
According to the classic General Electric slogan, circa 1960 and pictured above: “Progress is our most important product.”
So how’s that whole “progress” thing been working out lately, anyway? 1
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, for one, believes it’s working out pretty well:
Plenty of things are getting better, they're just too slow for us to notice.
With every passing day, self-driving cars get closer to reality. Some people are worried about what they'll mean, but I'll just note that in 2012 almost 100,000 people in developed countries died on the road. Self-driving can bring that number closer to zero.
On that same scale, last year, we went from zero to two privately-funded rockets that went to space and back, landing upright. Reusable rockets can make space travel a mainstream reality.
More generally, global economic growth continues. We're making progress fighting malaria, stomach bugs, and other diseases that kill way too many people. Governance indicators in most places in the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, are inching toward improvement. 2
Auto-bots and space travel may not be everyone’s idea of progress, but who can argue with fighting disease or with better governance? M. Gobry seems to think that, wars and terrorism aside, we're heading in the right direction.
PEG’s optimism pales, however, compared to the enthusiasm of Michael Shermer, who believes that things are getting better and better every day in every way, so long as Science and Reason are in the driver’s seat:
“We are living in the most moral period in human history,” he states unequivocally (or at least he did a year ago). 3 Aware that he may encounter some skepticism, Shermer insists:
I realize that to most readers that statement will sound almost hallucinatory, but not only have we become more moral over the past several centuries, most of this progress has been the result of secular forces, and the most important of these that emerged from the age of reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.
So what sort of “empirical verification” does Shermer present for his claim? All sorts, as it happens:
Improvements in the domain of morality are evident in many areas of life:
- governance (the rise of liberal democracies and the decline of theocracies and autocracies);
- economics (broader property rights and the freedom to trade goods and services with others without oppressive restrictions);
- rights (to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness);
- prosperity (the explosion of wealth and increasing affluence for more people in more places, and the decline of poverty worldwide in which a smaller percentage of the world’s people are impoverished than at any time in history);
- health and longevity (more people in more places more of the time live longer, healthier lives than at any time in the past);
- war (a smaller percentage of populations die as a result of violent conflict today than at any time since our species began);
- slavery (outlawed everywhere in the world and practiced in only a few places in the form of sexual slavery and slave labor that are now being targeted for total abolition);
- homicide (rates have fallen precipitously from over 100 murders per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to less than 1 per 100,000 today in the Industrial West, and the chances of an individual dying violently is the lowest it has ever been in history);
- rape and sexual assault (trending downward, and while still too prevalent, it is outlawed by all Western states and increasingly prosecuted);
- judicial restraint (torture and the death penalty have been almost universally outlawed by states, and where it is still legal it is less frequently practiced);
- judicial equality (citizens of nations are treated more equally under the law than any time in the past);
- and civility (people are kinder, more civilized, and less violent to one another than ever before).
That’s an impressive list of improvements--assuming it's accurate. After providing a brief (very brief) history of the Enlightenment, Shermer summarizes his case:
From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment reason and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority as the most reliable means of solving social and moral problems. I am not arguing, for example, that discoveries in physics and biology led directly to moral changes in society; rather, the application of the methods of science, as first developed in the physical and biological sciences, when applied to the human and social sciences led to advances that bent the moral arc toward justice and freedom.
It is Shermer’s story (and he’s sticking to it) that religion (i.e. dogmatism, superstition, and “the authority of an ancient holy book”) not only held back scientific and material progress, it also impeded our moral development:
For tens of millennia, moral regress best described our species, and hundreds of millions of people suffered as a result. But then something happened half a millennium ago — the Scientific Revolution led to the age of reason and the Enlightenment, and that changed everything. Instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves. Instead of human sacrifices to assuage the angry weather gods, naturalists made measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, and winds to create the meteorological sciences. And instead of a tiny handful of elites holding most of the political power by keeping their citizens illiterate, uneducated, and unenlightened, through science, literacy, and education people could see for themselves the power and corruption that held them down and they began to throw off their chains of bondage and demand rights.
Mr. Shermer is a passionate and articulate advocate for the secular gospel of Progress, but not everyone is buying what he’s selling. For example, and not at all surprisingly, John Gray begs to differ.4 Mr. Gray insists that “progress is a myth”; which may well be the case, but we should at least take note of how he chooses to define "progress":
I define progress…as any kind of advance that's cumulative, so that what's achieved at one period is the basis for later achievement that then, over time, becomes more and more irreversible. In science and technology, progress isn't a myth. However, the myth is that the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics, or, more simply, civilization. The myth is that the advances made in civilization can be the basis for a continuing, cumulative improvement.
