PROGRESS

The idea of progress is unique to the cultural tradition of Western Europe and from its birth has had a strong association with ethical issues raised by new knowledge and technological innovation. Although there are allusions to it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the concept first appeared in its modern sense in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The idea was introduced by the early humanists in the context of their invention of the division of history into three periods: a classical age, encompassing the cultures of Greece and Rome from about 600 b.c.e. to 400 c.e.; a culturally dark "middle age" from about 400 to 1300; and their own age, self-proclaimed as a renaissance, or rebirth, of cultural excellence that began in the fourteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, progress was explicitly coupled to the primacy of objective reason in human affairs and the promise of technological progress became an explicit dogma of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, progress became the mantra of industrial capitalism, proclaiming the blessing it conferred on society even as the reality of progress came under attack, first by the Romantics, then by philosophers and intellectuals more broadly, and finally by social and political activists.

Defining Progress

What the word progress means has thus changed significantly since the mid-fourteenth century. Common to all definitions, however, is the claim that something is better than it had been and promises to get better still in the future. What that something is, is what has changed over time. For the humanists, the something was high culture—literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture—and, perhaps surprisingly for humanists to be proud of, technology. All of these, they argued, were better in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries than they had been and they promised to keep getting better. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the definition of progress, though it looked to the growing power of modern science as evidence, widened to an identification of progress with intellectual and social reform, and thus with the claim that the subject of progress was the human condition itself, which not only could be, but in fact was being improved by the efforts of human beings themselves. Through initiative, courage, reason, and inventiveness, it was argued, individuals were improving the world in which they found themselves and in the process making people better as people.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idea of progress became increasingly complex and controversial. For one thing, the claim that art and literature were progressing fell out of favor. They changed, of course, but many dismissed any judgment that impressionism was better than Renaissance painting or that Yeats was a better poet than Milton. Cultural forms change but do not move toward an ultimate perfection, nor do there exist objective criteria for judging across these forms. Meanwhile contemporary science and technology in effect co-opted the idea of progress, claiming improvement as self-evident. And even as the ideal of human progress shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and political reform movements—liberalism, socialism, and communism—increasingly strident challenges were raised against the claim that the human condition and human beings had improved in any essential way.

The bitterness of the criticism of progress in the late-twentieth century was in part the legacy of two murderous world wars, in part the failure of many social and political reform movements to effect lasting improvements in the quality of life when they achieved power, and in part a response to the emergence of environmental, social, and personal problems linked to applications of increasingly powerful scientific theories and technological innovations. Relevant, too, was the historicism and relativism of much twentieth-century social science and philosophy, according to which there were no universal, objective, and hence value-neutral criteria for judging whether a change of any sort was an unqualified improvement. In the realm of technology, there are objective criteria for comparing and evaluating changes because artifacts are means to ends defined by their makers. Given the intended purpose of a camera, for example, one model can be said to be better or worse than another. But because the notion of purpose or end in relation to nature was abandoned in modern science, there is no basis in science or in technology for judging the value of the ends to be served by technologies and therefore no basis for judging that changes to natural entities are improvements. This isolation of ends from means creates an ethical gulf between technical knowledge and its applications that was only fully appreciated in the second half of the twentieth century, a gulf that further undermined claims of progress even in science and technology.

Progress as Threat and Ideal

From its introduction by the humanists, progress was a profoundly new and a profoundly secular idea, and the claim of real and promised improvement that it made was extraordinarily bold. The idea of progress challenged what had been a deeply rooted belief in pre-modern Western culture, inherited from antiquity, that the golden age of humankind lay in the past and that the aging of the Earth entailed decay for it and its inhabitants, analogous to the aging of individual living organisms. Furthermore the idea of progress implies a directionality to history and to time that contrasts sharply with the cyclical conceptions of time and of history dominant in antiquity. Finally the idea of progress implies an activist role for humans in defining their well-being and in causing it, in the present and for the future.

Judaism and Christianity, through their respective messianic and salvational doctrines, had already introduced an anticlassical directionality to history and time, but this directionality was the culmination of a divine plan and in the hands of God; it was not open to calculated, self-interested human intervention. Attributing value to improving the human cultural or material condition in a Christian context posed a direct challenge to transcendent religious values, and the claim that humans could by their own efforts make themselves better posed an even greater threat. The broad public appeal of and occasional resistance to the ideology of progress, first in Europe and then globally, thus reveals a great deal about these societies and their deepest values.

