Is the Notion of Progress an Illusion? [1957]

MUGGERIDGE: My position is this-I consider that one of the major factors in reducing the world to its present rather melancholy condition has been the circumstance that human beings 10 have been conditioned, for a variety of reasons, to believing that in some extraordinary way human life must, or can, get better and better. Now I regard this as a complete fallacy. I do not think it gets better, nor, indeed, do I think it gets worse. And I think that the only way that human beings can live sanely in this world is by recognizing that, and therefore I contend that the idea of progress has been a disintegrating idea, a fundamental error, and that there is very little hope for us until it is ultimately exploded.