Yes in specific, measurable domains, and false as a single guaranteed law of history. Real progress is demonstrable where you can name a metric—health, material welfare, knowledge, the scope of moral concern—but "Progress" as an inevitable, unidirectional, all-encompassing force is a myth. Progress is real, uneven, reversible, and domain-specific.
The measurable gains are not seriously deniable.
Over the last two centuries life expectancy roughly doubled, extreme poverty and child mortality fell dramatically, literacy and access to knowledge expanded, and many forms of interpersonal and state violence declined over the long run.
Moral progress is real too, if less smooth: slavery went from near-universal to near-universally abolished, and the circle of beings granted moral standing has widened.
Where a clear metric exists, the trend is often genuinely upward.
But three qualifications dismantle the grand narrative.
First, progress is domain-specific and can trade off: technological and economic advance has coincided with ecological damage and new existential risks, so gains in one dimension are not gains in all.
Second, it is reversible: democracies backslide, knowledge is lost, atrocities recur—nothing guarantees the trend continues, and treating progress as automatic breeds complacency.
Third, "progress" requires a value standard to measure against, so it is partly evaluative, not a neutral fact—what counts as better is a judgment, and the Whiggish story that history moves necessarily toward the good is unsupported.
So the honest synthesis rejects both the naive faith and the fashionable despair:
real, hard-won improvement has occurred and can be extended, but it is contingent, uneven, and must be actively defended and chosen, not awaited as destiny.
So credit the genuine gains, against cynicism that denies them, while refusing the complacency that thinks them self-sustaining—progress is something people make and can unmake, not a current carrying us. This would need revision if improvement across core welfare metrics reversed durably, or if it were shown to be inevitable rather than achieved; the evidence supports neither extreme.
Yes and no—and the distinction is the whole answer. Real, measurable progress in specific domains? Absolutely. "Progress" as an inevitable law of history sweeping everything upward? That's a myth. Progress is real, but it's uneven, reversible, and domain-specific—not guaranteed or total.
The measurable gains are hard to deny:
Where there's a clear metric, the trend is often genuinely up.
But three things kill the grand "history marches upward" narrative:
So reject both the cynicism that denies real gains and the naive faith that they're self-sustaining. The honest position: genuine, hard-won improvement has happened and can be extended—but it's contingent, and it has to be actively defended and chosen, not awaited as destiny.
Practical upshot: progress is something people make, not a current carrying us. Give the real gains their due (they're easy to forget or dismiss), and then treat them as fragile—because the same evidence that shows progress is real shows it can be undone.
Measured in Graves Not Dug.
Begin with the fact hardest to argue with: for most of human history, roughly half of all children died before adulthood, and now, in most of the world, almost all survive. Two centuries ago a toothache could kill, surgery meant agony, childbirth routinely took the mother, and plagues emptied cities; today anesthesia, antibiotics, vaccines, and clean water have quietly abolished horrors that every previous generation simply endured. This is not a story or an ideology—it is written in the graves that no longer have to be dug, the mothers who live, the children who grow up. Whatever else is uncertain, the reduction of raw human suffering by these measures is staggeringly real, and to deny it is to insult everyone who died of what we no longer die of.
The Arrow That History Does Not Have.
And yet the nineteenth century's confident faith—that Progress was a law of nature, that history moved by some built-in mechanism inevitably upward toward enlightenment—was shattered, and rightly, by the century that followed. The most technologically advanced nations produced the most efficient genocides; reason and science built the death camp and the bomb as readily as the vaccine. There is no arrow. History is not a river flowing reliably toward the good, and the phrase "the right side of history" smuggles in exactly the myth the twentieth century disproved. Progress, where it happens, is not gravity pulling us upward; it is a fire that human beings light and must keep feeding, and which goes out the moment they stop.
The Widening Circle.
Still, one form of progress is real enough to trace: the slow expansion of who counts. The philosopher Peter Singer described an "expanding circle" of moral concern that has, haltingly, grown—from the family and the tribe, outward to the nation, then to all of humanity regardless of race or sex, and now tentatively toward animals and future generations. Slavery, once a near-universal and unquestioned feature of human societies, is now near-universally condemned; ideas once radical—that women are full persons, that cruelty to the powerless is wrong—have become common sense. The arc is jagged and often reverses, but across long enough time the circle has widened. This is moral progress, and it is not an illusion, even if it is neither smooth nor guaranteed.
The Price on the Receipt.
But every gain seems to arrive with a hidden cost, and honesty requires reading the receipt. The industry that lifted billions from poverty is cooking the climate; the antibiotics that conquered infection are breeding resistant plagues; the connectivity that democratized knowledge also democratized delusion and dissolved our attention. Progress often does not solve problems so much as exchange them—trading the miseries of scarcity for the miseries of abundance, the old existential risks of famine and plague for the new ones of nuclear weapons and ecological collapse. This does not cancel the gains, but it complicates the triumphalism: we are not climbing a staircase toward a summit but moving across a landscape, solving here and breaking there, and whether the net vector points up depends heavily on what you choose to measure.
A Direction, Not a Destination.
So here is the honest resolution. Progress is real—the dead children, the abolished slavery, the widened circle are not propaganda—but it is made, not given: contingent, uneven, purchased at a cost, and above all reversible. It is less a place we are traveling to than a direction we must keep choosing, a garden that reverts to wilderness the moment it goes untended. The naive faith that history improves on its own is dangerous, because it breeds the complacency that lets hard-won gains rot; but so is the fashionable despair that denies any progress at all, because it insults the real achievement and saps the will to extend it. The mature stance holds both: gratitude for how far we have come, and vigilance about how easily it could be lost. Progress is not a promise the universe made to us. It is a promise we make, and keep, to one another—and the proof that it is possible is simply that, against every reason for despair, we have already done so much of it.
Progress is real in specific, measurable domains—life expectancy has roughly doubled, extreme poverty and child mortality have fallen sharply, knowledge has expanded, and the circle of moral concern has widened, with slavery going from near-universal to near-universally condemned. But it is not a guaranteed law of history moving everything upward: it is domain-specific and can trade off (material gains alongside ecological and existential risk), it is reversible, and calling something "progress" requires a value standard rather than reading a neutral fact. So the honest position rejects both the cynicism that denies the genuine gains and the naive faith that they are self-sustaining. Progress is something people make and can unmake—contingent, uneven, and to be actively defended and chosen rather than awaited as destiny.