A brief history of the western idea of progress - part five

the demise of progress in the waning years of peak anthropocene

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

As I wrote in an earlier edition of this series “The divine providence immanent in the unfolding of history may have been placed there by god but it required human activity to actualize itself and human activity could be perfected by education. God gave man reason which enables societies to progress as individuals do, in knowledge and skill as they age to fulfill his plan of a linear historical progression composed of developmental stages, inevitable, utopian, and millenarian. This is the structure of thought that, when secularized during the Enlightenment, began to acquire the contours of the modern western idea of progress.” Since the early years of the Enlightenment were unequivocally optimistic, the advance of civilization could be compared to a human life, one that went through infancy, youth, and maturity but never had to experience old age, decline, and death.

As Condorcet and similarly optimistic philosophes argued: if we could ascertain the laws governing the natural world, we could ascertain the laws governing the social world. If we could ascertain the laws governing the social world, we could program human progress. As Turgot and similarly optimistic philosophes like Kant argued: it was unproblematically possible to examine the development of human civilization as a whole from the universal perspective of sub specie aeternitatis. In his accessible work Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitical Point of View (1784) (or Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, or The Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan) Kant wrote:

“However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.”

Philosophers of progress prior to the Renaissance focused on a material inventory consistent with benchmarks of civilization typically identified by anthropologists, along with a few key social technologies like expertise, technocracy, free will, education, and reason. This article will focus of key social technologies identified by thinkers at the dawn of modernity like education, understanding, personal conscience, the division of labor, the seeming recreation of the stages of civilization in early America, and universal insecurity.

As feudalism dissolved in favor of the rise of trade, a cash economy, and global markets key features of early modernity in Europe included urbanization, an ascendant bourgeoise, and the division of labor. After the initial optimistic phase of the Enlightenment, towering critics of early modernity emerged like Nietzsche and Marx.

Any discussion of the parameters of western education needs to begin with the Ancient Greeks. One among many good examples is Plato’s Protagoras.

“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?”

In relation to what indeed. This is a plain spoken request for a frank and open discussion of the ends of education. The question is eternally new, relevant, and unanswered. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) Locke provides a superlative definition of the classical liberal role of education in personal development, one that presumably presupposed a splendid blend of reflection and action oriented towards the ideal virtues of character common in ancient Greek and Roman thought.

“There are some men's constitutions of body and mind so vigorous, and well fram'd by nature, that they need not much assistance from others; but by the strength of their natural genius, they are from their cradles carried towards what is excellent; and by the privilege of their happy constitutions, are able to do wonders. But examples of this kind are but few; and I think I may say, that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. 'Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind.”

Intuitively, this feels very satisfactory but an obvious shortcoming is a failure to define “what is excellent,” “good or evil,” and “useful or not.” Thomas Jefferson provides an ideal liberal view of the value of education for genuine democracy and true popular sovereignty in his 1820 letter to William C. Jarvis.

“I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.  This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

There are a million reasons to love Nietzsche. One important one was his philosophy of education - fierce, independent, and demanding about how great individuals should use education in the pursuit of an aristocracy of the intellect and spirit. A bottomless well for me has always been his 1876 Schopenhauer as Educator in Untimely Meditations.

“Your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite uneducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators. And that is the secret of all education.”

The indispensable Kaufmann anthology “Portable Nietzsche” has a remarkable little fragment.

“To educate the educators! But the first must educate themselves! And for these I write.”

Nietzsche has a radical, brief, coherent, and incredibly invigorating exposition of education in his 1889 Twilight of the Idols.

“Educators are needed who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet—not the learned louts whom secondary schools and universities today offer our youth as ‘higher wet nurses.’ Educators are lacking, not counting the most exceptional of exceptions, the very first condition of education…Educators are required for three tasks. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture.”

Closely related to education is understanding, as in Locke’s 1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

“Understanding…is the most elevated faculty of the soul, so it is employed with a greater and more constant delight than any of the other. Its searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its progress towards Knowledge makes some discovery, which is not only new, but the best too, for the time at least.”

Personal conscience could be considered a kind of expanded understanding created by the rise of international trade and an extension of worldwide political interactions during the Enlightenment. While Adam Smith is routinely mischaracterized as the father of “free market economics,” he actually began as a moral philosopher. In his 1790 Theory of Moral Sentiments he imagined a scenario in which a man losing his thumb would be a greater personal catastrophe than the disappearance of China – but he wouldn’t want to keep his thumb if it required the disappearance of China.

“It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct… the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.”

In another highly accessible work What is Enlightenment (1784) Kant imagined the division of labor fracturing a polymath’s ability to use his understanding maturely.

