There is no question but that in some areas, progress is real and palpable. Take medicine for example. Both the quality and the quantity of our years here on earth have expanded dramatically. Until about a hundred years ago, most people went through half their lives with a toothache. Today, however, few people born after 1960 even know what a toothache is.
Economic improvement is also extraordinary.
When it comes to moral progress, the issue is far more problematical and ambiguous. There have certainly been some remarkable changes in our own country of a very positive nature. Slavery and legally sanctioned racial segregation came to an end. The rights of women to equal treatment and opportunity multiplied geometrically. At the same time, the twentieth century is incontrovertibly the bloodiest in all of human annals.