There is surely good reason to question the reality of moral progress. The belief in progress was actually introduced by the Hebrew Bible. Prior to that the Greek view prevailed that life was wholly cyclical in nature. According to this way of thinking, the same sequence of events repeated itself from time immemorial and will go on eternally. In sharp contrast, it was the Jews who contended that life was a drama whose opening act occurred in the Garden of Eden and whose climax will take place during the messianic age when God s purposes on Earth will achieve total and complete fulfillment.
History is the saga of mankind s march through time from beginning to end.
The optimism that has permeated so much human thought since the Age of the inlightenment in eighteenth century Europe was essentially a secularized version of the Biblical concept of progress. A frequently overlooked ingredient in Judaic thinking, however, is the conviction that progress does not consist of a smooth, incremental, and almost automatic movement in time from worse to better, from ignorance to enlightenment. The reason is that God made man free, possessing the capacity to utilize his abilities in a positive and constructive way, or to harness them in a manner that is ruinous to himself and to the world. Human nature contains both a yetzer hatov, a good inclination, and a yetzer hara, an evil inclination. These two parts of our personality are constantly working against each other, and the goal of Judaism is to help the good inclination to get the upper hand.