Against Progress
Every civilisation tells a story about what came before it. The story is never neutral.
It is a founding myth, a justification, a way of making the present feel inevitable and the past feel like a problem that has been solved.
Modernity’s version runs like this: humanity lived in darkness, superstitious, hierarchical, ignorant, and cruel. Then reason arrived! Science replaced faith. Rights replaced tyranny. Progress replaced stagnation. The light came on, hallelujah, and we saw clearly for the first time!
This story is not entirely false. Unfortunately though, it is deeply, structurally misleading, and the nature of the narrative distortion matters. We do not necessarily exaggerate the gains of modernity, since many of them are real and we should be infinitely grateful for them. The feasibility of surgery, the doubled lifespan, the countless children who now survive to adulthood.
The problem is instead that we have lost the ability to see what was traded for them. The progress narrative works by taking its own values, individual autonomy, empirical method, material control, formal equality, and treats their absence in previous eras as the definition of deficiency.
The pre-modern world is not encountered on its own terms. It is measured against a standard it never accepted, found wanting, and filed under “the past.” The result is not history but caricature, and the caricature is load-bearing. Remove it, and the foundational story of modernity begins to crack.
Thinking From Within
Consider what happens when you refuse the caricature. Ask, what might be discovered when we attempt to think not about the pre-modern world but from within it. By inhabiting its logic we can reveal that which was previously unseen.
A medieval monk studying nature is not a failed scientist. He operates within a framework where knowledge is unified, where studying creation is participation in the divine intellect, where tradition functions as accumulated, tested insight rather than dead authority. He argues constantly, because the scholastic method is built upon structured disagreement, but he argues from within a coherent picture of reality, the same way a physicist works within a given paradigm rather than reinventing their discipline each morning.
A guild craftsman is not trapped in economic stagnation. He works within a system that holds quality, livelihood, justice, and social stability together as inseparable concerns. The just price is not naivety about supply and demand. It is a moral claim that the ability to extract more does not necessarily mean that you should.
A Confucian official writing a memorial of remonstrance to the emperor is not living under despotism. He fulfils a role that specifically requires him to speak uncomfortable truths to power, and his civilisation’s heroes are those who did so at the cost of their lives.
If we run this exercise across enough cases, the common law juror selected for knowledge rather than ignorance, the Polynesian navigator whose ocean-crossing cognitive system was tested at stakes no academic review has ever faced, the anchoress whose enclosure was a specialised vocation rather than pathological withdrawal, and a pattern emerges.
In every case, the pre-modern world is not missing something. Instead, it has different organising principles that produce a coherent, functional, internally consistent experience of life. The sense that these people were waiting to be modernised is the modern projection, not the real history.
The View From the Other Side
Now let us reverse the exercise.
Place a medieval parish priest in contemporary England and let him see through his own eyes. He would not see freedom of movement and individual choice. He would see mass orphanhood, an entire civilisation of people with no place, no purpose, and no role. He would not see economic sophistication. He would see the masses labouring under a curse they have forgotten how to name, performing tasks they find meaningless for reasons they cannot articulate.
He would not see the information age. He would see a library on fire, with everyone grabbing pages at random. He would not see secularism. He would see religion without priests, theology, or sacraments. Religion at its most dangerous, its sacred violence channelled into politics without any of the institutional wisdom that centuries of tradition developed to contain it.
Both caricatures work by the same mechanism. Each views a functioning system through a framework that values different things and then reads the absences as a pathology. Hold them up simultaneously, and what becomes visible is that modernity has not simply progressed. It has instead traded. Certain goods for others. One set of problems for another.
Individual autonomy gained at the cost of embeddedness. Material power gained at the cost of material meaning. Universalism gained at the cost of belonging. The range of human knowledge expanded beyond all precedent while the integration of that knowledge collapsed. We know incomparably more than any previous civilisation and can make almost none of it cohere.
The progress narrative prevents this honest accounting. To admit that something was genuinely lost, not merely outgrown, would compromise the founding story. So, conveniently, the losses are renamed.
Loneliness becomes a medical condition. The meaning crisis becomes a therapeutic problem. Political fanaticism becomes a media problem. The inability of educated people to agree on what a human life is for becomes a sign of healthy pluralism rather than what it plainly is: civilisational incoherence.
