Dead progress

Repetition is not itself bad, Rosenstock-Huessy says ( The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (The Cloister Library) , 80-1): “Life itself rests on a certain balance between recurrent and novel processes; the former are our fixed capital investment, the latter our free range of choice, selection, change, at any given moment. Unless the achievements of the past were continually reproduced along with the fresh creations of the present, there would be more mutation without cumulative growth of any kind.”

Still, repetition is a threat: “the natural tendency of life when left to itself is to relax from initiative to routine, and thereby to upset the balance between past and future, recurrence and innovation. That is why the automatic conception of progress is fallacious. Each group in society by sheer inertia tends to go on doing and demanding more and more of whatever its heart is set upon – shorter hours, higher profits, professional privileges, sectional advantages, established methods. But ‘more of the same’ means getting in a rut, a vicious circle, for quantitative expansion means qualitative repetition.” Ruts kill: “Ruts divide us from each other and cut us off from the future. And when life has lost unity and future, when it is disintegrated and imprisoned in the past, it is dead.”

Ruts define modern progress, which thinks of progress as more of what we now have. It is progress without surprise, progress without future. It is dead progress.