"Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass"
About this Quote
Progress is haunted by the need to outdo what came before. When genuine surpassing proves impossible, it reaches for the next best thing: magnifying its own importance. Exaggeration becomes a substitute for real advance, a way to preserve the narrative that tomorrow must be better than yesterday. The mechanism is psychological and rhetorical at once. If the new cannot be truer, finer, or more enduring, it can at least be louder, bigger, more spectacular. The inflation of claims serves as camouflage for a plateau in substance.
Franz Grillparzer, a 19th-century Austrian dramatist shaped by the Biedermeier era and the strictures of Metternichs Vienna, watched the rhetoric of modernity grow confident even as censorship and conformity reigned. He admired classical measure and feared bombast, and he distrusted the cult of novelty that rose with industrialization and the political upheavals surrounding 1848. His aphorism pricks the vanity of an age that mistakes noise for achievement. The word recourse signals a fallback tactic, not a path of strength. When arts, politics, or science cannot equal the depth of earlier achievements, they inflate their headlines, their budgets, their promises. The gesture reveals insecurity more than triumph.
The insight remains uncannily current. Technological marketing touts breakthroughs that are often refinements; cultural movements claim revolutions that amount to fashion shifts; political programs promise transformations that dissolve into rebranding. Scale and speed can masquerade as superiority, while the harder questions of truth, justice, beauty, and human flourishing resist easy improvement. Real progress tends to be precise, testable, and modest in its speech, because it does not need the bulwark of exaggeration. The test is simple: when achievements are solid, they invite scrutiny and comparison; when they are fragile, they demand fanfare. Grillparzers warning asks for humility before the past and rigor in the present, so that advancement, when it comes, can stand without bluster.
Franz Grillparzer, a 19th-century Austrian dramatist shaped by the Biedermeier era and the strictures of Metternichs Vienna, watched the rhetoric of modernity grow confident even as censorship and conformity reigned. He admired classical measure and feared bombast, and he distrusted the cult of novelty that rose with industrialization and the political upheavals surrounding 1848. His aphorism pricks the vanity of an age that mistakes noise for achievement. The word recourse signals a fallback tactic, not a path of strength. When arts, politics, or science cannot equal the depth of earlier achievements, they inflate their headlines, their budgets, their promises. The gesture reveals insecurity more than triumph.
The insight remains uncannily current. Technological marketing touts breakthroughs that are often refinements; cultural movements claim revolutions that amount to fashion shifts; political programs promise transformations that dissolve into rebranding. Scale and speed can masquerade as superiority, while the harder questions of truth, justice, beauty, and human flourishing resist easy improvement. Real progress tends to be precise, testable, and modest in its speech, because it does not need the bulwark of exaggeration. The test is simple: when achievements are solid, they invite scrutiny and comparison; when they are fragile, they demand fanfare. Grillparzers warning asks for humility before the past and rigor in the present, so that advancement, when it comes, can stand without bluster.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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