Well, is it?
In his book The Mansions of Philosophy, historian Will Durant has a chapter titled “Is Socialism Dead?” He wrote the book in 1929 but I think we could still seriously ask the question in 2024.
And for that matter, Durant had another chapter titled “The Breakdown of Marriage.” How long has it been reportedly breaking down?
But it was another chapter in his book, one titled “Is Progress a Delusion?,” that I thought most odd. 1929 was well into the 70 years of fast technological and social change (1870 to 1940) noted by Robert Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon claims that those 70 years of fast change might never be seen again in the history of the world.
So the question of whether progress was a delusion struck me as odd. Let’s look at some of the Durant’s supporting examples:
Durant notes that the ancient Greeks thought of history as a “vicious circle” that repeated again and again. There was no mention of progress in the works of Xenophon, Plato, or Aristotle.
Related, ancient Greek historian Polybius pushed a theory called anacyclosis, with six repeating stages of history, a concept explored by others as well. Polybius’ stages were monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy (mob-rule).
Support for this theory came from the historical evidence that the ancient Greeks had, looking around at their 1500 city states. Notably, the six stages come in pairs that proceeded through a good-bad sequence (for example monarchy as the good form and tyranny as the bad form). Those city state examples tended to proceed in the order listed and not the reverse. Thus, the cycle.
Another ancient Greek belief from Aristotle was that all arts and sciences have been invented and lost an infinite number of times. A belief like that leads one to believe in rediscovery and perfection rather than in creation. There is a finite set of arts and sciences to draw from. Study the past for clues of what to do, build, or create. People alive today are only reconfiguring from among a fixed set of options.
Others (too many to name) even looked to the past as a golden age and despaired of living in the current era. Durant notes that even the more recent Rousseau “preferred American savages, whom he had not seen, to the cruel Parisians who had rasped his nerves; he thought thinking a form of degeneracy, and preached a Golden Age of the past that echoed the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.” We still find the same attitudes today, but less often.
Also odd, though given context by the belief in an inevitable cycle, is the fact that we do not know of ancient civilizations with historians other than the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese. Why were there no known ancient Indian, Mayan, Egyptian, Persian, or Incan historians? Is it a matter of lost works (the ancient Egyptian partial-historian Manetho as an example)?
Whatever the reason, at some point the mindset shifted. The cyclical nature of history or the belief in constancy gave way to a belief in progress. As Western Europe became wealthier, Durant wrote that it “displaced the hope of heaven with the lure of progress” in the Middle Ages.
More recent comments on progress (OK, these are still centuries old) seem like they could be from today. French philosopher Pierre de la Ramee (writing about the years 1450 – 1550): “In one century we have seen a greater progress in men and worlds of learning than our ancestors had seen in the whole course of the previous fourteen centuries.” And of course Durant in 1929 himself wrote “This has an ironically contemporary sound.” It seems contemporary even today, a century later.
It was one of Durant’s small examples that most struck me. During the worst parts of the French Revolution, Condorcet, an aristocrat, was wanted and hiding from the mob because while a revolutionary, he had voted against the execution of King Louis XVI. In hiding, Condorcet somehow took the opportunity to write a book titled Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind.
As Durant commented: “To read his book is to realize to what a bitterly disillusioned and skeptical generation we belong. Here was a man who had lost apparently everything, who had sacrificed privilege, position and wealth for the Revolution, who was now hunted to death by empowered barbarians, and who had to bear the culminating bitterness of seeing the Revolution, hope of the world, issue in chaos and terror; and yet his book represents the very zenith of man’s hopefulness for man.”
Condorcet kept his belief in the bright future of humanity, even as he was pursued by thugs of the French Revolution. Durant writes: “What generous optimism! What courageous idealism, and what passion for humanity! Shall we scorn more the naive enthusiasm, Condorcet, or the intellectual cowardice of our time, which, having realized so many of his dreams, no longer dares to entertain the rest?”
One of the simpler, more insightful quotes comes from Sir Arthur Balfour, who in 1890 wrote that (quote from Durant): “human behavior and social organization are founded not on thought, which progresses, but on feeling and instinct, which hardly change from thousand years to thousand years; this, he believed, was the secret of our failure to transmute our growing knowledge into greater happiness or more lasting peace.”
And again, the comments from 1929 could be contemporary.
Relating to industrial progress and the experience of WWI, Durant writes: “It was the passing of art and the coming of war that shook the faith in our century in progress. The spread of industry and the decay of aristocracy cooperated in the deterioration of artistic form….[W]hen the machine, compelled to seek vast markets for its good, adjusted its products to the needs and tastes of vast majorities, design and beauty gave place to standardization, quantity, and vulgarity. Architecture halted its splendid development before the compulsion to build for a decade and not for centuries…”
For Durant, writing this essay, it was WWI that made people realize how fragile their current situation was. “War had decreased in frequency, and had increased in extent.” (Frequency vs intensity is a theme on this blog.) But, to me there is hope — though Durant doesn’t say it outright. “Hope faded away… a wave of apathy and cynicism engulfed all but the least or the most experienced souls.”
But What Is Progress?
You can get through Durant’s chapter unsure of what progress actually is. He does note that progress carries a question about what to do rather than simply being about doing things more effectively. In a world where technology and process make it easier to do more, faster, we pay too much attention to what benefits from those two qualities.
That earlier noted belief in past golden ages gave way to the belief in a future that was better than the past. To that and the belief that progress was the march toward that better future.
15 years before Durant wrote that chapter we have a different example from Woodrow Wilson. From The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People:
“Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. “There were giants in those days.” Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development—those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”
Durant finally does give a definition of progress, but I think it’s lacking. He writes: “Let us provisionally define progress as increasing control of the environment by life; and let us mean by environment all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of that desire. Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.”
Durant notes stages that humans went through in climbing from “the savage to the scientist.”
- Speech: The ability to communicate using words.
- Fire: And its role unlocking access to different climates around the world, tool-making, cooking food, mastering the night.
- Conquests of the animals: “That struggle between strength of body and power of mind… when at last it was won, the fruit of man’s triumph… was transmitted across a thousand generations…”
- Agriculture: Civilization called for permanent habitats.
- Social organization: The formal and informal expectations of what is right.
- Morality: With the amount of violence, poor treatment or others, and character all contributing.
- Tools: “that have enslaved and are liberating man.”
- Science: And the scientists who “will die before the trees they plant will bear fruit…”
- Education: As a way to “become” human.
- Writing and print: To transmit knowledge across. time.
Missing from the list are what I take as the more recent additions to thoughts on progress.
- Coordination. How does a more interconnected world respond to humanity’s grand challenges?
- Thought. Will humans continue to monopolize thinking? Can machines think? Then again, can other animals?
- The belief in progress itself. Breaking the belief in past golden ages and cyclicity was necessary for a culture of progress to emerge.
That expectation of progress, like an expectation in Moore’s Law, requires continued investment. On the part of Moore’s Law it is the thousands of individuals and entities collaborating and competing their way to new advances in materials science, imaging, fab construction, and business models.
That expectation of progress requires investment in product innovation, observation of new opportunities to pursue, and yes, process innovation. Also, an enduring optimism to keep the belief going another generation.
Consider
In Fontenelle’s book Dialogues of the Dead, Socrates speaks to Montaigne in the afterworld. Montaigne tells him that the world has degenerated. Socrates replies: “In our days, we esteemed our ancestors more than they deserved; and now our posterity esteem us more than we deserve. There is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and our posterity.”
The example above seems to have reversed recently. It has become common to judge people of the past according to the beliefs and morals of today. In other words, Your Great-Grandchildren Are Outraged.