Progress and Its Discontents

Humao,tlaslSoc,al Sc::lCInCeslSctancn

$11.95

Events 01 the past two decades have challenged many 01 the lundamental be· Hels, inslllutions, and values of modern 'Western culture-the culture 01 "progress." Are science and technology realty progressive and benelicial ? Have they led to the enhancement 01 wellare, greater happiness, and moral Improvement? Is the continued growth of material productivity possible? Desirable? Are the institu· tions of progress viable? Progress and Its Discontents assembles the views on progress of some 01 Amef1ca's leading humanists, scientists, and social scientists. CIting disappointed expectations 01 progress In spheres from science to morals and pollllcs, and the many problems created or left untouched by progress, the editors conclude that the term no longer refers to "an Inevitable sequence of improvements" but rather to "an aspiration and compelling obligation." Part I. His torical, Ideological, and Evolu tionary Aspects. Essays by Nar1r18rl O.

Keohane, Georg G. Iggers, Alfred G. Meyer, Crawford Young, and Francisco J. Ayala. Part II. The Progress and Problems 01 Science. Essays by John T. Edsall, Ger· aid Feinberg , Bernard D. Davi s, Gerald Hotton, Marc J. Roberts, and H. Stuart Hughes. Part III. The Prospects and Problems 01 Material Progress . Essays by Moses Abramovitz, Harvey Brooks, Nathan Rosenberg, and Hollis B. Chenery. Part IV. Political and Social Aspects. Essays by Glanfranco Poggi , Aaron Wildavsky, G. Bingham Powell , Jr., and Samuel H. Barnes. Part V. Progress and Humanistic Unders tanding. Essays by Steven Marc us, Murray Krieger, Robert C. Elliott, Martin E. Marty, Daniel Bell , and Frederick A. Olafson. "A collection of 25 essays appraising the meanings and prospects for progress in a variety of d isciplines from theology and the arts to biology and physics, Including history and the social sciences. The essays are rematkably good, and several are masterful in their compression of broad, complex subjects and argu· ments Into coherent, pointed accounls."-Amerlcan Political Science Review

University of California Press Ber1<eley 94720

ISBN 0-520-05447-4

Progress AND IT S

Discontents

Progress AND ITS

Discontents EDITED BY GABRIEL A . A LMO N D , MARV I N C H ODOROW , & ROY HARVEY PEAR C E Sp011JOI"I!d by Ibe lWeI/ em Cenler 0/ tbe Am erica/1 A cademy of / l rlS and Sciences

Berke/e)' IJJS /1 1I~clej

LondOIl

UNIVER S ITY OF CALIF O RNIA PRE SS

" l1>c Re.urn o f .h" Sacr~'(P The Argument un ,he fUlUI{" o f Rdig ion" by Doniel &11 CI 1977 by 1).J."ici &11. "Thrrant losses. In the case of technology this is oftcn easy. In morc spirirual domains it is nOt so obvious that we incor!X>rate the greatest achievements of past generations, avoid thci r errors, and move beyond them: but advances in techniques :lnd 6. QuOlelcip"'J of Mural ,md I'ofilic,,/ Sri(lII e" (Edinburgh, 1792), \'ul. I; d . BUI)·.ldca of I'rog , ClJ , pp. ')·6, 73-74.

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KEOHANE

a smuggled Providence." 11 Th is is apparent in numerous "secular" accounts of history as progress, from Adam Ferguson to Hegel and beyond.

