38 Historically Speaking November/December 2006 Letters Progress in History: "Betterment' and "Directionaliy" In the forum on "Progress in History" in the May/June 2006 issue, David Christian's essay "Progress: Directionality or Betterment?" caught my attention because of its neat analytical separation of two meanings, directionality and betterment, within the idea of progress. Christian argues that while it is possible to detect a rationally comprehensible directionality in the development of the universe, nature, and human history, there are no universally accepted criteria to prove that this directionality has improved the material welfare of humanity or encouraged the efflorescence of such human qualities as "kindness and empathy." Progress in the sense of betterment , he writes, "is a mythic idea, one diat raises ethical rather than empirical questions," whereas progress in the sense of directionality "is an objective concept" that can be tested empirically. He adds in a confident tone: "How could one prove that the art of the Lascaux caves was inferior to that of Picasso" or that the moral behavior of humans has improved or declined during the course of history ? The examples Christian offers of directionality in history include the migration of humans "to all parts of the earth" and their multiplication "many thousands of times to more than 6 billion," as well as increases in energy consumption per person, and accelerating improvements in communications and transportation technology. The kernel that ties all these examples together is the modern scientific idea that "human knowledge in the world has increased." Christian, of course, rejects the other Enlightenment meaning of progress that views this increase in human knowledge as an improvement in the physical and moral condition of humanity. He wants to avoid any association between directionality and die belief diat this accumulation of scientific knowledge is "self evidendy good." He wants to avoid any suggestion of "betterment" and would much rather speak in terms of the accumulation of "collective learning," which he defines in clinical terms as the "capacity to accumulate knowledge at the level of the community or even the [human] species." He challenges die Enlightenment's "easy confidence" in modern science by bringing up "the wars and holocausts of die 20th century" and the dangerous consequences of industrial growth for the environment. For all diis, Christian does not escape die presuppositions and "easy confidence" of modern— needless to say, Western—science. He endorses without qualification die claim that only the methods of modern science provide knowledge; there can be no cognition unless we measure and test empirically the object of study. He seems to believe, given his examples of directionality, that only that which is real and physical is measurable and accessible to explanation . Statements about progress defined as "betterment" are "subjective" expressions that cannot be verified according to universally valid criteria. Meanwhile, he then says that one of the greatest accomplishments of anthropological scholarship "has been to demonstrate the immense variety of cultural and educai standards in different human soThe use of the term "betterment" unavoidably reducesjudgments aboutprogress in history to mere expressions offeeling or attitude. cieties." This variety, he thinks, undermines the notion of betterment since different societies have different criteria of betterment, and there is no neutral vantage point from which to adjudicate which of these standards is correct. Christian forgets that anthropologists have also observed that primitive societies , and most civilizations, have endorsed a different conception of what constitutes "knowledge." If diere is anything shared in common by non-Western and premodern societies, it is precisely their rejection of the strict separation between fact and value. By contrast, Christian believes that modern science offers "universally valid" criteria of evaluation . The use of the term "betterment" unavoidably reduces judgments about progress in history to mere expressions of feeling or attitude. Clearly there can be no objective and impersonal validation of personal preferences. But we can employ genuine objective standards to determine whether freedom and liberty, for instance, have expanded in die modern era. Let me draw attention to the forum in the September /October 2005 Historically Speaking diat discusses David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2004), of which die distinctive feature is...