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Title: Idea of Progress: History and Society
Penguin Publishing Group
Item Number: 9780140213867
Number: 1
Product Description: Full Name: Idea of Progress: History and Society; Short Name:Idea of Progress
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780140213867
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780140213867
Rating: 4/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/38/67/9780140213867.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
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$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9297 total ratings) |
Erik Sexton
reviewed Idea of Progress: History and Society on December 24, 2020The first shock I had reading Sidney Pollard’s The Idea of Progress was his passage pointing out that the ‘fundamental axioms’ of the Enlightenment mesh conveniently with the self-interest of the 18th-century bourgeoisie. The American founding fathers – land-owning commoners and businessmen to a man – thought it was self-evident that all men are created equal. People have equal natural rights, and there should be equality before the law. Such commercially minded men did not believe, however, that property should be equally distributed. Freedom to trade, meritocracy, equality of opportunity, and security of property against arbitrary decisions of the aristocracy are all to the advantage of the owners of the factors of production. These ideas are still the foundations for political argument today. Could it be that my deeply held liberal democratic values are simply what happened to be best for wealthy 18th-century proto-industrialists?
Pollard’s book is a history of thinking about progress in Europe from the 16th century to the first half of the 20th century. Pollard classifies types of progress on a pyramid, where types lower on the pyramid are more widely accepted than those higher up. Scientific and technical progress are the base of the pyramid, and material progress is just above it. In modern parlance, we might call these economic growth, or economic development. Three centuries ago, the age of the earth was measured in thousands of years, disease was caused by humors and miasma, and human beings sprung whole from creation. School children today know more about the natural world than the most learned did then. If any deficiencies in the children’s knowledge remain, the greatest encyclopedia to ever exist is carried through the air to a device in their pockets. There are far more people today, and yet they are generally healthier and live longer than people of the past. In particular, babies are much less likely to die, an unimaginable blessing for parents. In a simple material sense, the modern world has left the past in the dust.
There is not quite so much reason to believe in progress in terms of political or social organization–the next step on Pollard’s pyramid. This is the belief that human society will become ‘better governed, more just, freer, more equal, more stable, or in other ways better equipped to permit a higher development of the human personality.’ Finally, the peak of the pyramid is progress in human character. Progress here means that people will become more moral, kinder, less selfish, or more cheerful. In the 18th century there was more widespread belief in these types. Buoyed by advances in science and technology, enlightenment thinkers believed that the aristocracy only had to be removed, and the stage would be set for a new kind of social arrangement and improvement in human character. Condorcet, for example, described a modern, rational society with gender and racial equality, democracy, and education for all. He wrote his great work ‘Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ while in hiding from the authorities of the French Revolution. He was eventually discovered and was either killed or committed suicide in prison. The French Revolution demonstrated that removing the aristocracy does not necessarily lead to a wealthy and desirable society. The optimism of the 18th century enlightenment philosophers about the potential for rationality to defeat barbarism gave way to a more dismal philosophy.
Usually I have to be a bit sneaky to insert some economics into book reviews, but Pollard let’s me off the hook. Economists take the center stage in his description of 19th century thought on progress. Starting with Adam Smith, economists have taken a more limited view of progress. The conceit of economists is to describe unchanging natural laws. Economists often assume human decision making to be ahistorical and driven by rationality and self-interest. ‘For Adam Smith,’ writes Pollard,‘and even more so for the economists who followed, every man was by nature a Scotsman on the make.’ Given the same environment, an ancient Indian peasant would approach a problem in the same fashion as a modern CEO. Since human nature is assumed to be constant across space and time, there can be no progress at the tip of the pyramid. While some societies may suffer from ‘distortions’ created by inefficient bureaucracies or poor infrastructure, classical liberals believe that the destiny of each country is to develop into a liberal democracy. Economic socialists like Owen, Marx, and Engels, had a different take with a similar view of progress: economic relations will drive all societies onto the same linear progression towards socialism and communism.
The last third of Pollard’s book considers the first half of the 20th century. The book is necessarily less thorough here both because the volume of economic and scientific writing exploded during this period, and also because it was maybe a bit too recent for Pollard to take a bird’s eye view. The major theme is Pollard's surprise at the revival of optimism about progress. The First World War and the Great Depression led to deep pessimism about whether history was progressing, or whether it was merely cyclical. Then, the triumph of the UK and the United States in World War II led to a wave of optimism about the future. ‘Somewhat to its surprise, the West found itself on a steeply rising curve of material prosperity, technical innovation and social peace such as it had not even conceived possible in the 1930’s. Men, perhaps fortunately, easily forget the ill, and take the good for granted, and with striking speed, the former belief in progress was disinterred, refurbished, and began to shine forth as if it had never been in any danger.’