In the fourteenth century, long before the first hints of modern science or modern philosophy, the idea of progress had already emerged in Western Europe, tentatively in the context of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century university movement, but clearly in the writings of the poet Petrarch, heir to Dante and father of humanism. The humanists are inaccurately depicted as worshipping Greek and Roman literary culture and seeking to reconstruct it imitatively. Petrarch's conception of a Renaissance was not the rebirth of antique ways of living and writing in the manner of a Williamsburg, Virginia. It was a rebirth of the style standard set in antiquity, after a long dark age during which this standard, especially in literature, art, and manners, was debased. As a start, then, but only as a start, the humanists sought by emulation first to recover, then to master, and ultimately to improve upon, what the Ancients had achieved—to use ancient texts as stepping-stones to still greater accomplishment. Bees, Petrarch noted, take pollen from flowers but transform it into honey, which is better than pollen. This is the humanist conception of progress: to take the pollen of stylistic excellence from ancient art and transform it into the honey of still greater art.

The idea of progress is expressed clearly enough here for it to have become an issue by the end of the fifteenth century. With the invention of increasingly powerful gunpowder-based weaponry; of printing by movable metal type followed by the rapid growth of a vigorous international printed book industry; of central vanishing point perspective and the flowering of Renaissance art and sculpture; of new, more complex forms of musical harmony and composition; of new, more powerful types of machinery; and with the voyages of discovery east to India and west to the Americas, culminating in Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in 1525, all enabled by new techniques of mapmaking and navigation, defenders of progress argued that the ancients had been far surpassed by the moderns. There followed, throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, set piece entertainments, popular in courts across Western Europe and in many books and essays, called the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns in which the claim that we were superior to ancient predecessors was defended against the argument that the ancients were superior in quality, as human beings, in spite of subsequent superficial technological superiority.

By the 1660s, the idea of progress was no longer open for debate. Joseph Glanville's Plus Ultra (1668) was a paean to the new experimental philosophy, enabling humankind to go further, to exceed all limitations previously set by ignorance and superstition (and religion!) on what people can know and achieve. While the engine of progress in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had been identified with inventiveness or creativity, especially in art and technology, with the seventeenth-century rise of modern science and philosophy, the engine of progress became reason, especially as exemplified in science and mathematics. This identification of progress with reason became a central dogma of modernism: that through the exercise of reason human beings can improve life on Earth without limit. In both modern philosophy, whether rationalist or empiricist, and in modern science, reason subsumes inventiveness and shifts the focus of progress from art and technology to understanding, with technological innovation merely a fruit or byproduct of understanding.

It is this version of the idea of progress that is at the heart of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and expressed in Thomas Paine's Age of Reason (1795). It is the justification for the republican experiment that created the United States and inspired the French revolution; that without kings, history, or God, the exercise of reason alone can create better societies than have ever existed, societies in which people will be happier, healthier, more prosperous, longer-lived, and more productive, for themselves and for others. The clear expectation that basing action on reason would produce better people is articulated in the Marquis de Condorcet's 1793 "Sketch for a Historical Depiction of the Progress of the Human Mind" (L'esprit humaine), written, ironically and tragically, on the eve of Condorcet's imprisonment by agents of the very Revolution whose ideals he proclaimed.

Progress Under Attack

The case for the rationalist interpretation of progress was based on the manifest superiority of modern science over ancient, medieval, and Renaissance science, of modern philosophy—René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant—over ancient, medieval, and Renaissance philosophy, and on the continually increasing power of technology, especially after the invention in the late-eighteenth century of mass production machinery and the steam engine. But the Romantic poets, novelists, and playwrights—among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, and William Wordsworth in England, and Novalis and Heinrich Wilhelm Kleist in Germany—rejected the hegemony of reason in human affairs, the capacity of reason to serve as an engine of truly human progress, and even the possibility of a happy ending to human history by creating an earthly, secular version of Paradise. With the spread of the Industrial Revolution and the dark Satanic mills (as Blake called them) that were its progeny, of the railroads with their noise and pollution, with the growing, poverty-ridden urban proletariat, the case for social progress weakened.

Progress within science and in technology, however, could hardly be gainsaid. Scientific theories clearly kept getting better in terms of explanatory power, prediction, control, and revelation of hitherto unknown aspects of reality. New inventions—steam-powered factories, ships, and railroads; the telegraph; synthetic dyes; electricity; the telephone; the automobile; and flight—gave people unprecedented capabilities and poured out in seemingly endless profusion. But the note that had been sounded in the sixteenth-century Battle of the Ancient and the Moderns was sounded again: Does any of this scientific and technological progress mean social or human progress? Does it make people better? Is the human condition in fact better than it was before, or is it merely different? Again every improvement entails a change, but not every change entails an improvement!