The second candidate for the cause of change, the nOtion that hisrory unfolds according to its own inner tendencies, particularly fascinated eighteemh. and nineteenth-century philosophers of progress. Imposing stages on history, whether four or twenty-four, is a delightful game. However, it is extremely difficult to devise a convincing account of the laws [hat govern the succession of such stages and to show why we should expect them to be invariam and benign. Almost all such aCCQums collapse into theories either of providential or of "anthropogenic" progrcss. ll The final candidate for the cause of change is human activity itself. At the heart of most theories of progress is a fascination with human efforts to improve the human condition. One can easily combine all three candidates under this rubric: a divine beneficence created our species to undertake activities that result in unfolding stages of history. Whichever energy or motive force is identified as the root cause, the most striking feature of this dogma of progress is the conv iction that knowledge, power, virtue, and happiness buttress one another and will be achieved tOgether. In its most robust and purest form, the belief in progress affirms that increase in human knowledge, the establishment of human control over nature, and the perfecting of the moral excellences of the species will guaramee one another, with a concomitant increase in human happiness. This certainly rests on beliefs drawn from Judea-Ch ristian and classical sources, combined with seventeenth·century optimism about man's estate. THE CONSTITUENTS OF THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

Bury depicts the idea of progress as a monolithic entity waiting to be discovered. He excuses the Greeks for not guite seeing it, despite i,l.1I their other accomplishments, and makes a good deal of identifying the exact moment when the idea was first formulated. This way of investigating the history of ideas presents some major pitfalls. 13 Several elements have been combined to form what we call a theory or ideology of progress. Each of these elements was familiar from amiguity, and each is still with us. The notion of progress depends on combining them in a particular way. II. Erne$! Tuveson, /Ili/lelmium alld Utopia (Berkeley: Universiry o( California Press, 1949), p. 201: see also Karl J..ijwirh, Meaning in Hi/lOry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 60. 12. Van Doren distingui shcs "amhropogcnic" rheories of progress, based on man's "colle
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The second factor-the proper motive-assured rapid progress. If we "consider what arc the true ends of knowledge," we will

SCI our to !earn "not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life," as we "pcrfect and govern it in charity." According to Bacon, the origina ! sin was nOt "that pure and uncorrupted knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures," but rather "the ambit ious and proud desire of moral knowledge," the revolt from God"s legislative power over us. To desire power fOf uneself, or over onc's country, is "vulgar and degenerate," a source of sin; but "if a man endeavor to establ ish and extend the power :md domin iun of the hum:m face itself over the universe," his ambition is noble and wholesome, and will be divinely blessed. n Bacon's sense of natUre's role in this adventure was complex. We must respect natUre to ensure her cooperation---obey her in orde r to command her- but the goal is human mastery.H There is no doubt about God·s support for such endeavors. Bacon depicts God as a devoree of hide-and-seek, inviting the ··human spirit for his playfelJow" at the game of innocent discovery of trUlh . If we proceed in this spirit, we may hope that the ··commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things, which is more precious than anything on earth, may be restOred to its perfen and original condition."' As wc imitatc the creative works of God for human good. he wil l repay [he enterprise most handso mely: ··Thou wilt make us partakers of thy vision and thy sabbath."'N The utilitarian conviction that scientific enterprise must be under, taken ··for the benefit and lise of life'· if it is to bear fruit is balanced in Bacon·s work by the pure joy in rhe discovery of truth. He praises the increase of knowledge itself, ··rhl' very beholding of the light:· as a ··fairer thing than all the uses of it;· and '·more worthy than all the fru it of inventions'-· For Bacon, these twO aspects of the search for trmh are not mutually exclusive but complememary. He asserts t ha t there will never be ··much progress in the sciences·· until ··natural philosophy be carried on and applied to particular sciences, and pa rt ie, ula r sciences be carried back again to natural phi losophy. " !~ From this mutual refreshment of pure and applied science we may cxpect grcat things; and this is the rule established in Bacon 's research utOpia, New AI/alllis (1 627 ), where the ·'End of our Foundation is the knowledge

