We assume things get better. Not just technology—everything. Medicine, morality, politics, understanding. Each generation inherits more than the last and builds higher. This assumption runs so deep we barely notice it. It shapes how we vote, what we teach children, and why we tolerate present hardships for promised future gains.

But this belief in inevitable improvement is remarkably young. For most of human history, people thought the opposite—that golden ages lay behind us, not ahead. The Enlightenment changed that. Understanding how and why matters now more than ever, as progress itself faces a crisis of confidence.

Before the seventeenth century, Western civilization told itself a different story. Ancient Greeks believed history moved in cycles—civilizations rose, flourished, and fell, only to rise again. Medieval Christians looked backward to Eden and forward to salvation, but earthly life remained a vale of tears, not a path of improvement. The Romans believed their best days were behind them, lost when the Republic gave way to Empire.

The Scientific Revolution shattered these assumptions. When Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton demonstrated that ancient authorities had been wrong about fundamental questions, something shifted. If Aristotle could be mistaken about physics, what else might previous generations have gotten wrong? Knowledge suddenly seemed cumulative rather than lost. Each discovery built on the last.

Thinkers like Francis Bacon and the Marquis de Condorcet articulated what many were beginning to feel: humanity wasn't recovering ancient wisdom but creating something genuinely new. Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind presented history as a story of continuous advancement, with the best chapters yet unwritten. The arrow of time pointed upward.

Takeaway

The belief that tomorrow beats yesterday isn't natural or universal—it's a specific historical invention that emerged when scientific discovery made ancient authorities look fallible.

The Enlightenment didn't just claim progress was possible—many of its advocates believed it was inevitable. Reason, once unleashed, would naturally spread. Superstition would retreat. Tyranny would crumble as people recognized their rights. Kant famously defined Enlightenment as humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity. The emphasis on self-imposed suggested the cure was already within reach.

This optimism had profound consequences. If progress was automatic, reformers could be patient. Education would gradually lift all boats. Institutions would evolve toward justice without revolution. The darker implications took longer to surface: if progress was inevitable, failure to progress implied something wrong with those left behind. Colonial powers justified empire as bringing civilization to the "backward."

The twentieth century delivered devastating counterexamples. The most scientifically advanced nation in Europe engineered the Holocaust. Nuclear weapons demonstrated that technological progress could threaten existence itself. Knowledge accumulated, but wisdom remained stubbornly scarce. The assumption that more information automatically produces better outcomes began to look dangerously naive.

Takeaway

Knowledge accumulates automatically; wisdom does not. The Enlightenment's great blind spot was assuming that understanding how the world works would naturally teach us how to live well within it.

We now live in the gap between two kinds of progress. Material progress continues accelerating—processing power doubles, genomes get sequenced, rockets land themselves. But moral and political progress feels uncertain at best, reversed at worst. This creates a peculiar modern anxiety that earlier centuries couldn't have imagined.

The Enlightenment assumed these forms of progress were connected. Scientific thinking would promote tolerance. Economic development would reduce conflict. Universal education would produce enlightened citizens. Some of this happened. But we've also learned to weaponize every advancement. Social media connects and polarizes. Artificial intelligence promises and threatens. The tools improve faster than the hands that wield them.

Contemporary critics like John Gray argue the Enlightenment's faith in progress was always a secular religion, a comforting myth dressed in rational clothing. Others, following Habermas, suggest the Enlightenment project remains unfinished rather than failed—that its genuine insights about human dignity and reasoned discourse still offer our best hope, if we can separate them from false promises of inevitability.

Takeaway

The modern condition is living with Enlightenment tools while doubting Enlightenment confidence—powerful enough to reshape the planet but uncertain whether we're wise enough to survive our own capabilities.

The progress myth isn't simply true or false. It captured something real about cumulative knowledge while missing something essential about human nature. We can build on previous generations' discoveries. We don't automatically become better people for it.

Perhaps the most honest Enlightenment legacy isn't confidence but responsibility. If progress isn't inevitable, it becomes a choice—one that requires constant effort, vigilance, and humility about how little we actually understand.