Can Progress be defined in a non-subjective manner?

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My training is in anthropology where I learned that the ascent of man diagram is bullsugar

That evolution is not about progress towards a goal but adaptation to a niche.

In my politics I am what some folks call progressive. The problem is that I can't find a way that the term is
objectively meaningful. I don't believe in a Marxist inevitable progression or that Progress can mean anything other than the subjective ,moving towards something I like better. I don't see things necessarily moving in my preferred direction so that does not work.

What are your solutions to this issue? What is progress?

Without a change, there is no progress. But not every change is progress. For me progress is simply making of a thing better in practice. The problem is, some people believe that progress is something that is in fact no progress on long term.

Improvements in technology are not only discernible, but measurable.

ruveyn

You can argue what progress can be, I believe. So that it becomes an objective goal. I think you can argue everything. To make progress something subjective is dangerous. Nazism is the worst example. Or is it? It must be argued.

Of course it can be defined in an objective fashion. The question is whether any of those definitions are useful.

Per-capita GDP by PPP is an objective measure, and its growth progressive towards a more prosperous society.
Growth in a country's human development index is objective.
Improvements in a country's leading health indicators are objective.

National bureaux of statistics involve themselves in an ongoing exercise of counting, classifying and analysing, and political leaders use these data and analyses to evaluate the initiatives that they have taken and to predict the impact of initiatives that they are contemplating.

But this objectivity--in the name of "evidence based policy making"-- is a bit of a canard, because there will always be the individual who is an outlier for whom any objective assessment is meaningless because nothing has actually been done to improve that person's subjective assessment of the quality of their own life.

To argue: Progress, progression, to make us go further. To make things better. If you start with a statement, like saying progression is to make the lives of people in the world better, you can either, objectively, approve this or you can question it. Is progression to make the lives of people in the world better?

You can discuss this and conclude with something objective. Like saying that progress in the world most definitely must be making people's lives better, because lives of people is the most absolute we have in this world. The more time you use on this discussion the more objective it will be. Because there is an objective answer, you just have to find out what it is. This particular questioning don't have to be done right now, though.

If progression is to make the lives of people in the world better, in what way do you do this. You could say by evolving, developing and expanding the sciences, which follows objective reasoning, it would better the lives of people. Why would you do this, and not something else? Because it is so important.

I don't know if I proved my point with this.

But can't "progress" be a Trojan horse. For example, most would think the invention of the automobile as progress, yet that same automobile pollutes our environment, enables drunk drivers, and quite likely makes us all fatter since we walk less.