PROGRESS. — Without reference to particular activities (economic, spiritual, industrial, juridical, etc.), the word commonly summarizes two converging concepts: the unceasing conquest of scientific and practical truths; and the attainment of greater comforts and more extensive automatism in human life, whereby people, gradually relieved of the heaviest toils and the most irksome cares, may devote themselves to more elevated forms of activity and enjoyment.
Unlike the more complete and solemn concept of civilization (v.), with which it is often confused, the idea of progress, at least in the common usage of the term, pertains chiefly to the satisfaction of practical needs and aspirations, and not to the integral vision of life, the world, and the destiny of mankind. Hence, whereas civilizations are born, develop, and perish, and one may speak of crises and involutions of civilization, progress is unique and indefi
nite. It is an element of civilization, far from exhausting it: yet in the centuries from rationalism to materialism, the confusion between the two has been so intimate that in reacting against it, progress has sometimes been set in contrast with civilization, and some, even Catholics, in defending civilization believed they had to attack progress, holding it responsible for imbalances that were in reality due only to the mismatch between scientific and moral progress.
This mismatch has harmed two vital sectors of civilization: the moral and the economic, both of which have remained backward and neglected in the face of the successes and seductions of scientific and industrial progress. Indeed, some even affirm a clear moral regression, judging from certain persistent manifestations of immorality and insensitivity, particularly linked to the phenomena of war and high international politics; and an economic regression, based on present-day systems, utterly inadequate to real needs of exchange (v.).
There is no doubt that scientific and technical progress, by itself, materializes life and places an ever-growing power for good and evil, and thus an ever-growing responsibility, in the hands of men whose character it simultaneously fails to strengthen and whose virtues it depresses: it also subjects social life to centrifugal, and hence disintegrating, forces such as hedonism and the division of labor (one-sidedness, competition, rivalry, the spirit of struggle and domination), without managing to neutralize them with equivalent centripetal forces such as charity, a homogeneous morality, and an economic order that opposes to the division of productive labor the concentration of exchange labor (v.).
To the deficient moral and economic progress must be attributed the excessive confidence in force in general and in political force in particular, spreading the conviction that every problem of social life would easily be resolved, even without study and without the exercise of virtue, if one possessed the levers of political power. Hence the scramble for government and the general tendency, in social questions, toward solutions of force: and hence the tangle of derived and secondary problems, which are in reality the so-called social and political problems, but which, when treated as primary, appear abnormal within the bounds of rationality.
The unequal pace of progress in various sectors and directions, and the unequal capacity for assimilation on the part of individuals, classes, and peoples, mean that scientific progress, and the culture that draws its inspiration solely from it, disturb the slower evolutionary processes of reflective thought, of consciences, of customs, and of systems of interests: thus, by unleashing appetites before the means to satisfy them are available, it has sometimes occasioned and served as an instrument of struggle, sources of naive enthusiasms and of fierce illusions.
Only an integral progress, accompanied by generous and intelligent charity, can preserve equilibrium and peace.