A brief history of the western idea of progress - part four
meandering towards a conclusion through the Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
The material artifacts and social practices that thinkers in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and early Catholic theology cite as evidence of progress, anthropologists and cultural historians might cite as evidence of civilization, a phase in the evolution of culture distinct from preceding neolithic and prehistoric ones. While I reached back to the ancient Greeks to examine the western idea of progress, the emphasis on periodization and teleology in early Catholic theology (as exemplified by such thinkers as St. Augustine and Joachim of Fiore) foreshadows the modern conception of progress.
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. God gave man reason which enables societies to progress as individuals do, in knowledge and skill as they age.” But this conception of progress includes an indefinitely expanding maturity without the decline the follows maturity physical organisms. As David Hume (1711-1776) wrote in Political discourses (1752)
“the universe, like an animal body, had a natural progress from infancy to old age; yet, as it must still be uncertain whether at present it be advancing to its point of perfection or declining from it, we cannot thence presuppose any decay in human nature.”
Turgot in A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind (1750) offered a similar analysis: “Thus the human race, considered over the period since its origin, appears to the eye of a philosopher as one vast whole, which itself, like each individual, has its infancy and its advancement.”
The leading lights of the Enlightenment believed that if we could discover consistent and uniform laws in the natural world we could discover the same in the human world. In Outline of an historical view of the progress of the human mind (written in hiding 1794, published posthumously 1795) Condorcet (1743–1794) wrote “The only foundation of faith in the natural sciences is the principle, that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe, are regular and constant; and why should this principle, applicable to the other operations of nature, be less true when applied to the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man?”
While the Enlightenment philosophes may have expressed the first modern secular version of progress, in subtracting the divine from divine providence they also left a dues ex machina behind in their conceptions of “immanence” and the “unfolding of historical laws.”
As Kant (1724 - 1804) wrote in Idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitical point of view (1784): “it might be possible to have a history with a definite natural plan for creatures who have no plan of their own.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is the most obvious example. In Lectures on the Philosophy of History (lectures in 1822, 1828, and 1830, text published in 1837)
"World history is governed by an ultimate design, that it is a rational process - whose rationality if not that of a particular subject but a divine and absolute reason - this is a proposition whose truth we must assume; its proof lies in the study of world history itself, which is the image and enactment of reason…Reason is self-sufficient and contains its end within itself; it brings itself into existence and carries itself into effect.”
From the 17th century onward a number of important social developments gave rise to modernity, as well as a number of insightful critiques of modernity.
The Peace of Westphalia established “principles crucial to modern international relations” including “the inviolability of borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states.” Central banking began with Sweden’s Riksbank in 1668 and Bank of England 1694. The English East India Company was founded in 1600 and Dutch East Indies Company in 1602. They had some but not all of the characteristics of the modern corporations. They concentrated capital. Shares were transferable. Management was separated from ownership. Immortality and liability protections would come later.
The legal fiction of corporations is that they are immortal persons. The superlative 2003 documentary “The Corporation” asks the question “if corporations are persons, what kind of person are they?” Using the DSM-4 it answers: they are psychopaths.
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults; reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations; and
lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.”
All of the largest and most powerful corporations in the world fit these criteria. to a tee, which means that the legal entities which structure most of the economics, politics, and culture throughout the world (particularly the “western world”) are psychopathic. This does not contribute to progress except perhaps to a shallow and unsustainable material one.
Conventional notions of progress require the indefinite rapine of a finite biosphere. The biosphere is our relative, generated from exactly the same star dust as our sentient beings. It should be given the same respect due to relatives. The phrase “natural resources” is a way to abstract the biosphere and make it emotionally easier for humankind to exploit it. We are pushing against its limits now in a world structured by psychopaths obliviously racing us all towards an omnicidal cliff at full speed.
With the pointless and industrial scale slaughter of World War I, however, notions of inevitable progress as the engine of history dissipated in favor of thinkers like Spengler. We have been living in that ambivalent intellectual regime since then.