That’s progress for you

Can you name a few sciences off the top? Right, physics. Chemistry, certainly. Biology, definitely. Astronomy? Yes, of course.

But what about philosophy? Or, God forbid, theology? No, of course not. These, as any modern man weaned on the Enlightenment knows for sure, aren’t sciences. Because, even if the modifier ‘natural’ is sometimes omitted before ‘sciences’, it’s always assumed.

Science is something that deals with various aspects of matter. If it deals with anything else, it’s not science.

Now, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain disagreed. Not only is philosophy a science, he argued, but it’s superior to natural sciences because it deals with first principles. And theology sits above even philosophy, while towering over natural sciences.

Both philosophy and theology deal with questions that natural sciences can’t answer, nor even ask. How could something come out of nothing? Why did it happen? To what end? Is there a purpose to life? What’s good or evil?

Answers to these questions have to exist, but they can’t be found in the material world. They inhabit a different reality that’s easy to notice but hard to understand. So hard, in fact, that some two centuries ago Western Man decided not even to try. As a result, he became Modern Man.

He lost interest in things that are outside the remit of natural sciences, insisting instead that such things don’t exist. And if they do exist, then sooner or later natural sciences will explain them. All it takes is time. How much time? As much as it takes. Millions of years if need be. We’re in no hurry, are we?

Meanwhile, natural sciences can explain everything of interest in life, including life itself. What’s there not to understand? Life is progress, constant movement from the primitive to the simple, from the simple to the complex, from the worse to the better.

Subatomic particles become atoms, atoms become molecules, molecules become matter, matter becomes cells, cells become biological life, biological life produces single-cell organisms, they in turn produce more intricate biosystems and so on all the way to Shakespeare and Bach. True, science hasn’t yet got around to explaining where those first subatomic particles came from, but it’s early days yet. Give us another few millennia, and your curiosity will be satisfied.

This line of thought inevitably had to lead to the notion of axiomatic progress. Everything is in flux, things change, and they always change for the better. Natural science says so, and whatever it says applies to everything: man, society, morality, politics – every little thing.

Once that understanding of life got to be accepted as indisputable orthodoxy, Darwinism absolutely had to appear and feed the orthodoxy the way tributaries feed rivers. Darwinism was the biological expression of all-encompassing progress, and, since natural sciences reign supreme, human progress can only be understood in Darwinist terms, those of continuous meliorative development.

The needle of progress was stuck in Modern Man’s vein, and he became a junkie in short order, needing his fix all the time. His view of the world had to boil down to the certainty that newer means better. And if reality refused to be forced into that intellectual straitjacket, then so much the worse for reality.

Man’s everyday life is made up of myriads of things, but man himself has to be both the starting point and the destination of analysis. And there our progress junkies have to deal with an uncomfortable truth. While man has indeed managed to improve gradually every thingamajig propping up his everyday existence, he himself hasn’t progressed at all since the time he painted those sublime drawings in Santander caves.

Anyone arguing against this observation will be on a hiding to nothing. He’d have to insist that Derrida is a better philosopher than Plato, Emin is a better painter than Rembrandt, Boulez is a better composer than Bach, Pinter is a better playwright than Shakespeare, the Lloyd’s building is better architecture than Lincoln Cathedral, Kingsley and Martin Amis are better novelists than Dickens and Tolstoy.

No? Then what about morality? Does Hemingway’s morality (“If it feels good, it’s moral”) strike you as superior to, say, the Sermon on the Mount? Does Rousseau’s fallacy that man is born in primordial goodness lead to a more moral world than the doctrine of original sin?

At this point, any modern man worth his salt will whip out his laptop, key in a few words and triumphantly show you the screen. We now have more food than ever, more and better medicines, we live longer, travel the world faster, have painless dentistry and instant access to information. Isn’t that progress?

Don’t ask me. Ask respondents in regular polls around Western Europe. They’ll tell you what they unfailingly tell those pollsters: their lives are worse than the lives their parents had, but better than the lives their children will have. That sounds more like regress than progress to me.

People, even those hooked on progress, realise that quality of life is made up of many imponderables that can’t be expressed numerically. They notice, for example, that, while their parents spent their spare time reading serious books or playing cricket, and they themselves reading potboilers or playing football, their children don’t read at all and play computer games. The rest of the time, the youngsters remain glued to their high-tech gadgets, chatting in monosyllabics and acronyms to friends they’ll never meet.

As a result, they gradually lose the gift of speech and any ability to function socially in civilised society. They also lose the lean physique of their parents’ generation, acquiring pillows of fat around their girth and all sorts of attendant diseases. But not to worry: our better medicine and pharmacology will control those diseases nicely. That’s progress for you.

However, if you say anything against progress, you’ll be bombarded with variously inane sound bytes. Don’t you prefer driving a car to riding in a carriage? Yes I do, though more people are killed in car accidents than ever were killed in carriage accidents.

Isn’t it better for surgery to be painless? Yes it is, though as a result we probably have more surgery than is strictly necessary.

Wouldn’t you hate to write with a quill? Yes I would, though more great books were written with that implement than ever will be written with a word processor.

But all those drugs, nuclear power stations and cars only constitute progress if they are used to good ends by good people. When this condition isn’t met, progress begins to look rather less progressive.

Suddenly we notice that the same company that gave us the VW Beetle also gave us the V1 rocket. The same conglomerate that first synthesised aspirin also mass-produced Zyklon B gas. The same American automaker who pioneered mass production of cheap cars also delivered 20 per cent of all vehicles used by the Wehrmacht, not to mention thousands of lorries that carried millions to Soviet concentration camps. And, as some unfortunate Japanese could have testified, the same technology that can heat our houses can also incinerate them.

Of course, the moment we mention human goodness as a necessary precondition, we leave the domain of material, quantifiable progress and enter the realm of things metaphysical but nonetheless real. It’s there that we see not progress but ever-accelerating failure. And it’s this failure that’s putting dents, soon to become holes, into material progress as well.

Meanwhile, we’ve replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, sensitivity to others with wokery, self-respect with self-esteem – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.

That’s progress for you, as I’m sure Darwin would argue if he were around. While at it, it would be nice if he could explain why some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world have become extinct, and why modern biology shows that most mutations are degenerative rather than meliorative.

Progress has become the faux god of modernity and, like real God, it moves in mysterious ways. But I’ll leave them for our progress junkies to explain.