The interwar period of twentieth-century Europe accepted—without question—the notion that all history and human action moved toward some end point, generally a happy if not paradisiacal one. Dawson feared that this idea, called progress, had become so ingrained as an absolute in the human mind by the 1920s that no one questioned it as a fact to which all must submit. Even the devastation of the Great War (1914-1918) did little to attenuate the belief in progress. That war had been waged in the name of progress, but now the cost was, perhaps, too bloody for interwar Europeans to contemplate as frivolous. Could that entire generation of young men have died for less than nothing, for a phantom idea?
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/01/christopher-dawson-nature-progress-bradley-birzer.html