Progress
Progress
CONCLUSION: WHAT WENT WRONG WITH PROGRESS?
Social scientists have historically concerned themselves with identifying patterns in the way people interact with their environment in order to account for factors that enhance both stability and change in society. This concern with the conditions that underlie the preservation and improvement of the human condition made the concept of progress —from the Latin progredior, meaning “a going-forward” or “advance”—an attractive analytical construct to the nascent social sciences in the nineteenth century.
While some scholars have traced progress back to classical Greece and Rome, most agree that, as an organizing concept in the social sciences, the concept derives its full meaning from specific developments in modern Europe. These included the growth of the physical sciences and theories of knowledge since the seventeenth century; the concern of eighteenth-century social philosophers with political, economic, and social reforms; and the influence of the biological model of evolution and a secular philosophy of history in the nineteenth century.
As early as the eighteenth century, the idea of progress marked a growing confidence in what many then believed to be the unlimited potential of science and human reason to create favorable conditions for improved human life. Following Auguste Comte’s positivism, which sought to extend the empirical method of the natural sciences to the study of social processes, progress came to epitomize the conviction that, as in nature, developments in society were regulated by innate laws. Through a scientific study of society, these laws could be deduced and their interactions with other social phenomena could be modified to ensure a desired social outcome. On the one hand, this meant that civilization was moving through cumulative stages of improvement so that even catastrophes like wars, epidemics, and earthquakes came to be viewed as temporary reversals, even necessary evils, in a movement to a happy ending. On the other hand, it implied that human beings, equipped with scientific knowledge, could alter this movement to influence the quality or quantity of the end product. Social institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals serve this purpose of complimenting natural laws to enhance the knowledge, morality, and health of members of society. In his The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, Irish historian John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927) famously captured the optimism of this view by defining progress as the belief that “civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction” (1920, p. 2).
Most importantly, progress provided the social sciences with a rational solution to the old problem concerning the causes, mechanisms, and ends of social change. Where in earlier times change was generally dreaded and attributed to chance or supernatural intervention, it would thenceforth be viewed positively as the outcome of processes that could both be predicted and objectively verified. There were ideological differences among social scientists concerning the mechanisms of social change. For social conservatives like Auguste Comte (1798-1857), change proceeded in an orderly manner through rational interventions by an elite class of social engineers, while for radicals like Karl Marx (1818–1883), change was attributed to class conflicts. This general understanding of progress as both law-governed and subject to human manipulation remained central in the social sciences up to the twentieth century.
Contrary to the atmosphere of optimism that attended the birth of modern social institutions, however, world events in the twentieth century gave rise to strong doubts about the desirability of the direction of human civilization. Two world wars, particularly the atrocities in Nazi Germany, and a succession of liberation wars in European colonies led to such intellectual and political criticism of progress that by the middle of the century the concept had lost its earlier luster. Thus, while in the 1930s sociology textbook series in the United States still included a volume on progress, by the late 1940s the historian Sidney Fay (1876–1967), in his article “The Idea of Progress,” would declare the concept “logically meaningless” (1947, p. 231). Even the first edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968) did not include progress as a separate entry.
Ironically, reconstruction efforts in the wake of the very events that led to the decline of progress invested a new set of concepts with some of the basic assumptions that the obsolescent progress had generated. The decolonization movements in the 1960s and 1970s fuelled internal hopes for economic growth, self-determination, and social justice in the former European colonies. In this context, progress meant catching up with former colonizing countries by improving conditions of living through mass education and expanded social service. The economic plight that soon besieged these newly independent countries led to increasing interventions by international financial institutions like the World Bank, with the goal of encouraging growth-focused economic policies. New concepts like development, modernization, and structural adjustment moved in to fill the conceptual space vacated by progress.
CONCLUSION: WHAT WENT WRONG WITH PROGRESS?
Criticisms of progress both predated and outlived the calamities of the twentieth century mentioned above. They ranged from theoretical challenges of its analytical purchase to political denunciation of the social implications of some of the assumptions it had generated. One of these assumptions was aptly expressed by the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who declared in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind that “the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite” (1793, p. 211). In itself, the notion that human beings can improve is not controversial. It is the idea behind educational institutions. However, the uncritical extension of scientific methods to the study of social life effectively reduced the diffuse and fluid interactions of everyday life to patterned behavior. If human behavior follows a determinant blueprint whose laws can be identified, does this mean we can socially engineer people to behave in certain ways and not others? In the context of fascist regimes and other forms of dictatorships in the twentieth century, the question was more than merely rhetorical.
Some philosophers and historians of science have also pointed out that science and reason are themselves not disinterested tools of knowledge but they can be used to perpetrate prejudice and domination. In the wake of Nazi theories of racial superiority, for instance, the earlier suggestion by the eugenicist Francis Galton (1822–1911) that social conditions could be created to ensure improved racial characteristics in future generations created fears of racial genetic profiling and contributed to the decline of eugenics as a science.
Cultural evolution, or the idea that whole cultures develop along a line of progressive improvement from barbarism to modern civilization generated the assumption that European cultures were at the apex of this cultural progress. On the basis of this assumption, European colonization of other people was often justified as a humanitarian mission to accelerate or guide their civilization. The idea, central to progress, of a universal history or of history as driven by a single universal norm also generated the assumption that people in other parts of the world existed outside history until the arrival of Europeans on their shores.
Another important aspect of progress was the emphasis on rationality and scientific thought, which put human beings at the center of social progress as its rational movers. Earlier critics of this humanist assumption had attributed social progress to nonhuman forces, such as the structured relations of social classes for Marx and the social division of labor for Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). In art, literature, philosophy, and social sciences, other critics have portrayed the human being as alienated, insecure, fragile, brutal, emotional, and as just one part of a complexly structured reality. Progress as an analytical concept developed in an environment in which men were generally assumed to be the standard bearers of the human species. Feminist critics have highlighted the fact that ideas about the “unity of humankind” and “perfectibility of human beings” were held contemporaneously with practices and beliefs that denied political rights to women.
While progress generated some questionable assumptions, it also highlighted our collective capacity to improve the conditions of our lives. Among its advocates were people like the American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952), who emphasized that progress meant improving the efficiency of social institutions that are set up to meet the needs of all members of society.
SEE ALSO Development; Modernization; Positivism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bury, John Bagnell. 1920. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan.
Comte, Auguste. 1974. The Essential Comte: Selected from Cours de Philosophie Positive. Ed. Stanislav Andreski. Tran. Margaret Clarke. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Fay, Sidney. 1947. The Idea of Progress. American Historical Review 52 (2): 231–246.
Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton.
Zolani Ngwane