Progress

Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 133-134:

It is inherently questionable to believe that there is a continuous moral progress, moving forward with the speed of science, still more questionable to believe that there is artistic or spiritual progress marching beside it. Virtually no poet since Homer has surpassed him, and in the arts, in religious thought and in philosophical speculation, we are as likely to encounter a decline from one generation to the next as an improvement. Even if there is knowledge of a sort contained in high culture, it is not knowledge that accumulates in an orderly or linear way. It is a matter of wisdom, not expertise, of an imaginative grasp of the human condition rather than the search for theories with which to explain it.