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their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical claim. An ideal is something you aspire to, despite the fact that it does not match reality at this time, nor at any time in the past, and perhaps never even in the future.
Progress is something that you want to spend a lot of time producing, not something you just find in nature. It's something that you want to produce despite the fact that billions of people before you have failed miserably, not because of previous successes. If you want to help the kids in Africa who die of easily preventable diseases, you're a believer in progress. Just because you don't think it has a high chance of success doesn't mean that you don't want it to happen.
Now, people do disagree about what constitutes progress. But only a sophomore philosopher throws away an idea just because people disagree about it. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater every time you find a contamination in the bathwater, there will be hardly any babies left. And guess what, a life without ideals is like a world without babies. Without babies, our species will die out. Without ideals, our intellects will have nothing better to do than contemplate the grim reality. If that's all we're going to use our brains for, why have an advanced brain in the first place?
> We simply need to accept our fate, as they did in the classical age, before the Socratic faith in knowledge and the Christian concept of redemption combined to form the modern idea of progress and the belief in the infinite malleability of human nature.
It is not true that people simply accepted their fates prior to the invention of Greek philosophy and Christianity. Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Fruit on a branch that's too high? Get a stick to reach it. Too much weed and not enough grain? Burn the weed and plant some barley. River too deep to wade across? Build a bridge or a boat. Boat is too slow? Add some sails. No wind? Add an internal combustion engine. Anything else too inconvenient for your lazy ass? Find a way to make it easier. It's in our nature.
The paleo-conservative movement, which The National Interest seems to be a part of, is getting ridiculously out of hand. No ideal of progress? That's not even paleolithic. Cavemen lived in caves because they found it warmer and safer than sleeping in an open field or on a tree. They used stone tools because they found them more convenient than ripping things apart with bare hands.