Progress Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The ancient philosophers were aware that the earliest periods of human history were primitive in nature, and that the more advanced social condition of the present arrived after a number of intervening stages of development. Aristotle, for example, traces social development through the clan, the village, and finally to the polis, while Thucydides is emphatic about how far the Greek cities of his time were in advance of the communities of earlier times. However, no matter how fully these thinkers believed society would come to understand the separation between the present and prehistor ic times, the ancients nevertheless were not inclined to see the future as differing fundamentally from the present. They had a cyclical approach to time, tending to see history as an endless repetition of cycles running from utter devastation to rebirth and back again.

Classical And Modern Progress

Although the idea of progress or development was known to the ancient philosophers, it is much more a distinguishing aspect of modern thought. Any study of such thinkers as Giovanni Vico, Marquis de Condorcet, Immanuel Kant, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Karl Marx illustrates time meditating on the meaning of history to an extent not found in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Cicero, and Lucretius. Furthermore, the modern doctrine of progress suggests a prejudice in favor of the current time as being either the highest stage of civilization or closer to its full culmination. In line with the advancement of learning associated with names such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, the modern thinkers tended to view past thought as more of an obstacle to, rather than a basis for, further knowledge, and as something that must be transcended, and perhaps even forgotten, if humankind’s full development is to be reached. The moderns sometimes described antiquity as a period of humankind’s childhood, while the closer people come to the present time the more grown up they are in understanding and insight. This attitude contrasts with a kind of backward-looking respect on the part of the ancients for the contributions of their intellectual predecessors.

Prior to the modern period, Christian writer Joachim of Fiore made a tripartite division of human history into the age of the Father (from Adam to Christ), the age of the Son (between the advent of Christ and 1260), and finally the age of the Holy Spirit (impending in 1260), when humankind was to come in direct contact with God. The modern philosophers picked up Joachim’s thread and thus Vico presented his divine, heroic, and human periods; Hegel described his phases of oriental despotism, Greco-Roman aristocracy and Protestant freedom; Comte volunteered his theological, metaphysical and positive epochs; and Marx came forward with his feudal, capitalist, and communist stages of class struggle.

As in the earlier theological thought of Joachim, the modern view suggests the possibility of an end of history once humankind’s capacity for progressive development has been unleashed and pent up energies have been allowed to play themselves out. With the hindsight that an end-of-history vantage point affords, all the limitations and distortions of the earlier stages come to sight as so many steps on the road to final resolution. Kant, for example, suggests that world history could end with a republic of humankind living in harmony and good order through some version of what is now known as the United Nations. Hegel’s end of history takes the form of the modern Prussian state with its constitutional monarchy and professional civil service. Later, the end of history takes the form of the worldwide church of humanity for Comte and the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to communism for Marx.

Questions About Progress

The philosophical question at the heart of the concept of progress is thus whether a final stage of history is possible, at which the most deforming contingencies that restrict human flourishing are removed from the lives of most human beings. Will a new human nature more pristine than the old make its presence felt when the constricting limitations of the past have been overcome? Are humans capable of leaving their beastliness in the mists of the past as they shape their own futures according to a new and higher standard? Or are humans condemned by a fatal flaw or original sin never to be able to rise above their innate depravity? Furthermore, there is the question that if progress is inevitable by a kind of law of human nature, it should make no difference whether it is sought deliberately and willfully, or simply by sitting passively and waiting for its unfolding. If the law of progress is the law of human nature, then attempts to resist it are futile. On the other hand, if progress is not inevitable but is more a product of human willing and striving, then human beings will have to put their shoulders to the wheel.

This ambiguity in the doctrine of progress is evident in many thinkers. Various liberal thinkers express skepticism about the possibilities for progress given that humankind is “crooked wood,” as Kant phrased it, while conservative thinkers have not infrequently expressed their hope that human beings can improve themselves and their world. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke come to mind here as emblematic of these paradoxical philosophical tendencies present on both the left and the right. Therefore, while it is fair to say that the idea of progress is akin to modern religion, it is important to note that it has its critics that hail from all points on the political compass.

Since the Enlightenment and the great age of Victorian progress, modern history has seen two world wars, totalitarianism, a cold war, regional conflicts, and now the rise of such nations as China and India whose fate was once determined in the capitals of Europe. Such developments have engendered grave doubts about the validity of the inevitable law of human progress, which had been adhered to in the West so firmly for so long. If the current era is sometimes characterized as the age of postmodernism or nihilism, it is in large measure attributable to the weakening of the idea of progress as an underlying philosophical principle of modern society. Yet, however spirited the rejection of the idea of progress becomes, it is impossible to deny its role in forming the sensibilities of the modern mind. The biblical tradition flowed into this mind with its story of historical redemption, relaying that there will certainly come a day when goodness and righteousness will prevail, all the while insisting that humans are fallen creatures forever crippled by original sin. At the same time, humans have been shaped by their Greco-Roman legacy with its humanistic teaching that through the use of reason, a human being comes close to the divine, with a constant reminder that hubris, or pride, “goeth before a fall,” as was the case with Icarus. There is reason to believe then that the debate over the possibility of progress is coeval with the Western experience itself, and thus it will continue into the future.

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