It is an article of faith and a hidden presumption of the secular West that progress is real and that it is an unqualified good. Modernisation is a necessity it is taught and must be imposed. Resistance is reactionary and morally suspect. It was modernity though that produced totalitarianism, environmental exploitation, loss of the sacred, nihilism and anomie. Progress then makes a totalitarian demand that is imposed on us, regardless of what of value is sacrificed to facilitate this. Value is the main loss, quality is neglected for the sake of quantity.
From Heidegger to Guenon, Leontiev to Weaver, very different thinkers have challenged the unquestioning faith in progress as a force for good. We have seen the secularisation of belief and the enframement by technology. As much as we recognise benefits such as ease and efficiency, the eradication of disease and the increase in comfort we must realise we have in a sense become disconnected from authentic existence.
A key factor is quantification, whereby everything is measured and reduced to data. This mathematical process is reductive, it always leaves a remainder - that remainder is quality, which cannot be accounted for by the modern mind. Quality is therefore dismissed as merely subjective. The Platonic triad of the Good, the True and the Beautiful once having transcendental authority and meaning is now reduced to mere preference and idiosyncratic tastes of the atomised individual.
This shift to quantification of existence leads to atomisation be that via Marxist Socialism or free-market capitalism. Value has to be measured and therefore all that counts is a materialist assessment. This is reductive and anti-spiritual. It also means that whatever we attempt to measure we cannot take into account the true spiritual value of the quality.
So the real process is one of disintegration whereby hierarchies and organic connections are dissolved into individual atomised and dislocated units. This degeneration is justified both in terms of a positivist scientific process and a political achievement of liberation and equality. Liberation though means dislocation and equality means the destruction of uniqueness found in the traditional and organic hierarchies of human society. In economics all that is measured is the data of productivity, so purpose and activity occur on the basis of consumerism, not principles. Hedonism becomes the only purpose, replacing asceticism and sacrifice. This is the totalising event of modernity. It turns us all into identical units driven by passions and appetites. The only value is material quantity.
A key turning point was the development of nominalism by William of Ockham, whereby universals were rejected and only the particular was regarded as valid. The connection with the realist tradition back to Plato was broken and the march of modernity through meaning and telos was initiated. With the Renaissance and the release of occult and kabbalistic theories from fallen Constantinople, a further turn brought complementary ideas of manipulation and magic as power over reality. Modernity developed further in hubris and the infatuation with technological progress and political revolution grew more.
Modernity, the dream of the Enlightenment and the revolution is the reduction of human existence, the loss of the spiritual level and the separation from our ancestors. Modernity then kills the value of human civilisation.
The resistance to progressive disintegration must be a focus on a return to the sacred, the hierarchical, the meaningful, the telos and at an overarching level the transcendental Logos. This return to the Logos is not to be misinterpreted as reductive rationalism, but in a rediscovery of transcendental meaning and overall a structured and purposeful cosmos. This is then in reality a reinvigoration of our civilisation and culture by a reassertion of what Saint Vincent of Lerins described as Quod Ubique, Semper, et Ab Omnibus. Progress, by contrast, has meant disintegration and reduction and the atomisation of the human being whether as a self-interested rational actor or an egalitarian member of international sameness, disconnected from tradition, heritage and culture. We cannot continue on this path of quantification and disintegration.
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