Why We Must Keep Believing in Progress

It is a common trope of literary history, that of decrying the degeneracy of the times, and looking back with nostalgia upon the virtues of one’s forefathers. “O tempora, O mores!” cries Cicero, fulminating before his fellow senators as he delineates the crimes of Catiline, who sought to stir up a civil insurrection to place himself in power. In The Acharnians and Lysistrata, Aristophanes glances at the virtue of those Spartans and Athenians of two generations past who joined forces to fight the common foe, Persia, at Thermopylae and Marathon, rather than fighting one another and cozying up to that same enemy. William Faulkner sees in the American South a transition from a society whose principal virtue was honor, to one in which money is the only thing that talks; a movement from a world that the thoughtful Quentin Compson could both critique and love, to a world ruled by people like his grasping brother Jason, who even when he was a boy kept his hands in his pockets.