of a life full of disappointments").