Reading this book made me think of Keynes famous quote from The General Theory:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
Before reading Pollard’s book, I didn’t realize how many views that I take for granted were controversial views during the 18 and 19th centuries. For example, the idea that human nature is fixed. When I learn about ancient societies, I imagine myself living among them. What might it have felt like to be a Roman slave, an Egyptian priest, or a Chinese eunuch? On consideration, this way of thinking is a bit silly. I have a totally different understanding of nature, concept of what is good, and view of proper social relations. It is really impossible for me to imagine myself as a member of a society so epistemologically different than my own.
It is possible that the differentness of past societies from the present is obscured by the conformity of nearly all modern societies. Countries as geographically diverse as China, South Africa, and Chile all dress in a similar Western fashion. The Chinese government has recently accused Western countries of anti-Chinese racism. From Istanbul to South Africa, political debates are couched in the language of liberty and equality which grow out of the European enlightenment. The past is a more exotic foreign country, than any existing foreign country of today.
Here is Pollard:
More interesting, however, is the assumption of the inevitability of ‘economic development’ in the Western sense, among the large majority of the world’s population living in ‘underdeveloped’ economies. For one thing, it is basically new. Even a generation ago, Spengler and Toynbee could argue, with at least some plausibility, that India, China, the Arab world, or the Russian world, were so different in their total basic outlook as to make communication across the frontiers meaningless, if not impossible...It is important to stress how much the assumption, now accepted as self-evident, that every country will ‘progress’, mainly in the economic sphere but also in all other socio-historical respects, towards the Western model, contradicts fundamentally the doubters and pessimists, and how much and how startlingly it vindicates the prophets of progress.
More controversially and tentatively, there may even be a genetic difference between past and present peoples. There is no question that evolution operates on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, not the mere hundreds of years since the beginning of the enlightenment. But in some circumstances it can function at smaller time scales. For example, there is strong selection for those who dwell in the Himalayas against altitude sickness. In a world populated by guns and where social standing is based on brains and conscientiousness, might there not be different selection than in a world where physical might ends arguments? Could it be that a genetic snapshot of Beijing in 1400 might look quite different than the same in 2020, even among ethnically similar people?
If human nature changes either through culture or genetics, are we making progress? This is a difficult question to wrestle with. I am a modern person, so I share modern moral intuitions with most people alive today. Stephan Pinker in Enlightenment Now juxtaposes material progress with moral beliefs. All over the world, people believe more and more in emancipative values which emphasize freedom of choice and equal opportunities. Peter Singer has argued that our ‘moral circle’ is expanding, so that we feel moral responsibility towards people more and more remote from us.
It is tempting to believe that these are moral improvements in humanity, and that they follow naturally from progress in science and technology. But it isn’t clear that this correlation is causal. The French revolution, and the atrocities of the first half of the 20th century show that there is not a single possible enlightenment morality. Enlightenment ideas of social progress fed the holocaust and the forced sterilizations associated with Social Darwinism. Living memory of that horror has died out, but there is no obvious social force which indicates it can not happen again–this time with the far more effective tools which have been developed in the interim.
Pollard’s book shows that the modern stagnation of human nature is a sort of religion. We believe, with some reason, that science and technology will continue to advance, but that we have reached the end of history. The destiny of every society and every country is to become a liberal democracy. Our increasing morality makes us more free and more autonomous. Pollard’s book is more descriptive than rhetorical, but he implicitly argues that we could very well be wrong. Human character was different in the past, and may be different in the future. People in ages hence might find our current enlightenment values parochial or worse. The common-sense view of historical progress may be far off the mark. The moral ground we stand on may be more unstable than we realize.
The Idea of Progress is the the opposite of Twitter. The writing is academic, the print is small, the chapters are long, and the topic is subtle. It does not grab the reader’s attention, she must pay it herself in return for its ideas. Just as Twitter rewards the pithy put-down, the long-form style of The Idea of Progress is made for sustained and careful argument. By the end of Pollard’s Western intellectual history of the concept of historical progress, I was questioning some of the fundamental assumptions I have about history, society, and my field of research.
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