“It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor! If I have a book which provides meaning for me, a pastor who has conscience for me, a doctor who will judge my diet for me and so on, then I do not need to exert myself.”

As with Kant, Marx and Engels both had something intriguing to say about the division of labor. In their inimitable “Sermon on the Mount of modernity,” The Communist Manifesto (1848), they wrote:

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers…All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

One of Thomas Jefferson’s many revealing insights includes seeing a convincing recapitulation of the stages of civilization in early America: from the barbarism of the frontier, to the up-to-the-minute modernity found on the Atlantic seaboard, and pastoralism in between.

“he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns…Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.” – letter to William Ludlow (1824)

In my favorite essay from Nietzsche on education, Schopenhauer as Educator, he also recognized a pervasive yet rarely acknowledged sense of universal insecurity in early modernity.

“For a century we have been preparing for absolutely fundamental convulsions; and if there have recently been attempts to oppose this deepest of modern inclinations, to collapse or to explode, with the constitutive power of the so-called nation state, the latter too will for a long time serve only to augment the universal insecurity and atmosphere of menace. That individuals behave as though they knew nothing of all these anxieties does not mislead us: their restlessness reveals how well they know of them.”

These sentiments are as true now as they were then, part of why he is one of the very greatest critics of early modernity.

Why is the idea and material manifestation of progress in the midst of “absolutely fundamental convulsions” today, simultaneously collapsing and exploding as we speak? Simply because “people of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.” What John Kenneth Galbraith prognosticated in 1977 in The Age of Uncertainty for the individual is equally true today for the core states of neoliberal global capitalism. This would include the G7, European Union, Schengen Visa area, NATO, Five Eyes signal intelligence consortium, and South Korea (which has just joined the NATO cyber command): the imperial core of America and its vassal states (or Mafia marks), all in free fall decline.

What prevents progress now in the waning years of peak anthropocene? Even with access to a seemingly universal knowledge? As Kant and Nietzsche have both written of the individual: laziness and cowardice. To which I might add: apathy and an appetite for deception. At the macro level, the complete and total domination of so-called democracies by corporations who “have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.”

However, since we have been so indoctrinated all our lives by the media, schools, academia, government, and conventional wisdom to believe that capitalism is “natural” because it reflects human nature, we are led to believe any attempt to alter transnational corporate kleptocracy masquerading as democracy is “ideological” (which is distinctly meant as pejorative). Translation: immature, deluded, impractical.

Yet, in the contemporary crisis of progress the choice facing us today is the same as that identified by German socialists Karl Kautsky (1892) and Rosa Luxemborg (1915): socialism or barbarism. Since we are told any alteration of capitalism is impractical, however, many think they are urging pragmatism when they say “we can’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.”

But the socialist alternative was never meant to be perfect.

Contemporary public intellectual Vijay Prashad tells us socialism relies on experimentation and that experimentation is part of what makes us human. Numerous thinkers have argued that modern progress isn’t a linear accumulation of knowledge on the road to the perfectibility of man, negating the ideology of indefinite linear progress and a model of knowledge as indefinite accumulation.

Engels suggested instead that “history moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line.” In Thomas Kuhn’s monumentally influential Structures of Scientific Revolutions he called it a paradigm shift, when normal science collapses under the weight of its anomalies and is replaced by a new paradigm which has fewer, creating a procession of paradigms. For Samuel Beckett, the injunction was to “try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The anthropocene “is an unofficial unit of geologic time used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” It can be dated from the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and said to have begun in earnest in the immediate post-world war II era, particularly in the 1960s. These charts of the “great acceleration” provide an iconic view.

Peak anthropocene is a concept I created combining Hubbert’s peak oil and Heinberg’s peak everything with the anthropocene. For a while in the post-world war II era it seemed to provide for incredible material affluence in the so-called west. The exploitation of non-renewable natural resources that created modern progress and initiated the population explosion can no longer be sustained. This progress has also been called “affluenza,” a cognate word combining affluence and influenza. While it may be a lifestyle of plenty it is nevertheless suffused with a profound existential malaise. Until recent decades, affluenza was restricted to the so-called first world and based on the bubble economy of the Earth’s rape. And now there is nothing else left to rape. As Tarnas wrote in Cosmos and Psyche (2006):

“The underlying anxiety and disorientation that pervade modern societies in the face of a meaningless cosmos create both a collective psychic numbness and a desperate spiritual hunger, leading to an addictive, insatiable craving for ever more material goods to fill the inner emptiness and producing a manic techno-consumerism that cannibalizes the planet.”

The alienation that fosters this lifestyle has never lifted

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