The pernicious presumption of progress

Ever since Heraclitus observed that you can’t step into the same river twice, mankind has known that everything develops, irreversibly so. Even natural selection held no secrets for our civilisational ancestors.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses and thus contributing to the survival of the faster ones.

It would have indeed taken a blind man to overlook the dynamic essence of nature. All species develop, some thrive, others don’t, and most die out. We now know that some 99 per cent of the species that have ever inhabited the world no longer do.

And even a single biological organism, such as a tree, goes through predetermined biological cycles: birth, childhood, youth, maturity, decline, death. A human being develops over the same cycle, which indisputable observation has led some thinkers, Toynbee and Spengler spring to mind, to come up with the naturalist view of history, perhaps the most anti-Western theory I can think of.

But the really damaging theory of history first appeared in the 18^th century and acquired a sacramental status in the 19^th. That was the idea that each new phase wasn’t only a development of an old one, but also an improvement on it.

Life wasn’t just in flux, with things changing over time. According to progress junkies, things didn’t merely change; they became steadily and ineluctably better. They developed as if with a specific purpose in mind: from primitive to complex, from small to big, from chaos to order, from bad to good, from scatterbrained to rational, from wicked to moral.

The last two forms of development applied to man only, but the tendency was common for all nature. And why not? When later in the 19^th century Nietzsche explained that God was dead, he meant that educated people no longer believed. That was simply an observation, and an accurate one at that.

Therefore, man was no longer perceived as the unique creature made in the image and likeness of God. He was just another order of nature, a beast of a special kind – cleverer than any other animal but an animal nonetheless. Hence man too obeyed ubiquitous natural laws, by then helpfully formulated by Darwin. For evolution, read history.

Darwin explained, being rather economical with the proof, that Homo sapiens started life long ago (millions of years ago? billions? – never mind, as many as it took to make the theory plausible) as a single-cell organism. The single cell kept growing and becoming more complex until it became Charles Darwin via many intermediate stages.

Since Charles Darwin undoubtedly represented progress over an amoeba, the point seemed irrefutable. Progress, which is to say inexorable meliorative development, was now seen as an ontological property of biological life and hence of man, its more advanced element.

In the century preceding Darwin, man was paid a blanket compliment of getting better, not just older. Man had finally begun to acquire reason, having until then flown by the seat of his pants. Progress was under way, and man was growing from his natal senselessness to rationality, and hence from immorality to morality, showing signs that eventually the Rational Millennium was bound to arrive.

Soon Darwin was on hand to explain this tendency in biological terms, and preachers of progress experienced the joy of a safe cracker who hears the final satisfying click. Darwin’s hypotheses fell far below the level of evidential proof required of other sciences, but they were happily accepted as the ultimate truth.

History turned out to be a science after all, and a natural science at that. So what’s a few missing links here and there among progressivist friends? An irrelevant footnote at worst.

In any case, philosophers of progress were happy to leave the biological details for natural scientists to sort out. What mattered to them was the historical truth of meliorative evolution as it applied to human life.

Just look at social and economic formations, the way Darwin’s contemporary Marx looked at them. Can’t you see the steady progress from primitive and crude to complex and refined?

Primordial caveman, hunter and gatherer, developed a barter economy; his descendants progressed to slave ownership and then to feudalism; that was replaced by capitalism; capitalism became imperialism and hence moribund; socialism took over, with ensuing communism set to adumbrate the very millennium of Reason and hence Virtue that those 18^th century philosophes had prophesied.

Not every thinker accepted Marx’s take on progress, but few of them raised any objections to the notion of progress as such. It was patently obvious to all sensible people that life was getting steadily better, however ‘better’ was defined.

Life in the 19^th century was better than in the 18^th; that was better than life in the 16^th century, and there wasn’t even any point talking about earlier times. They were enfolded in darkness out of which man was gradually alighting, guided by the beacon of Reason.

Yet whenever we say that A is better than B, we’re implying the existence of objective valuation criteria enabling us to pass comparative judgement. But in this case such criteria don’t exist.

The criteria a historian uses are based on his own thoughts, experience, sensations. And these are largely affected by his own time. That’s roughly what Benedetto Croce meant when he said: “All history is modern history.”

Our own time is dominated by science and resultant technology, which are constantly getting more intricate and sophisticated. However, it’s slipshod thinking to insist on that basis that life is getting better. There’s no doubt that an Apple Mac represents a technological advance over the quill pen, yet more great books were written with the latter than the former.

History is a progression but not necessarily progress. It’s a chronological development of man’s thought and the acts inspired by thought, but only someone in the grip of wishful thinking would discern invariable melioration in the chronology.

One would have to be blindly committed to the fallacy of progress to insist that Beethoven was better than Bach, Brahms better than Beethoven and Pierre Boulez better than all of them. Or, that Aristotle was a better philosopher than Plato, Kant a better one than either of them, while Foucault and Derrida top the lot by a head.

A modern man may like his way of life, but it’s foolhardy of him to aver that the way of life in, say, Elizabethan England was nowhere near as good. Show me a nuclear reactor, a car and the Internet, and I’ll show you Donne, Marlowe and Shakespeare. They didn’t have modern technology, but then we don’t have any equivalents of them.

Looking at, say, the Middle Ages, modern man sees nothing but ignorance, cruelty and superstition. However, had a student of Albertus Magnus at Paris University in the 13^th century been endowed with the gift of prospective vision, he’d probably look at our times and see nothing but barbarism along with intellectual and moral degeneration.

Neither of such hypothetical individuals would probably want to swap his own way of life for the other one. Their tastes would differ too much.

Yet modern people are conditioned to believe that any change is for the better. They’ve bought the lazy and ill-conceived theory of progress, and they have neither the desire nor the intellectual wherewithal to bring it to task.

This is a very serious matter indeed since, using this theory as a starting point, modern man blithely initiates damaging changes to his way of life because he’s constitutionally unable to regard any change as damaging. Progression always means progress to him, he has no doubts on this score.

However, I’d argue that nothing stunts progress as much as presumption of progress. Man isn’t necessarily getting better because he has more expensive toys to play with. It may be easier to argue he is getting worse.

And he’ll continue to get worse until he is able to assess himself, his past and his present accurately, dispassionately – and with no presumption of progress anywhere in sight.