The Bargain
There is a name for the spirit that drives a civilisation to trade its soul for power and knowledge. It is the name Western civilisation has, at its most honest moments, given itself. It is the Faustian spirit.
It is the drive toward the infinite, the unbounded, the restless will to push past every limit. In its creative phase this drive built Gothic cathedrals reaching skyward towards heaven, explored every harmonic possibility through polyphonic music, conquered the globe, unlocked the atom, and ever so briefly even touched the moon and the heavens themselves.
In its winter phase the same drive produces infinite scroll, infinite leverage, infinite content, and infinite optionality. This is the formal structure of boundlessness emptied of any animating purpose. Faust still striving, but he has forgotten what he was striving for.
The bargain was struck centuries ago. The power is real, but the soul has been spent. Like Faust himself in the middle acts of the drama, the civilisation that he exemplifies has forgotten that a bargain was made at all, and it is this forgetting that is the critical symptom of modernity.
Modern loneliness is not experienced as the price paid for individual freedom. It is experienced as a mysterious epidemic with no clear cause. The meaning crisis is not understood as what happens when you remove the framework that made meaning systemic rather than personal. It is understood as a failure of individual psychology, treatable with better self-knowledge or medication.
No civilisation in history has asked its members to generate meaning, purpose, and belonging from purely internal resources, with no shared story about what reality is or what a human life is for.
We are running that experiment now. The results are visible in every clinic, every election, every lonely room where someone surfs an infinite web of possibility and feels nothing.
Decline and Genesis
Some say that this is simply how civilisations end.
They are born, they flourish, they exhaust their creative impulse, they harden into mechanism and bureaucracy, and they die. Western civilisation has run its course. There is nothing to be done but manage the decline.
However, the historical record does not support this fatalism, even on its own terms. Early Christianity, Talmudic Judaism, and eventually even Islam all emerged inside the dying body of Classical civilisation.
They grew within Roman imperial forms, initially misrecognised as minor sects, deviations, and curiosities. What looked like pure decline from one perspective was simultaneously a period of extraordinary creative ferment from another. The Desert Fathers, the early Church councils, the Talmudic academies. All of this was happening whilst Rome was falling. Decline and genesis were the same period viewed from different positions.
Civilisational renewal does not look like the old civilisation saving itself, because it cannot. It looks like something new growing in the shell of the old, taking on its external forms while simultaneously developing an entirely different interior logic. It is, by definition, invisible to those measuring the world by the standards of the dying order.
What this hints for our future is that the post-Faustian, the civilisation that grows from the dying shell of the West, is not merely a programme to be implemented. It is something that may already be growing, misrecognised, mistaken for a subculture or an eccentricity or a regression, using the language and technology of late modernity while being animated by an entirely different principle.
The Benedictines did not necessarily plan to save their civilisation. They built monasteries, followed a rule of life, preserved what seemed worth preserving. The civilisational renewal emerged from communities oriented toward something greater than simply cold, calculating strategy.
The Chinese Neo-Confucians did not plan a renaissance. They returned to their own root principles and discovered that the traditions contained more than their predecessors had extracted, because they were facing questions their predecessors had never needed to ask.
Renewal grew from particular commitments by particular people in particular places. It became visible only in retrospect.
The Turning
But the story of Faust does not end in decline, despair, and damnation. It rejects fatalism and does something instructive instead.
In Goethe’s telling, Faust is not, in the end, condemned to hell. At the moment of death, after a lifetime of restless striving beyond every limit, his redemptive vision is not of personal power or infinite knowledge. It is of a free people on free land. A community working together to reclaim ground from the sea. Bounded, purposeful, shared human activity. The angels say he is redeemable not because he stopped striving, but because the striving was redirected. The Faustian energy is not killed. It is turned.
This is the shape of what comes next. Not the renunciation of the Western spirit but its maturation. The same restless drive that once pushed outward toward conquest and expansion, turned inwards toward integration, depth, and coherence.
Imagine the Faustian energy applied not just to discovering more but to making what we already know make sense together. The physicist, the ethicist, the theologian, and the artist working not in sealed departments but within a shared framework of inquiry, much as the medieval university once housed them before the modern one shattered knowledge into fragments that no longer speak to each other. Not a retreat from rigour, but a confrontation with a harder problem than any single discipline has faced alone. The Faustian temperament could thrive on such a challenge.
