After I waded through a few chapters of Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (see yesterday’s post), I began to wonder how the self-conscious defenders of progress articulate their doctrine. Fortunately, I came across a copy of Charles A. Beard’s A Century of Progress (1932). Beard was regarded as one of the leading progressive historians of the early 20th century. An ardent New Dealer and World War I cheerleader, Beard turned isolationist in the late ‘30s and became a great critic of FDR. A Century of Progress — a collection of essays championing labor rights and feminism, along with a piece celebrating machine “Industry” by Henry Ford, and an essay on “The Process of Social Transformation” by Jane Addams — was released the year before Beard was anointed as president of the American Historical Association. The collection begins with an essay, “The Idea of Progress,” which I will focus on today.
Beard begins by acknowledging the controversial nature of Progress, its status as a philosophical theory of history and political action, as well as its predictive pretenses. He then provides a succinct definition:
Briefly defined, [Progress] implies that mankind, by making use of science and invention, can progressively emancipate itself from plagues, famines, and social disasters, and subjugate the materials and forces of the earth to the purposes of the good life—here and now. In essence the idea of progress belongs to our own times, for it was unknown to the ancients and to the thinkers of the Middle Ages. It is associated, therefore, with every phase of the vast intellectual, economic, and rational movement which has transformed the classical and medieval heritage into what is called, for the sake of convenience, Western civilization.
Indeed, Progress, along with its associated forces of democracy, science, and technology, has a laudable list of accomplishments, says Beard: The eradication of diseases and starvation, the amelioration of pain, as well as the gift of modern comforts, long lives, and the vast dissemination of knowledge. It also fills us with a sense of hope that things will only get better.
Where the pessimist sees the worst, it proposes a search for the best and advances toward perfection by increments. The suffering, ignorance and folly which drive the timid to the Nirvana of doubt and oblivion are, under the light of progress, calls to action, to research, to planning, and to conquest.
Progress is a universal force. It has revolutionized nearly every society across the planet. Perhaps the planet, too, will be revolutionized—or “subdued,” whichever you like—by the forces of Progress.
Everywhere it makes its way, dissolving the feudal institutions of Europe, disturbing the slumbers of the Orient, arousing lethargic Russia, and finding a naked avowel in the United States of America: the earth may be subdued to the security, welfare, and delight of them that dwell therein.
As with religion or patriotism, Progress may be exploited by “pious frauds” or “munitions-makers.
In the hands of the demagogue or noisy promoter it may be manipulated to avoid questions and obscure doubts. And yet the idea survives its friends as well as its enemies.
Beard continues on to fully articulate why the Idea of Progress was unknown to medieval thinkers. Civilizations were thought to go through life cycles in those days past. Progress holds that with the right knowledge and technology, civilizations can just keep ascending higher and higher…
At the outset, the explorer confronts four fundamental questions which have perplexed thinkers since civilization began on this planet: Do nations, like human beings, pass through youth, middle life, and old age to death? Or do they revolve endlessly, as some ancient writers thought, in a cycle—despotism, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and mob-rule—or some such succession of forms. Or is it possible for a nation to stand still through countless ages, preserving what it believes to be an ideal arrangement of things? Or is there discernible, under the surface ebb and flow through the centuries, some stream of tendency, some organizing principle indicating the course of nations, and giving to their peoples some guiding rule by which to shape their activities and mold their lives and their institutions?
I’m just going to let Beard go on for a while here:
Now, among the fundamental notions competing for the allegiance of mankind in our age, as indicated in the beginning, none is more widely discussed, warmly defended, and hotly attacked than the idea of progress. In substance, it is a theory that the lot of mankind on thus earth can be continually improved by the attainment of exact knowledge and the subjugation of the material world to the requirements of human welfare. Associated with it are many subsidiary concepts. Its controlling interest is in this earth, in our own time, not in a remote heaven to be attained after death. It assumes an indefinite future and plans for greater security, health, comfort, and beauty in the coming years. While a philosophy of history, it is also a gospel of futurism. It is founded on the belief that civilization is on the threshold of time and it is characterized by the buoyancy of youth, not the skepticism and morbidity of old age. If it lays emphasis on the material benefits of civilization, it makes no assumptions that are more materialistic than those of less earthy philosophies. It does not admit that nations move from youth to death or through endless cycles, but contends that mankind is advancing, in spite of calamities, errors, and disasters, and on the whole in a desirable direction. If the truth of this allegation be questioned, its defender may reply, as did the mathematician, Poincare, when the validity of Euclid was challenged: whether true or not, it is convenient and is at all events one of the supreme products of intellectual history, the highest of all world courts.
The dreary, hopeless Fatalist provides the counterpoint to Progress, writes Beard. Today, on the Internet, Fatalists are referred to as Doomers. I will write a bit about the Doomers—or Collapsitarians—in the future. They have received a bit of bemused attention from the New Yorker and the New York Times. In describing the Fatalists, Beard is finally reduced to scorn.
Thus broadly conceived, the idea of progress runs counter, of course, to the doctrine of fatalism which has possessed large sections of humanity for long ages, especially in the Orient. The fatalist sees nations decimated by plagues, famines, floods, blights, diseases, and wars, and insists that “nothing can be done about it,” that the more changes we have the more we have of the same thing. Those who make a philosophy of such fatalism, leave the world to its folly and withdraw within themselves to contemplate. Seeing many horrors wrought by physical nature and human nature, they conclude that ‘nothing really matters’; resignation, not effort and thought, is the best, if not the only, recourse. That such an attitude is fitting for a civilization in which science and invention have created no instrumentalities for eliminating or reducing calamitous forces must be conceded, but what justification can be made for accepting undoubted evils that can be eliminated by understanding and labor? By what criterion of values is it better to endure evils than to remove them? Let the philosophy of fatalism answer that question.
There is a lot more to this essay, that I will touch on later. That being said, in the light of Beard’s honest and eloquent discussion, it seems to me that Lasch has accurately represented the Idea of Progress.
A few questions come to mind.
Does the Idea of Progress stand the test of time? Can we really subjugate the forces of the Earth to the purposes of the good life? Can we extend the “good life”—as conceived of by materialistic Western Progressives—to all 7 billion of the Earth’s inhabitants and maintain the conditions necessary for human survival? Every day, it seems more exquisitely clear that we cannot.
But, if we cannot rely on Progress for a sense of hope, how can we move forward with our daily routines, with our stubborn duties to career and family? Does a non-Progressive approach to the future leave us any room for true hope, as opposed to fickle, baseless, optimism? Or must we become hopeless fatalists, resigned to our own sense of impotence and unyielding tragedy?
Corporate Hair 