A brief history of the western idea of progress – part one (ancient Greece)
and, why “progressive” is such a horrible political label
Hesiod, Greek poet active between 750 and 650 BC
I find it hard to put a single label on my political beliefs because I am at the center of a Venn diagram of many differing philosophies. In my heart of hearts I am an anarchist but I am also well enough versed in the history of anarchism to be painfully aware that the most successful anarchist polity in history, early 20th century Catalonia, lasted only seven years. To kill it, every party in the Spanish Civil War and World War II had to gang up on them in concert. I am also a revolutionary socialist. I am also a devoted acolyte of big “D” liberal Democrat large scale social spending, such as can be found in FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. While I favor experimentation and creativity in public policy I sometimes think the old ways are the best. I am very sympathetic to sentiments like those of the archetypical arch-reactionary Edmund Burke when he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that “people who never look back to their ancestors will not look forward to posterity.”
When I say “the old ways are often the best,” sometimes I mean the really old ways, the neolithic ways. In part because it seems inevitable to me that as large scale organized human civilization gradually crumbles in a slow series of cascading geopolitical, ecological, and macroeconomic shocks, humankind will of necessity revert to an unusual hybrid of neolithic practices with neolithic population levels set against a hyper-modern technological backbone, with radically decentralized water, food production, power generation, and sewage, self-governing at the small watershed or (roughly, in American terms) county level. So in this sense I am a conservative, although not a MAGA, Fox News, or culture war conservative. These I do not consider conservative but actually Jacobin radicals because they want to use the power of the super-state to impose their values on the general population as a whole, instead of embracing the small “D” democratic aspiration of letting everyone adhere to their own value systems.
Having said all that the label that most readily and conveniently conveys my political opinions to strangers and the public at large is “progressive.” But I have never been comfortable with this label. “Progress” implies indefinite economic growth, which presupposes the indefinite exploitation of finite “natural resources.” The bubble economy of the earth’s rape is just about over because there is nothing else left to rape. If you don’t understand what I mean by that phrase, you will, and sooner than you think. An ever-increasing population on a ravaged planet utilizing finite natural resources is not only a mathematical impossibility but a psychopathic omnicide subordinating the entire biosphere to the craven needs of man. Having well overshot our planet’s human carrying capacity, we are reaching those limits now. Those limits will gradually and inevitably kill off most of today’s human population, whose remainder will live on a completely ravaged earth.
As an acolyte of Nietzsche, I think every significant concept that can be geneologized should be. To examine the evolution of the idea of progress in western intellectual history, we need some definitions. Progress can be defined as: “a cumulative process in which the most recent stage is always considered preferable and better, i.e., qualitatively superior, to what preceded it. This definition contains a descriptive element (change takes place in a given direction) and an axiological element (this progression is interpreted as an improvement). Thus it refers to change that is oriented (toward the best), necessary (one does not stop progress), and irreversible (no overall return to the past is possible).”
“The theorists of progress differ on the direction of progress, the rate and the nature of the changes that accompany it, even its principal agents. Nevertheless, all adhere to three key ideas: (1) a linear conception of time and the idea that history has a meaning, oriented towards the future; (2) the idea of the fundamental unity of humanity, all called to evolve in the same direction together; and (3) the idea that the world can and must be transformed, which implies that man asserts himself as sovereign master of nature.”
Or also defined as:
“advances in technology, science, and social organization [that] inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development and the application of science and technology (scientific progress).”
The concept of linear time constantly progressing precludes any ideas of both degeneration from a golden age (such as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West) and cyclical time (which can include renewal from degeneration; such as George Sorel’s Illusion of Progress). Former Columbia professor Robert Nisbet offered another definition.
“The essence of the Western idea of progress can be simply stated: mankind has advanced in the past, is now advancing, and may be expected to continue advancing in the future. But what, it will be asked, does "advance" mean?”
Nisbit argues there is a dual nature as to what progress can mean. It can both give “substance to the hope for a future characterized by individual freedom, equality, or justice” or be “made to serve belief in the desirability and necessity of political absolutism, racial superiority, and the totalitarian state.”
I would argue that “advance” implies a multifaceted social movement compounding an overall spiritual, moral, intellectual, scientific, technological, and material improvement in the state of mankind. To my mind, it is highly debatable that this is happening now or even possible in the midst of contemporary neoliberal globalization.
Legendary Beat poet Gregory Corso once said something to the effect of “The Greeks gave us fate. The Romans gave us fortune. The Catholics gave us hope. The Enlightenment gave us free will, so let’s use it.” This is food for thought and decent as a rough and ready typology of the ongoing social construction of human agency but I would propose a slightly different and more comprehensive typology.
