“Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative". Secular thinkers, “reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal”, even though “the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning”.
Whether faith in progress is an invention or an adaptation of the Enlightenment, the image of secular humanists naively believing humanity is on an irreversible, linear path of advancement seems a caricature of their more modest hope, based in history, that progress has occurred and that more is possible. Enlightenment ideas of progress “were usually tempered by a strong streak of pessimism, a sense of the dangers and challenges to which the human condition is subject”.
He dismisses the idea that “Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naive belief in man’s perfectibility” as a “complete myth conjured up by early 20th-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims”.
John Gray's book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)
