PROGRESSO. — Without reference to particular activities (e.g. economic, spiritual, industrial, juridical, etc.), the word commonly summarizes two convergent concepts: the unceasing conquest of scientific and practical truths; the attainment of greater conveniences and more extensive automation in human life, whereby people, gradually relieved of the heaviest labors and the most burdensome concerns, may devote themselves to higher forms of activity and enjoyment.
Unlike the more civilization (v.) with which it is often confused, the idea of p., at least in the common meaning of the term, concerns above all the satisfaction of practical needs and aspirations, and not the integral vision of life, the world, and the destiny of human beings. Thus, while civilizations are born, develop, and pass away, and one may speak of crises and involutions of civilization, p. is unique and indefinite.
It is an element of civilization, far from exhausting it; over the centuries, however, extending from rationalism to materialism, the confusion between the two was so intimate that, in reacting against it, p. was at times placed in opposition to civilization, and some, including Catholics, in defending civilization believed they had to attack p., which was made responsible for imbalances actually attributable only to the disparity between scientific p. and moral p.
Two vital sectors of civilization have suffered from this disparity: the moral and the economic, both of them left behind and neglected in the face of the successes and seductions of scientific and industrial p. Indeed, some assert that there has been a clear moral regression, judging from certain persistent manifestations of immorality and insensitivity, particularly connected with the phenomena of war and great international politics; and an economic regression, on the basis of present systems, which are utterly inadequate exchange (v.).
There is no doubt that scientific and technical p., by itself, materializes life and places an increasing power for good and evil, and consequently an increasing responsibility, in the hands of people whose character it does not simultaneously strengthen and whose virtues it diminishes; it also subjects social life to centrifugal, and therefore disintegrating, forces such as hedonism and the division of labor (one-sidedness, competition, rivalry, a spirit of struggle and domination), without managing to neutralize them through equivalent centripetal forces such as charity, a homogeneous morality, and an economic system that sets the concentration of exchange labor against the division of productive labor (v.).
The excessive confidence in force in general and in political force in particular is due to deficient moral and economic p.; the conviction has spread that every problem of communal life would easily become insoluble, even without study and without the exercise of virtue, if one possessed the levers of political power. Hence the assault on government and the general orientation, in social questions, toward solutions based on force; and hence the magnification and entanglement of derived and secondary problems, which are in reality the so-called social and political problems and which, when regarded instead as primary, appear insoluble within the bounds of rationality.
The unequal rhythm of p. in its various sectors and directions, and the unequal capacity for assimilation on the part of individuals, classes, and peoples, mean that scientific p., and the culture inspired exclusively by it, disturb the slower evolutionary processes of reflective thought, consciences, customs, and systems of interests; by unleashing appetites before the suitable means for satisfying them were available, they have therefore at times served as occasions and instruments of struggle, and as sources of naïve enthusiasms and ferocious illusions.
Only an integral p., accompanied by generous and intelligent charity, can preserve equilibrium and peace.