The Idea of Progress Reconsidered: Christopher Lasch

Reflections on Chapter 2 of The True and Only Heaven

Reflections on Chapter 2 of The True and Only Heaven

In Chapter 2 of The True and Only Heaven, Christopher Lasch undertakes one of the most incisive critiques of modern liberalism's central myth: the myth of progress. What appears on the surface as a rational ideal, an orderly ascent toward justice, prosperity, and enlightenment, is, in Lasch’s analysis, a displaced form of religious hope. He calls it the secular religion of progress, a faith that has come to dominate the modern imagination, replacing divine judgment with the judgment of history, and replacing eternal truth with the promise of material abundance.

“The secular religion of progress… substituted the judgment of history for the judgment of God”

But history, as Lasch points out, is not a reliable moral judge. The modern faith that things inevitably get better over time is, in many ways, a superstition. One that has proven unable to offer meaning, moral formation, or the strength to endure hardship.

From Civic Virtue to Consumer Utopia

Lasch begins by tracing how the early defenders of commerce — thinkers like Mandeville, Hume, and Adam Smith — offered not just economic theory but a moral reinterpretation of vice. Mandeville famously claimed that private vices could yield public benefits, and while Smith distanced himself from this cynicism, he still believed that self-interest could be harnessed for national prosperity. Yet even Smith was ambivalent.

He feared that men in a commercial society would become “effeminate and dastardly,” too addicted to comfort to defend their country

In an effort to correct this drift, 19th-century reformers tried to moralise capitalism through the family. Domestic life, they hoped, would transform selfishness into responsibility.

“Domestic life transformed the potential gambler, speculator, dandy, or confidence man into a conscientious provider”

But this adjustment did not restore virtue. It redefined it. Thrift and restraint gave way to productivity and consumption as moral goods. Liberal society reduced citizenship to economic activity. The ultimate aim became not character, but comfort.

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From Scarcity to Psychological Engineering

By the early 20th century, this logic reached its full maturity. Simon Patten declared that the problem of scarcity was over. The new challenge was psychological: how to condition people to enjoy the coming age of abundance. The state would now act as therapist, manager, and engineer of desire.

“Patten proposed a new morality based not on the postponement of gratification but on the capacity for enjoyment”

This therapeutic state would promote happiness through planning, leisure, and consumer choice. Even advertising became moralised.

“Prosperity lies in spending, not in saving,” declared Earnest Elmo Calkins

The result was a society in which morality was no longer about limits but about efficiency, pleasure, and satisfaction. The older disciplines, religious, civic, or familial, were replaced by technocratic management and marketing.

Keynes and the Gospel of Comfort

Lasch devotes considerable attention to John Maynard Keynes, whose 1928 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren prophesied a world in which the economic problem would be solved and humanity liberated to pursue higher pleasures. In that imagined future, traditional restraints would be unnecessary, even harmful. Keynes saw the coming age of abundance as an opportunity to cast off the inherited burdens of Victorian morality. Lasch quotes him in full:

“We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things. The rest of the sad stuff, the deliberate repudiation of pleasure, the asceticism of today’s professional economist, the unnecessary sacrifice, and the moral urge for the future, all these will be revealed as mere vestiges of a puritanical past. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the highest virtues. We shall once more realise that the love of money as a possession, as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life, will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” (p. 74)

What Keynes envisioned was not just economic liberation, but moral and psychological transformation. But for Lasch, this utopian aestheticism was both elitist and dangerously naïve. Keynes reserved the fruits of civilisation for a “small class of people, preferably idle,” capable of “passionate perception” His admiration for the Bloomsbury circle, with its cultivated detachment from tradition, only deepened the gap between intellectual taste and civic virtue.

Even Keynes, despite his visionary optimism, sensed the tension. He acknowledged that irreligious capitalism could not match communism’s spiritual fervour. Its only advantage, he concluded, was efficiency.

“If irreligious capitalism is to defeat religious communism, it must be many times more efficient”

Orwell, Fascism, and the Hunger for Meaning

This brings Lasch to a chilling insight. If liberalism offers only comfort and pleasure, it leaves the door open to darker alternatives. He turns to George Orwell, who, writing in 1940, observed that the democracies had come to think human beings desired nothing beyond “ease, security, and avoidance of pain.” Fascism, by contrast, promised danger, hardship, and sacrifice, and thus, meaning.

“Whatever else could be said about it, fascism was psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life”
“Whereas socialism, and even capitalism... have said to people, ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them, ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet”

Lasch/Orwell are not excusing fascism. He is explaining its appeal. When liberalism offers nothing higher than leisure, people may turn to movements that demand sacrifice.

Mumford and the Need for Discipline

Lasch then draws on Lewis Mumford, who denounced the “sleek progressive mind” that denied the value of struggle, discipline, and discomfort. Progressives, Mumford argued, believed that evil was merely social or external, and that human nature was inherently good if only it were unshackled.

“They scorned the discipline gained through manual labor, the endurance of discomfort, and the nurture of the young. They sought to free mankind from all manner of hardship and adversity, from the boredom of domestic drudgery, and from natural processes in general”

Mumford saw what many liberals could not. Freedom without formation leads to fragmentation. Without limits, life becomes shapeless and aimless.

Hope vs. Optimism

Lasch ends with a distinction as subtle as it is profound. Optimism, he argues, is not hope. Optimism is the belief that things are getting better. Hope is the belief that justice is worth pursuing, even when things fall apart. It is forged not in progress, but in memory — in early experiences of love, order, and trust that remain resilient even in disillusionment.

“Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice”

“It rests on confidence not so much in the future as in the past… such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced”

Hope is not linear. It is tempered by suffering, sustained by memory, and directed by conscience. It is what progress cannot provide, and what liberalism, in its rejection of tragedy, has forgotten.

Final Reflections

What Lasch’s calls us to recover, is a society that remembers what it takes to form people of character.

We have traded struggle for safety, duty for indulgence, and hope for optimism. But these trades have left us unprepared for crisis, unable to endure hardship, and uninterested in what lies beyond ourselves.

Lasch shows us that “Progress” is a secular substitute for faith, spiritually empty and morally adrift.