Many social commentators write that a self-conscious sense of cultural progress is a concept dating from the Enlightenment onward. I follow Nisbet, however, in wanting to give careful scrutiny to Greek, Roman, Christian, and other pre-Enlightenment social formations to see what they have to say about progress.
It can begin, as so many surveys of western intellectual history do, with the Greeks. In Hesiod’s (~750 - 650 BC) Works and Days, we witness a remarkable cavalcade of many of the myths, figures, and sites familiar to people with even a superficial knowledge of Greek mythology. Zeus, Prometheus (which means “foresight” and his brother Epimetheus which means “hindsight”), Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, Kronos, Pandora, Olympus, Hades, Oedipus, and Helen of Troy all make their cameo appearances. This is not an exhaustive list of the myths, figures, and sites in Works and Days; just the most well-known ones. Until the advent of the scholar of myth Joseph Campbell, myth was synonymous with fiction. In the post-Campbell era, myth is more respected as a repository of universal narratives and symbols, many of which can be found in various iterations around the world, doing what all good stories and scientific hypotheses do: help to explain, predict, and control the natural and social worlds, and provide comfort and solace too.
The typology of a descent from gold to silver to bronze to iron ages in the philosophy of ancient Greece is a popular misconception. In Hesiod’s Works and Days these metals and the alloy of bronze are actually races. While it is indeed a degeneration (and the iron age sure reminds me of the present day), there is an interregnum between the bronze and iron races, a race of heroes, which is rarely mentioned in schools or the popular media. A kind of return to the golden race, a
“godlike generation of men who were heroes, who are called demigods.” This could be considered the earliest iteration of the idea of progress in western intellectual history. While fate is indeed one of the primary organizing principles in ancient Greece, appropriate ritual observances to the gods and avoiding hubris can give man a certain freedom of action within fate. As
Xenophanes (560 - 478 BC) noted as well, the gods themselves left another sphere of human freedom but not disclosing everything to man all at once. “The gods have not revealed all things to men from the beginning, but by seeking they find in time what is better.” As is often the case with ancient Greece, elements of their thought can seem perpetually modern. For example, Xenophanes bemoaned the mass appeal of athletic contests.
This sentiment could be seen as the predecessor of Roman circuses in their formula for social stability “bread and circuses,” the predecessor of the Frankfurt School’s central thesis of a commodified “culture industry,” and the predecessor of a litany of contemporary distractions like mass media, the internet, and smart phones. In this lambasting Xenophanes also makes perhaps the earliest plea for expertise and technocracy in the western tradition.
He also began the western tradition of rugged skepticism as one of the best epistemologies to enhance human agency but, again, this was always in conjunction with the gods. “There never was nor will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so. But all may have their fancy. Let these be taken as fancies something like the truth.” Fancies, at best informed opinion, can be seen as the height of truth claims.
If we turn to the ancient Greek dramatists,
Aeschylus (525/524 - 456/455 BC) provides one of the fullest expositions of the myth of Prometheus in Prometheus Bound. Although Prometheus was severely punished by Zeus for bringing fire, a metaphor for technology, to man this gift nevertheless marked an obvious advance. In the play, Prometheus brought brick architecture, arithmetic, writing, domestication of animals, astronomy, ocean-going vessels, open sea navigation, medicine, and metallurgy. These are all distinct strides forward but even Aeschylus has Prometheus say that the “three-formed Fates and unforgetting Furies…steer necessity,” which not even Zeus can overcome. Prometheus implies that he has knowledge of the fate of Zeus but he refuses to share it with the chorus, as keeping the secret may be his only means of ever escaping his torment.
One of ancient Greece’s other great dramatists Sophocles (496 - 406 BC) also has necessity and fate as ruling principles but, within that, a sphere of freedom has yielded clear progress. In Antigone Sophocles wrote about domestication of animals, and improvements in intellectual reflection, rhetoric, medicine, and law.
“Speech and thought fast as the wind and the moods that give order to a city he has taught himself, and how to flee the arrows of the inhospitable frost under clear skies and the arrows of the storming rain. He has resource for everything. Lacking resource in nothing he strides towards what must come. From Hades alone he shall procure no escape, but from hopeless diseases he has devised flights. Possessing resourceful skill, a subtlety beyond expectation, he moves now to evil, now to good. When he honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods to which he is bound by oath, he stands high in his polis.”
The Stoics’ innovation was in accommodating necessity and fate with strength, grace, and ease.
Zeno the Stoic (495 - 430 BC) has a few chestnuts among his fragments.
“Man conquers the world by conquering himself.”
“Well-being is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.”
“When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.”