On what grounds can people judge which changes are improvements? How can they tell which capabilities provided by technological innovations are worth adopting? To whom or to what do people turn to learn how to apply knowledge or implement innovations and set goals, for which particular technologies can provide helpful means? In the absence of goals, means become ends in themselves. Neither technology nor science can help to identify which ends to pursue with their aid: technology because it is purely a means, and science because value-neutrality is central to the methodology of modern science.

The equation of progress with the application of value-neutral reason became increasingly problematic in the course of the nineteenth century. Echoing the earlier Romantic poets, philosophers from Arthur Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard to Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri-Louis Bergson formulated criticisms of reason that undermined its capacity to serve as the engine of human or social progress. By the end of World War I, the claim that through science and reason Western societies and their inhabitants had improved rang hollow. This feeling was intensified by the global slaughter of World War II, a war in which the most advanced forms of value-neutral rationality, science, and technology were proudly allied to the value-laden nonrationality of politics.

The Price of Progress

In the course of the twentieth century, then, it became clear that the price of modern science and science-based technology was that the ties between knowledge and action were sundered. Even as the rate of development of theories in the sciences and the pace of technological innovation accelerated, driven by massive public and corporate funding and by the creation of reinforcing social institutions, even as science and technology became the dominant agents of social change and became inextricably entangled with personal and social life and values, the ethical divide separating knowledge and action widened. It seemed that progress could be defined unequivocally with respect to scientific theory change and technological innovation, but claims that social and personal life style changes were progressive were highly equivocal. Suddenly the ethical implications of science and technology became central issues for society, but there existed no conceptual tools, comparable in power to those available to scientists and engineers, for grappling with these issues, nor did the average person have the political and economic power to challenge the institutions that exploited science and technology.

In fact even the confidence that progress could be defined objectively with respect to scientific theory change and technological action was severely shaken in the 1960s. Technological change can be evaluated objectively but only with respect to parameters that incorporate arbitrary value judgments: A high speed Internet connection is better than a slower speed connection if the values of speed and of being connected to the Internet at all are accepted as givens. These values, of course, cannot be judged objectively. An analogous challenge was raised with respect to science, because from its beginning modern science had as its primary objectives discovering the nature of things, revealing the hidden causes of why things happen, and disclosing reality. In the nineteenth century, questions were raised about the relation between increasingly abstract mathematical physical models of nature and what was really out there, but the prevailing view remained that scientific theories changed because newer theories were truer to reality than older ones. To be sure, quantum theory raised more serious questions about the relation between physics and reality than had been asked in the nineteenth century; and the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics invented by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg argued that physics could not provide a picture of reality, only an empirically satisfactory account of experience.

It was only in the 1960s, however, that a broad consensus grew among intellectuals, challenging the progressive and objective character of scientific knowledge. People had no real access to the new realities that scientists claimed to be encountering and thus no way to know whether such advances truly constituted progress. This consensus was precipitated by the debate over Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which led to a broad historical, philosophical, and social scientific critique of the concept of objectivity and for many scholars a rejection of the possibility of objective knowledge. This in turn triggered the so-called Science Wars of the 1980s and 1990s in which the objectivity of scientific knowledge and the progressive character of scientific theory change were defended by physical and life scientists. But even if the objectivity of scientific knowledge were conceded, bridging the ethical gulf between value-neutral knowledge and its applications remains an issue in the early-twenty-first century.

STEVEN L. GOLDMAN

SEE ALSO Change and Development;Development Ethics;Theodicy;Wells, H. G.;Wittgenstein, Ludwig.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Carl. (1993). The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. New Haven, CT: Yale. An important early twentieth century historian's analysis of the goals of enlightenment social and political reformers. Very well written.

Burtt, Edwin A. (2003). The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. New York: Dover. A classic pre-1960s study of the ideas and values underlying the seventeenth century scientific revolution.

Goldman, Steven L., ed. (1989). Science, Technology and Social Progress. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. A collection of thought-provoking essays by scientists, historians and philosophers on the question of whether modern science and technology have improved the quality of human life.

Hacking, Ian. (2000). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. A clearly written, balanced, and insightful account of the "science wars" of the late twentieth century.

Kelly, Donald R. (1991). Renaissance Humanism. Boston: Twayne. Excellent introduction to the distinctive ideas and values of key humanist thinkers and why they are important to understanding the riser of modernity.

Kitcher, Philip. (2001). Science, Truth and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Excellent, deeply thought-provoking discussion of bridging the gap between technical knowledge and its applications in a democratic society.

Kuhn, Thomas. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. This is the book—short, sharply focused and clear—that precipitated the challenge to the claims that scientific knowledge was truly objective.