Progress

Miracles 3.3 Do scientists really mean what they say? [Context: Quantum Mechanics] "I cannot help thinking they mean no more than that the movement of individual units are permanently incalculable to //us//, not that they are themselves random and lawless." ... For it is the glory of science to progress." Idea expressed of the transitory nature of scientific knowledge. "... a layman can hardly feel any certainty that some new scientific development may not tomorrow abolish this whole idea of a lawless Subnature."

Believers in progress rightly note that in the world of machines the new model supersedes the old; from this they falsely infer a similar kind of supercession in such things as virtue and wisdom. //Why I Am Not a Pacifist//, paragraph 22

"Tender as my years may be," said Caspian, "I believe I understand the slave trade from within quite as well as your Sufficiency. And I do not see that it brings into the islands meat or bread or beer or wine or timber or cabbages or books or instruments of music or horses or armour or anything else worth having. But whether it does or not, it must be stopped."

"But that would be putting the clock back," gasped the Governor. "Have you no idea of progress, of development?"

"I have seen them both in an egg," said Caspian. "We call it //Going bad// in Narnia. This trade must stop." //Voyage of the Dawn Treader,// chapter 4, paragraph 15-7

"Have you ever noticed," said Dimble, "that the universe, and every little bit of the universe, is always hardening and narrowing and coming to a point?"

His wife waited as those wait who know by long experience the mental processes of the person who is talking to them.

"I mean this," said Dimble in answer to the question she had not asked. "If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder. Like in the poem about Heaven and Hell eating into merry Middle Earth from opposite sides. //That Hideous Strength//, chapter 4, paragraphs 28-30

There [|wd. be] no `progress' if everyone were living in the Spirit: at least in some senses of the word `progress'. There might continue to be progress in arts & sciences - why not? But social and economic progress wd. cease, I expect, because all those problems wd. solve themselves in the first year or so. Progress means getting nearer to a desired goal and therefore means not being there already. You don't want the London train to go on progressing after it reached London! //Collected Letters,// to Mr Lyell, 6 December 1944

//In May 1944 Jack received an amusing letter from the Society for the Prevention of Progress, of Walnut Creek, California, invit­ing him to become a member and requesting him to forward his credentials. The signature on his reply was instigated by one of the Society's rules to which his attention had been called: - Membership and the privileges of the Society are denied to such individuals as Henry A. Wallace and this fellow Beveridge.//

Dear Sir, While feeling that I was //born// a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership. I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour. I humbly submit that in my Riddell Lectures entitled //The Abolition of Man// you will find another work not all unworthy of consideration for admission to the canon. Yours regressively, C. S. Lewis Beverages not Beveridges (my motto) //Collected Letters,// May 1944
 * TO THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF PROGRESS**