The crisis of progress is a crisis of its standard bearers, not the idea

Evidence

There can be no doubt that progress has been a democratic ideology. Nor is there any doubt that it has had a political function in the formation of modern constitutional states, etc. It is also certain that it is no longer at its zenith. But in what sense is this the case? Not in the sense that the faith in the possibility of rationally dominating nature and chance has been lost, but in the sense that it is “democratic”. In other words, the official “standard bearers” of progress have become incapable of this domination, because they have brought into being in the present destructive forces like crises and unemployment, etc., every bit as dangerous and terrifying as those of the past. (The past forces meanwhile have now been “socially” forgotten, though not by all elements of society: the peasants continue not to understand “progress”; they think of themselves as being, and still are all too much, in the hands of natural forces and of chance, and therefore retain a “magical”, mediaeval and religious mentality.) The crisis of the idea of progress is not therefore a crisis of the idea itself, but a crisis of the standard bearers of the idea, who have in turn become a part of “nature” to be dominated. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1278

Categorization

• XREF: The peasants’ ‘magical, mediaeval’ mentality as a lagging consciousness directly prefigures Gramsci’s hegemony/consent analysis and the margins-center distinction.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that those who standard-bear progress become themselves part of ‘nature to be dominated’ is a dense inversion — the modernizers become the new irrational force.