To clarify further, he states:
Take slavery. If you achieve the abolition of slavery, you can then go on to achieve democracy. Again, the myth is that what's been achieved is the basis for future achievement. My observation of history is that this isn't the case for civilization. Of course, I strongly support advances in civilization, like the emancipation of women and homosexuals and the abolition of torture, but all that can be easily swept away again.
In short, nothing counts as “progress” for John Gray unless it is an essentially irreversible advance, which seems to rule out such realms as human rights, morality, politics, and so forth—because people (and nations) can always relapse into barbaric behaviors. For instance, in the wake of the Iraq War, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Gray points out:
The ban on torture was notoriously "relaxed" by George W. Bush and his gang in the world's greatest democracy, not by some obscure dictatorship…Something like torture, which is completely beyond the boundaries of civilization, can become renormalized at any time.
Not only is moral “progress” precarious and unstable, but sometimes it’s no more than a veneer in the first place. On that score, Gray indicts Western societies which, having abolished slavery long ago, have now (he claims) “changed the name, and…outsourced it. And we've done the same thing with pollution. We've outsourced heavy industrial pollution to China and India so that we can be very clean. But they produce the goods that we actually use.
People who subscribe to the myth of Progress, according to Gray, are engaged in a misplaced and futile search for meaning:
[They] suggest that Western countries, despite the great problems they have, are the meaning of history. That is a myth. Western countries do have many virtues…but they also have great difficulties. Behind every myth, there is this demand for the meaning of life…we as human beings can create meaning ourselves, but there's no ultimate meaning inscribed in the universe or in history. My advice to people who need a meaning that's beyond what they can create is to join a religion. On the whole, those are older and wiser myths than secular myths like progress.
Gray then delivers the rhetorical coup de grace:
I've called progress the Prozac of the thinking class before. People have often said to me, “If I didn't believe in progress, I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning.” But as the belief in progress is only about 200 years old, I usually ask them, “What were people doing before that? Lying in bed all the time?”
What limited progress there is, Gray insists—by which he means scientific and technological developments—merely fosters an unfortunate illusion:
The rapid movement in technological advancements creates a phantom of progress. Phones are getting better, smaller, and cheaper all the time. In terms of technology, there's a continuous transformation of our actual everyday life. That gives people the sense that there is change in civilization. But, in many ways, things are getting worse. In the UK, incomes have fallen and living standards are getting worse…
Plus, there’s a downside to everything, even to Progress (maybe even to auto-bots and space travel):
Technological progress is double-edged. The internet, for example, has more or less destroyed privacy. Anything you do leaves an electronic trace.
While he’s at it, Mr. Gray goes on to question not just Progress but also the “myth of happiness”:
Happiness is a myth of satisfaction. The belief is that if you arrange your life in a certain way, then you'll have a certain state of mind. But I think a more interesting, fulfilling way to live is to just do what interests you because you never know in advance whether you'll be satisfied or not.
Have we come this far—by “we,” I refer to My Generation of Baby Boomers—only to find that the Truth was right in front of us back in 1965, when the Rolling Stones complained “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)”?
What seems clear from all this, I think, is that “Progress” is a contested concept that raises more questions than we can likely answer: what do we mean by “progress” in the first place, how do we measure it, and what are we making “progress” towards? If the whole point of progress is auto-bots and space travel, I’m not sure the game is worth the candle; but if we might actually be slowly, fitfully, and painfully working our way towards a more peaceful world and a more humane society—well, I’m all for it. And I also think that, in order to make any advances at all, we need both cheerleaders of Progress like Michael Shermer and skeptics (or curmudgeons) like John Gray.
Progress (or "Progress") is a fascinating subject; the very notion has a history of its own, and in future posts I’ll present some background and some perspectives on it.
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1 And whatever happened to GE’s handsome and genial spokesman of that era? He looks vaguely familiar…
2 http://theweek.com/articles/596818/what-im-looking-forward-2016
3 The Shermer quotes come from an article published by the Cato Institute in February 2015; they are in turn excerpted from Shermer’s 2015 book THE MORAL ARC: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. http://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2015/science-reason-moral-progress
4 http://www.vice.com/read/john-gray-interview-atheism Seriously, Mr. Gray should consider that as a title for his eventual memoir: “John Gray Begs to Differ”.
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