Christopher Dawson and the Idea of Progress

Christopher Dawson and the Idea of Progress Joseph T. Stuart (bio) The English historian of culture Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) took up in a unique way the intellectual burdens of his age. 1 One of those burdens was the "idea of Progress." 2 In notes hand-written sometime during World War I, Dawson mused on the "radical change brought about by the war." Even an inconclusive peace, he thought, "could not bring back the old state of things. We are irrevocably committed to a new age and new systems." "It is impossible," he continued, "to foresee what the future may bring, it may be disaster, it may be renewed life. What is possible and necessary is to take stock of the factors of the new situation and see as far as possible what alternatives are before this new age." 3 One of these new factors was that the Great War helped make human progress itself into a philosophical and historical problem. Dawson's response to this problem was his book Progress and Religion (1929), which was received with wide acclaim by both Catholics and non-Catholics. 4 The book is a wide-ranging treatment of the spiritual, intellectual, and material factors in cultural development and an interpretation of world history. In this article I will first examine in more detail various responses to the problem of human progress during the [End Page 74] 1920s. I will then explain the basic argument of Progress and Religion by contrasting it with the argument of the historian J. B. Bury in his The Idea of Progress, published in 1920. I will show that Dawson's unique interpretation of human progress involved two broad emphases: man's relationship to the natural environment and his relationship to the intellectual and spiritual realm. Progress as a Problem There were three general responses to the problem of human progress after the Great War in Britain: pessimism, optimism, and Dawson's realism, which combined elements of the first two. First, while for some people during the 1920s life was full of fast cars, parties, and sex (as analyzed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby of 1925 and satirized in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies of 1930), below this surface some thoughtful writers sensed a heightened pessimism. Richard Overy has recently chronicled this in The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars. 5 The war had killed and wounded millions of soldiers. It had linked the words "machine" and "gun" in the popular imagination. It had dulled the optimism of the nineteenth century. Most representative of this pessimistic position was Oswald Spengler's two-volume work The Decline of the West, which appeared in English between 1926 and 1929. Copies of The Decline of the West sold especially in Germany by the tens of thousands. Spengler sought to create a true German philosophy of historical development, attempting to penetrate beneath the surface of history and politics to ask, what moves history forward? In his view, however, there was no real "forward": all the cultures of the world were independent, natural growths, akin to natural organisms. They are born and they die; they rise and they fall. Human cultures, wrote Spengler, "grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field." Civilizations are "a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming. . . . They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." This [End Page 75] meant that progress was an illusion: "The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of history." 6 Second, despite the pessimism present in Europe after the Great War, the idea of progress continued to hold a powerful sway over many minds. Dawson wrote in his 1929 book that "today, to the average European, and still more to the average American, Progress consists in the spread of the new urban-mechanical civilization: it means more cinemas, motor-cars for all, wireless installations, more elaborate methods of killing people, purchase on the hire system, preserved foods and picture papers." 7 Derivative senses of the word "progress" proliferated in British business and manufacturing language for...