At the very heart of modern Progressivism is its epistemological weakness. It is the elephant in the room.
The assertion that the "progress of man" is inevitable or inexorable is patently false on its surface. One is hard pressed to find greater examples of the depravity of man than may be adduced from the twentieth century. There was a seemingly endless list of the merciless butcheries of tyrants....Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and so forth. In the face of all of these any assertion of the continual moral betterment of man is absurd.
Beyond the question of ethics or morals there is the question of technology or material betterment. A thorough review of history will disclose that many technologies and even engineering achievements have been lost for extensive periods of time. Perhaps the greatest wholesale case of this being true is the example of the dark ages from 500 AD to 1000 AD in which much of the hard won knowledge and technology of Rome was lost.
Ludwig von Mises suggests that it is not even necessary for us to point to historical examples of regression to disprove the faith of the Progressive.
"Mankind is almost unanimous in its appraisal of the material accomplishments of modern capitalistic civilization. The immense majority considers the higher standard of living which this civilization secures to the average man highly desirable. It would be difficult to discover, outside of the small and continually shrinking group of consistent ascetics, people who do not wish for themselves and their families and friends the enjoyment of the material paraphernalia of Western capitalism.
If, from this point of view, people assert that "we" have progressed beyond the conditions of earlier ages, their judgment of value agrees with that of the majority. But if they assume that what they call progress is a necessary phenomenon and that there prevails in the course of events a law that makes progress in this sense go on forever, they are badly mistaken.
To disprove this doctrine of an inherent tendency toward progress that operates automatically, as it were, there is no need to refer to those older civilizations in which periods of material improvement were followed by periods of material decay or by periods of standstill. There is no reason whatever to assume that a law of historical evolution operates necessarily toward the improvement of material conditions or that trends which prevailed in the recent past will go on in the future too.
What is called economic progress is the effect of an accumulation of capital goods exceeding the increase in population. If this trend gives way to a standstill in the further accumulation of capital or to capital decumulation, there will no longer be progress in this sense of the term.
Everyone but the most bigoted socialists agrees that the unprecedented improvement in economic conditions that has occurred in the last two hundred years is an achievement of capitalism. It is, to say the least, premature to assume that the tendency toward progressive economic improvement will continue under a different economic organization of society."
The view here of Mises is that the assumption of a law of historical evolution is simply unwarranted. The Hegelian historical dialectic is at the very least premature. Nevertheless, the Progressives insist on conducting these experiments which invariably end in failure. Public schools, progressive income taxation, welfare statism, and every imaginable structure of tutelary fascism have reached hitherto unimaginable dimensions of failure.
Perhaps the most recent and popular of these experiments is the test of the proposition that corporate welfare produces economic growth. After many years of this experiment we may at last admit that this idea too is a complete failure. In all of these respects we might repair to the view of Alexander Hamilton, who suggests in Federalist #6, "Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries."
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