Featured Excerpt: Progress

“Let the philosophical observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwardly toward our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature . . . He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals . . . and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.”

This passage is from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, two years before his death and forty-one years after the end of the American Revolutionary War. Jefferson was the United States’ third president and one of the country’s most important Founders. This short text illuminates both the spiritual foundation of the country and the idea at the heart of this book. So let’s deconstruct it.

If you were to travel from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Atlantic coastline in the east, Jefferson suggests, the land you would pass through and the buildings dotted along your road would appear as they had at earlier points in human history, as if you were traveling along not just miles but centuries. Your journey would reflect the passage of time, the progress made by European settlers since they reached the East Coast of North America. In other words, by “savages . . . living under no law but that of nature,” Jefferson means that at the Rockies there would be ancient wilderness housing violent fur-clad people without society who foraged for food and shelter, and dangerous beasts, representing life in humanity’s earliest years. By the time you reached what are now the Midwestern states, you would find early agricultural societies, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and rows of corn and wheat surrounding simple towns and villages. Finally, reaching the end of your mirror-image quest of American westward frontier expansion, arriving in Washington, DC, New York City, or Boston, you would find the as-yet “most improved state” of human beings and their societies: laws, dense cities, bustling trade, and sophisticated technology. There, you could rest assured that such developments would continue into a bright future. What Jefferson is sketching out is a grand narrative in a specific tradition that can be best captured in one word: progress.

Pick up any crime novel and you are likely to find a narrative formula. The details may change from story to story, but the general structure stays the same: a crime is committed, a detective begins the process of finding and piecing together clues, and the story culminates with the crime solved and the criminal brought to justice. Like crime novels, narratives of progress follow their own formula. This excerpt from Jefferson’s letter offers an ideal distillation of that formula. Though the details have changed through time, from culture to culture, the formula’s essential elements have remained remarkably consistent over not just centuries, but millennia.

The formula starts in the dark and wild beginning of humanity and moves forward and upward into a superior, more refined present, through changes that compound over time, culminating in some still vague, ever-future paradise. The story always parcels its characters into a binary, splitting those deemed civilized from the savage, the heathen from the blessed, the wild from the domesticated, the developed from the undeveloped. There is almost always some kind of frontier space, physical or metaphorical, into which the blessed must enter. The salvation awaiting in the future is set aside for the chosen, but only if they remain obedient to this quest, or, rather, to those leading it.

This narrative formula has served as the intellectual foundation on which Western civilization itself has grown and spread. The American sociologist Robert Nisbet, the last author to publish a broad historical account of the idea of progress, wrote of the concept in 1980: “No single idea has been more important in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years.”

The narrative formula of progress has been important for even longer than that, across many geographies and cultures. It has been important to how countless people over the last five thousand years have understood their place in the cosmos, the timeline reaching back to the beginning of all things and forward to the end of all things. It has been important to how armies are motivated, slaves and peasants are placated, gods invented, and emperors unleashed. The formula has been foundational to those who have made major scientific discoveries or peeked beyond the planet’s atmosphere, but also to those who have waged world wars and enslaved masses. Tracing the lineage of this narrative, we can not only see the evolution of an idea, but also understand more clearly the process that created a certain kind of society that we call civilization, an anomaly that was sparked first in one place, and has since burned across time, peoples, and far stretches of the earth. Though two hundred years old now, Jefferson’s letter appears in the latter part of this history. His worldview was grown out of a lineage that stretched back nearly five millennia, to the world’s earliest civilization in Mesopotamia. But that tradition did not end with Jefferson. The progress formula still occupies a central place in societies and minds all over the world. It remains the default, subconscious framework by which most of us understand our place in our species’ history and our societies’ trajectories through time, and thus by which policies are decided and enacted. It remains the foundation on which we are currently building the future.

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Progress Copyright © 2025 by Samuel Miller McDonald. All rights reserved.