Should we believe in progress?

A General Election in Britain soon will be with us. 

All political parties believe in progress. Progress implies change and movement. But it must be more than that. For progress only means anything if the movement has a known destination. Someone who has no idea where he wants to go, but is marching along a road, can hardly be said to be making progress. He could be moving to disaster. With a different metaphor, some say we cannot put the clock back. However (changing back the metaphor) if you have made a wrong turning you must try to go back to where the mistake was made in order to take the right road so as to make progress on your journey. 

Certainly in my life so far, there have been enormous changes in society and its attitudes . (I am in my mid fifties). When I was an undergraduate a number of fellow students (most were non Church goers) were together in a student common room watching a TV documentary about promiscuity in another part of the world. Among us all there was as sense of shock with the expressed hope that such a sexual revolution would never come to Britain! 
At that time a friend of mine was a young soldier in the British army. He tells me that among his fellow soldiers attitudes were the same as ours in the student common room. 

If we had been told then what society would become  like thirty-five years on we simply would not have believed it. 

Yet paradoxically it is many of our generation who have driven these changes. Their leading role in the media and other opinion forming bodies has been very powerful. Governments of all shades of opinion simply have not had the will or courage to stand up to these changes.

Each change that has been made in law and custom has been made in the name of the happiness and rights of individuals. It is not at all clear to me that individuals are happier with the free for all. What is clear to me is that succeeding generations of children are very very much less happy because of the freedom claimed by the modern adult. The enormous cost in terms of misery, violence and social deprivation, never mind the financial cost to the social security system, is hard to imagine. 

In the late 1990s Lord Rees Mogg who used to be editor of the Times wrote: 

None of us controls the culture in which we live. So far as that is concerned, we are all flying in a jumbo jet with a blind pilot to an unknown destination. The history of earlier civilisations suggests that a pleasure culture does, indeed, destroy the happiness which is its objective. Cultures, which depend upon duty, tend to be more creative. But we are not the pilots of our cultural aircraft; we do not know how long it will go on flying, nor in what wilderness it will eventually land.

The heart of the gospel is that the Son of God gave up His `right to happiness' so that through His suffering we might be eternally happy. He was prepared to do that for us because He knew that we live forever. 

If people are not prepared to take into account our eternal destiny they will try (vainly) to grab all the happiness they can now. That is one of the roots of the problem.