Thucydides’ (460 - 400 BC) History of the Peloponnesian War describes the key elements that brought civilization to ancient Greece; large walled permanent settlements, commerce, agriculture, capital, and long distance land and ocean transportation.
In Plato’s (428/427 - 348/347 BC) Protagoras, ritual observances to the gods must still be observed but beyond that a significant realm of human agency resides in proper education, with significant attention paid to its ends: to become well rounded with facility in the arts and letters and having a firm foundation of physical health.
“Were you expecting the kind of instruction you get from a teacher of writing, or the harp, or from a trainer? For it was not with a view to becoming a practitioner, that you developed proficiency in these subjects, but to acquire an education suited to an independent free man.”
“Hippocrates here, on associating with Protagoras will, on the very first day he spends time with him, depart a better man, and every day thereafter he will develop in this manner; but in what direction, Protagoras, and in relation to what?”
Protagoras, like the works previously mentioned, includes in his definition of progress the creation of language, architecture, urbanization, “clothing, shoes, bedding and the production of food from the earth.”
In his dialogue The Statesman Plato discussed the advent of agriculture and the failure of the gods to fulfill their pact of mutual aid with mankind leaving an even wider sphere of freedom for human agency.
“in the first ages they were still without skill or resource; the food which once grew spontaneously had failed, and as yet they knew not how to procure it, because they-had never felt the pressure of necessity. For all these reasons they were in a great strait; wherefore also the gifts spoken of in the old tradition were imparted to man by the gods, together with so much teaching and education as was indispensable; fire was given to them by Prometheus, the arts by Hephaestus and his fellow-worker, Athene, seeds and plants by others. From these is derived all that has helped to frame human life; since the care of the Gods, as I was saying, had now failed men, and they had to order their course of life for themselves, and were their own masters, just like the universal creature whom they imitate and follow, ever changing, as he changes, and ever living and growing, at one time in one manner, and at another time in another.”
Plato’s The Laws, Book III also discusses the evolution of civilization from the state of nature; domestication of animals, urbanization, government, law, metallurgy, anarchism (“the community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles”), warfare, rhetoric, and walled cities. It also mentions a rebuilding after a deluge.
Aristotle’s (384 - 322 BC) Politics described the urbanization as well, numerous cities “nearly or quite self-sufficing” become the first proto-states “originating in the bare needs of life and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.”
Epicurus (341 – 270 BC), founder of Epicureanism, counseled moderation not hedonism: “freedom of the body from pain and the freedom of the soul from confusion.”
While Epicurus mentions fate, fortune and the gods to be sure he is also among the earliest and most explicit proponent of free will. In his Letter to Menoeceus.
“Some things happen of necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency. For he sees that necessity destroys responsibility and that chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach.”
“the wise man understands that while some things do happen by chance, most things happen due to our own actions.”
He tried to base free will in a concept of physics he called “atomic swerve,” his idea that atoms occasionally deviate from their normal paths. While he may not have described the social and physical artifacts of progress that were already becoming commonplace in the thought of ancient Greece, his articulation of free will provided what would become an ever-increasingly powerful means of achieving that progress.
The Greeks grappled with many of the same issues we still grapple with today, providing us with an incredible first draft of the western mind. What they called fate and necessity, modern intellectuals have called by many different names. Freud theorized about how much of our behavior is guided by the unconscious. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs deposits self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, which presupposes free will. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche implies that people do have free will but are too lazy and frightened to actually use it to achieve self-actualization.
“Each of us bears a productive uniqueness within him as the core of his being; and when he becomes aware of it, there appears around him a strange penumbra which is the mark of his singularity. Most find this something unendurable, because they are, as aforesaid, lazy, and because a chain of toil and burdens is suspended from this uniqueness. There can be no doubt that, for the singular man who encumbers himself with this chain, life withholds almost everything—cheerfulness, security, ease, honor—that he desired of it in his youth.”
In a 1950 lecture entitled “Language” Heidegger formulated his aphorism “language speaks” (“Die Sprache spricht”). I take this to mean that language is the most important prerequisite enabling man to become a fully human social being. Languages are systems that existed before any individual human and will exist after their passing. de Saussure’s concept of langue and parole is similar. Lang is an individual language, the signifying system independent of parole, which is any speech act by a speaker. Like Heidegger’s sprache, lang exists before any individual human and will continue to exist after they die.
Anthony Giddens called it structuration – a new cognate word combining structure (fate and necessity) and action (free will). In recent post-Marxist theory, race, class and gender stand in for fate and necessity (although gender is certainly having a fluid moment of late). Or, if we are to take it back to the grand master, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx (1852) said
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
In subsequent editions of this series on the history of the western idea of progress, we will continue to examine the evolution of these nightmares.