From Change to Progress

Change is the unavoidable accompaniment of life, even of existence. In this group of words, it is the most general and least arguable. To see change is not necessarily to judge its value. So of these words it is most purely observational.

The concepts of growth and development are relatively value-free. In biology, these are natural processes, neither good nor bad. Yet in common usage, the terms are generally weighted positively. A small tree may fit the scale of the yard more adequately than a large one, yet we characteristically want trees to grow, to develop. Beyond nature, we think of a person "growing" intellectually or morally, or of "developing" a better sense of his or her surroundings. A "developed" idea is judged superior to just the "germ of an idea".

By the time we reach improvement, we have become more explicitly valuers. An improvement is a change that we thoroughly approve of. Even if the tree grows to its potential, this may not represent an improvement. We may "improve" the tree by pruning it back severely. Modernization is a particular type of change that is generally, but not always, associated with improvement. We generally do approve of modernization, yet we may prefer an eighteenth century house to a "modern house".

Progress is the most controversial and most highly evaluative of this family of terms. At times it has been understood to be in itself a philosophy of civilization or at least guiding thesis. According to optimistic ideologues of progress, change improves the human condition almost inevitably. This is understood to be an ineluctable process akin to the biological evolution that produced rational human beings. Against this, some conservatives have argued that social and technological change brings as much pain and suffering as it does improvement in the human condition. They see progress as neither inevitable nor desirable. In part the argument is a matter of definition. Progress can be defined so that if change does not improve the human condition then it should not be spoken of as "progress". (See Raymond Duncan Gastil, Progress: Critical Thinking about Historical Change, Praeger, 1993.)