Is Progress Obsolete?

By CHRISTOPHER LASCH

Progress and democracy, we assume, go hand in hand. Progress means abundance: more labor-saving machines, more comforts, more choices. It means a rich life for everyone, not for the privileged classes alone. Or so we used to believe, until recent events began to suggest that progress may have limits after all.

Compared with the rest of the world, industrial nations enjoy a lavish standard of living. The affluence generated by industrialism looks even more impressive when compared with living standards that prevailed throughout most of the millennium now drawing to a close. Goods that would once have been considered luxuries have become staples of everyday consumption. Medicine has reduced infant mortality and conquered many of the diseases that formerly struck down people in their prime. A vast increase in life expectancy dramatizes the contrast between our world and that of our ancestors in the distant past.

To be sure, we pay a price for progress. Constant change gives rise to widespread nervousness and anxiety. In solving old problems, we often create new ones in their place. Improvements in life expectancy make possible an aging population that puts a growing strain on the health-care system. Private cars give us unprecedented mobility but swell the volume of traffic to the point of gridlock. In the course of enjoying the delights of consumption, we generate so much garbage that we are running out of places to dump it.

Yet none of this destroys our faith in progress. The benefits, we think, outweigh the costs. As long as the question of progress is posed in this way, the question answers itself. The price may be high, but few would seriously choose not to pay it. Progress is an offer we have been unable to refuse.

The real question today is whether progress has built-in limits. Environmentalists argue that the earth will not support indefinite economic expansion along the old lines. Reports of global warming, damage to the ozone layer and long-term atmospheric shifts caused by deforestation raise further doubts about unlimited growth. Even though much of this evidence remains controversial, it has already transformed the debate about progress. For the first time we find ourselves asking not whether endless progress is desirable but whether it is even possible, as we have known it in the past.

The global distribution of wealth raises the same question in a more urgent form. If we consider the effect of extending Western patterns of consumption to the rest of the world, the potential impact on the earth is truly staggering. Imagine the populations of India and China equipped with two cars to a family, air conditioning in private homes and appliances galore, participating fully in a consumer economy that already makes heavy demands on the world's environment even when it is confined to a mere fraction of the world's population. It is obvious that the wasteful, heedless life now enjoyed by the West cannot be made available to everyone without stretching the energy resources of the earth, as well as its adaptive capacity, beyond the breaking point.

The idea of progress loses all meaning if progress no longer implies the democratization of affluence. It was the prospect of universal abundance that made progress a morally compelling ideology in the past. According to the old way of thinking, the productive forces unleashed by industrialism generated a steadily rising level of demand. Even humble men and women could now see the possibility of bettering their condition. The desire for a full life, formerly restricted to the rich, would spread to the masses. The expansion of desire -- the motor of progress -- would assure the expansion of the economic machinery necessary to satisfy it. Economic development would thus continue indefinitely in a self-generating upward spiral, without any foreseeable end or limit.

But affluence for all now appears unlikely, even in the distant future. The emergence of a global economy, far from eliminating poverty, has widened the gap between rich and poor nations. The revolution of rising expectations may not be self-generating, as we had thought. It may even be reversible. Famine and plague have returned to large parts of the world. Poverty is spilling over into the developed nations from the Third World. Desperate migrants pour into our cities, swelling the vast army of the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, drug-ridden, derelict and effectively disfranchised. Their presence strains existing resources to the limit. Medical and educational facilities, law- enforcement agencies and the supply of available jobs -- not to mention the supply of racial and ethnic goodwill, never abundant to begin with -- all appear inadequate to the enormous task of assimilating what is essentially a surplus population.

The well-being of democracy, a political system that implies equality as well as liberty, hangs in the balance. A continually rising standard of living for the rich, it is clear, means a falling standard of living for everyone else. Forcible redistribution of income on a massive scale is an equally unattractive alternative. The best hope of reducing the gap between rich and ; poor lies in the gradual emergence of a new consensus, a common understanding about the material prerequisites of a good life. Hard questions will have to be asked. Just how much do we need to live comfortably? How much is enough?

Such questions implicitly challenge the notion of progress, which is usually taken to mean there is no such thing as enough. The prospect of a world in which people voluntarily agree to set limits on their acquisitive appetite bears little resemblance to what is conventionally understood as progress. But then neither does the prospect of a world in which unparalleled affluence coexists with frightful depths of misery and squalor.