Imagine the same energy applied to technology, not as conquest of nature but as craft. The medieval sense of making that was embedded in purpose, community, and moral judgement. Not just “can we build it?”, but “what does it serve, what does it cost us, and what kind of people does it make us?” We have built the tools. The post-Faustian question is whether we can learn to be worthy of them.
Imagine it applied to community. Not the involuntary bonds of the medieval village, which were real but also coercive, but freely chosen belonging. Limits accepted not as deprivation but as the condition for depth, the way a marriage is a limitation that makes possible a kind of knowledge unavailable to those who keep every option open.
The pre-modern world knew that belonging requires sacrifice. The modern world discovered that freedom requires choice. The synthesis asks whether it is possible to choose sacrifice, to freely accept the constraints that make depth, fidelity, and genuine communion possible.
This is arguably the hardest thing the Faustian temperament can attempt, for it rages against bounds. It may also be the most Faustian thing of all, because it means turning the infinite will toward its own transformation. Not grasping, but attending. Not conquering, but receiving. Not just striving outward toward infinity, but discovering that the infinite was always available in the depths of the particular, the local, and the given.
The pre-modern world was brutal in ways that must not be softened. The untreated pain, the persecutions, the serfdom, the woman burned for witchcraft. People choose modernity when given the option, and their preferences deserve some weight.
Anyone writing these words on a laptop, and anyone reading them on a phone, is in a compromised position to say otherwise. However, our thesis was never that the medieval world was simply better. It is that it contained working answers to problems we have since declared insoluble, and that the progress narrative prevents us from seeing this.
The question has never been a choice between surgery or prayer. We should instead question why we were told we could not have both surgery and a meaningful framework for understanding the suffering that surgery can relieve.
Our Final Act
The modern period is ending.
Not the world, but the specific civilisational settlement that began with the Enlightenment.
What comes next will demand a new kind of honesty, and the ability to live without the illusions that sustained both the pre-modern and the modern worlds. The pre-modern person could rely on an inherited cosmos. The modern person could rely on the myth of progress. The person who comes after has neither, and must build while being fully aware of the costs, the trade-offs, and the absence of guarantees. This is harder than either previous condition. It is also more mature.
Faust is, in the end, redeemed. Not by abandoning his nature, nor by returning to the world before the bargain, but by discovering, at the last moment in the final act, what his striving was actually for. Something bounded, something shared, something that serves not just the infinite but the real.
The question now is whether the redemption of our civilisation is a possibility or merely a wish. It cannot be answered in advance. But it can be begun.
Learn the name of your neighbour. Commit to a place and stay there long enough to be changed by it. Find work whose outcomes you can see with your own eyes. Practise the discipline of attention, the refusal to let the world become background noise to your own inner monologue. Read books that are “outdated” and discover that they were asking questions you have inherited but can no longer articulate. Build something small, local, and concrete. Do not mistake this for a retreat.
The great civilisational renewals did not grandly announce themselves. They began with a few people in a few places who decided to live as though a different world were possible, and discovered, in time, that they had made one.
Sources and Further Reading
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981). The argument that modern moral philosophy is working with fragments of a dismembered tradition it can no longer understand.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007). How the West moved from a world where unbelief was almost unthinkable to one where belief is one option among many.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918–1922). The civilisational morphology behind the Faustian characterisation.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (1808/1832). The myth Western civilisation wrote about itself. The ending matters more than most readers realise.
Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World (1950). A short, prophetic book about what comes after the modern settlement collapses.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947). Attention as the fundamental human discipline.
Nikolai Berdyaev, The New Middle Ages (1924). The prediction that the Enlightenment settlement would exhaust itself and the questions it suppressed would return.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952). The argument that modernity is a gnostic project, and that recovery requires the remembering of suppressed experiences of transcendent order.
Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (1932) and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950). The case that every civilisation is animated by a religious vision and dies when that vision dies.
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975). The radical argument that modern institutions have corrupted and colonised the human-scale activities they were meant to serve.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). The diagnosis of “psychological man” and the argument that the therapeutic framework is itself the problem it claims to solve.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977). The practical, grounded, and deeply serious case for an economy of membership rather than extraction.
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (1964). A quiet masterpiece on the medieval model of the universe, written not to defend it but to help modern readers see it from the inside.