It meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Often, when I talked about progress, I was attacked on the basis of a purely semantic misunderstanding. For many people, particularly in the younger generation, the term had come to symbolize a rapacious dedication to profits and production quotas, at the expense of both social justice and environmental concerns. Its content varies in time and space, and from one individual to another.
Progress is always upward and forward, looking to the future.
It implies change for the better. That is where we can and should begin to disagree. The rest of the essay tried to define the term but didn't do a very good job. It's time to try again. Every individual faces a bewildering array of situations or conditions or relationships that would be better if they could only be improved.