Immanentising the Eschaton

America and the Spirit of Technicity

Originally delivered as the John F. Fay ‘68 Plenary Address, at the 2024 Veritas Conference, Providence College, RI.

There is something unique about the relation between the American project and the idea of progress. It’s a distinctive spiritual impulse; culturally and historically specific. In what follows I want to explore its relation to a technologizing spirit, to master the material world – and to suggest that in this combination a high and beautiful aspiration stands so close to a literally anti-human one as to be almost indistinguishable.

I want to offer some reflections on telling these apart. And on how I hope that discernment - which I fear we’re going to learn the hard way - will in the end enable us to master the technologies that currently threaten to master us.

Progress Theology

First, though, we need to uncover some of the theological frameworks baked into the word “progress”. Because talk about progress is never just about incremental improvements. Rather, it’s a spiritual narrative, that has taken on supposedly secular colouring without really losing its theological character. This idea of progress is somehow everywhere, all the time. It seems to be in the air: in books, movies, stories. We have to “move forward”. We can’t “go backwards”.

The starting premise for Feminism Against Progress was a story of losing my faith. I don’t believe this version of progress is a thing. I don’t mean I think nothing ever gets better. Nor do I mean I think everything is somehow getting worse. Nor, obviously, do I mean nothing ever changes. Clearly we don’t live in the same world as, say, Roman Britain. But this notion of progress tends claim we don’t need a substantive vision of the good - and also to claim that we’re heading from somewhere to somewhere else. History, in this frame, is a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Usually, though not always, this comes with an assumption that the “to” is better than the “from”. But you’re still using the same framework if you run it in reverse and say things are getting worse. It’s a long story how I got there, but I came to feel that no: it’s not self-evident that in sum the world now is “better” in any absolute sense than that of, say, Roman Britain. It’s different. But how can we call it, definitively, better?

If you want to prove that you have to define your terms. You can point to things that are better now. Other things are surely worse. There is no way to evaluate the trade-offs except by defining on what terms you think we’re progressing. And you have to do so narrowly enough to exclude things that have got worse, but that you think don’t matter. And that’s a circular definition, that assumes the truth of what it sets out to prove.

The only other way to evaluate the claim would be divine omniscience. And this gives us a clue to what’s actually going on here. A continuation of theology by other means.

So let’s bracket the truth or otherwise of “progress” and explore its structure as a belief. To be progressing, we have to be going somewhere, usually somewhere better.The ultimate endpoint, the ultimate somewhere, is also the ultimate better. That is: the point at which everything that’s wrong with the world has been resolved. 

If this is all sounding familiar, that’s because it is. History in this moralised sense has a heavily Christian flavour. Greek and Romans mythologies had creation stories but no end times; Norse and Hindu mythologies have end times, but see the divine story as cyclical. The structure of “progress” is a version of Christian eschatology, with the transcendent bits edited out.

This isn’t an original observation at all: the social critic Christopher Lasch  described “progress” as “a secularised version of the Christian belief in Providence”. And in this white-labelled form, Progress tells us we’re fine without a divine creation story. We don’t need a substantive vision of the good. We don’t need faith in God, the soul, or the afterlife.

All that stuff about the End of Days? Pfft.

Progress strips out the overtly spiritual bits and explicit moral narrative. But it keeps the structure: the from and the to. And it keeps the expectation, now mostly content-free and ungrounded, that the endpoint will fix everything that’s wrong with the world. As we’ll see, this pared-down version of Christian eschatology hides another premise, with important implications: a set of assumptions about the how of progress. The methods at our disposal for bringing it about.

America

First, though, I want to dwell on what’s distinctively American about this theology of progress. I’ll say first up that I speak from a place of love. I visit America a lot, and sincerely love your country in all its hugeness and strangeness. I speak also, as a Brit, from a place of close cultural kinship.

Culturally speaking Brits and Americans overlap and yet differ. We are, as George Bernard Shaw put it, “divided by a common language”. The historical relation between Brits and Americans is ambivalent in some respects, of course. But Brits and Americans are still cultural cousins. The impulse I’m speaking about today was English before it was American, and came to America with the early English colonists. Even so, modern America has, at a fundamental level, a very different orientation to reality to that of the modern English. And especially to what could be.

The first time I visited the USA, about 20 years ago, I landed in New England. I found it so similar to the England I’d just left, it was like being in a bizarre dream. Then I got on a Greyhound bus and headed South – and found myself in a totally different world.

I rode the Greyhound bus network, coast to coast. I’ll spare you the travelogue, except to say it was wild. I came away with three abiding memories. A love of breakfast burritos. A deep, deep fear of gas station coffee. And a powerful sense of how abundant America’s resources are of raw spiritual wealth.

It's common here, especially among conservatives, to hear the opposite: that America is spiritually impoverished, in the grip of decadence, materialism, some other variant of moral crisis and collapse. But that was not my impressions on the Greyhound bus two decades ago. It’s not my impression now. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Let me explain what I mean.

America is extraordinarily rich in raw resources of faith, in a way that those born in this country perhaps find difficult to see. But which is very clear as a foreigner. America is what it is today partly thanks to the crude oil that gushed and still gushes from the ground. But raw faith also springs in this country, seemingly as freely as oil. I’m not talking about organised religious communities, though America of course has plenty of these. That’s refined faith. The same relation to the raw kind, as petrol to crude oil.

I’m talking about raw faith: the capacity to believe, and to move mountains on the basis of faith. This is a kind of spiritual wealth that erupts wherever Americans have a big idea. This abundant and free-flowing wealth of raw faith is what powers the hidden eschatology of “progress”. What’s especially important, though, is a culturally specific how.