Progress: Directionality or Betterment?

Abstract

22 Historically Speaking · May/June 2006 Progress: Directionality or Betterment? David Christian Progress: the idea "that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction" (J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth [Macmillan, 1920], 2). Progress: "the idea that history is a record ofimprovement in the conditions ofhuman life" (Leo Marx and Bruch Mazlish, eds., Progress: Fact or Illusion? [University of Michigan Press, 1996], 1). The idea of "progress" contains two separable components. The first is the notion of directionality . The English word "progress" comes from the Latin progressus, a going or stepping forward.1 The etymology implies that each forward movement depends on previous steps. In this limited sense, the idea of"progress" refers to the existence ofa rationally comprehensible directionality in human history. The sense of forward movement helps explain the second element in the idea of "progress": a movement toward betterment. This sense puts a subjective and ethical loading onto the simple idea of directionality. Early in the 1 7th century Francis Bacon had already brought these two meanings together. He insisted that human knowledge of the world had increased, and that this increase in knowledge could and should be used to improve human life. History, in short, had a direction, and that direction pointedtowardbetterment. Enlightenment thinkers picked up this doublebarreled definition of progress with great enthusiasm, and by the 19th century the idea ofprogress held a strategic position within the human sciences.2 Writing in the early 20th century, Bury described the "doctrine of Progress" as "the animating and controlling idea ofwestern civilization."3 In acquiring this ethical loading, the word progress followed the path of other words such as evolution and civilization, both of which were pressed into service to express the Enlightenment sense of history as betterment. As a first step toward clarifying the idea of progress, it is vital to separate its two component meanings. We can show many forms of directionality in human (as in biological and cosmological) history. However, we know of no universally accepted criteria for evaluating those trends. Directionality is an objective Sir Francis Bacon. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. concept that can be tested empirically. Progress is a mythic idea, one that raises ethical rather than empirical questions. On small and medium time scales, the directionality ofhuman history is often hard to see. A historian of the Depression or the Columbian exchange or the decline of Rome will rightly reject a simple linear view of history . So will most historians operating on small scales. Besides, whole areas of social life resist the idea ofdirectionality. How could one prove that the art of the Lascaux caves was inferior to that of Picasso or that human qualities such as kindness and empathy have increased or declined over time? Nevertheless, there are some clear and powerful vectors that have shaped human history and the lives of human beings in fundamental ways. When our species first appeared between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, it consisted of just a few tens ofthousands of individuals who lived in Africa using technologies a Martian observer would have found hard to distinguish from those of other great apes. Since then, humans have migrated to all parts ofthe Earth and their numbers have multiplied many thousands of times to more than 6 billion. Meanwhile, humans have greatly increased their control over planetary resources. For example, energy consumption per person has multiplied from just a few thousand calories a day to more than 230,000, so that currently humans may be controlling 25-40 % of the energy that enters the land-based biosphere from photosynthesis .4 This represents an unprecedented increase in the ecological power and influence of a single species. Though the most spectacular changes have occurred in recent centuries, the trend is apparent throughout our history . The migrations that first took humans around the globe were largely completed before the end ofthe last Ice Age, and human numbers certainly increased as the range of our species widened. It was also in the Paleolithic era that humans first began to display their astonishing capacity to reshape their surroundings. Regular...