Progress: False friend and real hope

Progress is often a problematic term in health and environmental humanities. Scholars in both disciplines have critiqued progress as a theory, deconstructing ideas of inevitable and predictable paths through history, whether human or more-than-human; they have critiqued claims of progress as a material reality, highlighting its harms and the people and ecosystems left behind. Health humanities work has robustly queried the measures of progress, such as life expectancy, pointing to huge inequalities in health and wellbeing globally and over time. Environmental humanities scholars have turned a spotlight on the dangers of an extractive, industrial form of “progress” and the resource demands and polluting outputs of endless-growth capitalism. Yet scholars have also insisted that we actively need a concept of progress to envision better futures as well as understand the past. This chapter analyses the varied meanings of progress – both as ideology and as material reality – and its many critics, finishing with alternative ways of understanding the link between past and future, offering meanings of progress in which we can find hope and direction. Keywords: Progress, Capitalism, Teleology, Determinism, Futures