I think more important than the Hayekian difficulties of planning is that, to my understanding of how the term progress is normally used, part of the reason why all these notions of economic-technological, values, and institutional progress have been linked together under the term “progress” is because they are mutually self-reinforcing. Economic growth and peace and egalitarian, non-hierarchical values/psychology → democracy → economic growth and peace and egalitarian values, a-la Kant’s perpetual peace. You can’t easily make one go faster than the others because they all come together in a virtuous circle.
Further, these notions of progress are associated with a very particular vision of society put forward by liberals (the notion of long-run general progress, not just a specific type of moral progress from this particular law, is an idea mostly reserved to liberals). Progress, then, isn’t moving forward on humanity’s timeline, but moving forward on the desired liberal timeline of history, with a set of self-reinforcing factors (economic growth, democratization, liberal values) that lock-in the triumph of liberalism to eventually usher in the end of history.
I think this understanding makes the notion of undifferentiated progress much more compelling. It is hard to separate the different factors of progress, so differentiating is unreasonable, but progress is also a specific political vision that can be countered, not some pre-determined inevitable timeline. We live at a time where it feels uncontestable (Fukuyama a couple decades ago), but it isn’t quite.
I think more important than the Hayekian difficulties of planning is that, to my understanding of how the term progress is normally used, part of the reason why all these notions of economic-technological, values, and institutional progress have been linked together under the term “progress” is because they are mutually self-reinforcing. Economic growth and peace and egalitarian, non-hierarchical values/psychology → democracy → economic growth and peace and egalitarian values, a-la Kant’s perpetual peace. You can’t easily make one go faster than the others because they all come together in a virtuous circle.
Further, these notions of progress are associated with a very particular vision of society put forward by liberals (the notion of long-run general progress, not just a specific type of moral progress from this particular law, is an idea mostly reserved to liberals). Progress, then, isn’t moving forward on humanity’s timeline, but moving forward on the desired liberal timeline of history, with a set of self-reinforcing factors (economic growth, democratization, liberal values) that lock-in the triumph of liberalism to eventually usher in the end of history.
I think this understanding makes the notion of undifferentiated progress much more compelling. It is hard to separate the different factors of progress, so differentiating is unreasonable, but progress is also a specific political vision that can be countered, not some pre-determined inevitable timeline. We live at a time where it feels uncontestable (Fukuyama a couple decades ago), but it isn’t quite.