22. BJco n. Preface fU T he G~eat InJl/Ju~.Jt irJII, p. 310: a nd Novum O rglmum , Book I, Chap. 129, p. 3 7~ . 23. Bamn , NOl·UIll Orglll/um, Book I, Chap. 3. p. 33 1: o n Baoon·s exploitJti,·e att i· tude to ..... ard nature· s boumy. see Caro l)" n Merchant. The Oeal h oj Nalu~e: Women, Ecology. ,wd the Sciemijic Ret·olulion (San Francis. Georg Hegel, Philosophy 0/ Hinory, trans.J . $ibrec (New York: Wiley, 19(0); Georg Hegel, Philosophy 0/ RighI. tram. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1%:». 16. Marx. "Preface:' p. :> : Friedrich Engels, "Sociali sm: Utopian and Scientific:' in Milrx ,E"gelI Reader. p. 7 1 ~ ; Marx and Enge ls, "Manifes!O,"' p. 490; Pierre·Joseph Pro udhon. "The Gt'nera l Idea of the Revolution in the Ninetee':uh Centur)":' in The Gre"l Po/ili",/ Theories. I'd. Michael Curtis (Ne .... York: Avon, 1%1), p. 135; Doc/rine 0/ Sai" I·Sim on. p. ~x j.

Progrelf in Hi f/o rfograph)' aM Social Thoug h:

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Despite the fundamentally different conceptions of the political organization of the future , ranging from autocratic rule by scientifically informed clites to the abolition of traditional political constraints, there is a considerable area of common ground among these doctrines of progress in the affirmation of values to be recognized in history. Fat Comte, Mill, Buckle, Spencer and also Marx, Condorcet"s vision of the future , rooted in the Enlightenmem, remains decisive, even if the mechanism by which this vision becomes reality places much greater emphasis on collective forces and historical processes than on intellcerual leadership. The entire history of the world points to the achievement of a civilization in which science and industry occupy a cemral role in the transformation of the conditions of human life. The military repressive patterns of the past will be replaced by the peaceful, productive order of the futUre. The emire history of mankind finds its culmination in the history of modern Europe. This confidence in the leadership of Europe is shared by Hegel and by German idealist philosophers like Fichte, who, perhaps reflecting the delayed economic and social modernization of Germany , places less emphasis on science and technology. The non -European world will find the completion of its historical development nor in the further development of its own heritage but, because its heritage represents an earlier phase in the progress of mankind, in total Europeanization. For the majority of nineteenth-century theori~i[s of progress, it is conflict which provides the mechanism by which the onward march of mankind proceeds. The Enlightenmem idea that imellecrual discussion itself provides a major source of the civilizational advancement of modern man is reiterated in the liberalism of John Stuart Mill. But Mill, in his stress on rational dialogue, is somewhat of an exception. For Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Spencer, the rational order of the furure is achieved in part unwittingly by the irrational forces of the past. There is no room for fundamental evil in the economy of history; coercion, exploitation, and warfare have thus contributed to their own elimination. The implication is that individuals and whole ages were sacrificed on "the slaughter bank of history·· for the n.-demption of mankind. Conflict took a variety of forms. For Hegel, as also for Kant, war played OJ decisive role a5 tht.· ultimate arbiter in the dialectical co nfron tation of states, as the concrete manifestation of an ascending succession of philosophic principles. War and the conflict of states remained for Hegel (bur not for Kant) a desirable agent of progress also in the future. For the Saim-Simonians and Comte, ··organic·· epochs, marked by unanimity in basic beliefs and the presence of a centralizing authority providing social cohesion, alternated with ··critical'· epochs in which individualism and skeptical inquiry dissolved the incomplete unity of the past to provide the possibility of a new, more comprehensive synthesis. For Marx and Engels the agency of human emancipation

"was the class struggle; for Spencer it was the com petit ion of the GEORG C . IGGERS

marketplace, with its survival of the finesr. The belief in finality and the role o f conflict in arealning this final ity contained the seed of a political ani rude that was willing to sacrifice the individual for an idea. From a libertarian perspective, Proudhon sensed this well when in his PhiioIOphie du Progres he warned against any identification of progress with an absolute end. Progress, Proudhon insisted, is "the affir+ marion of universal movement, consequentl}' the negation of any st3tic form or formula." Z1 Mill questioned the possibility of progress as a "natural law." At most, limited "empirica l Jaws" might be formulated which would describe "cerrain general tendencies which may be perceived in society," such as the replacement of a military society by an industrial one. Moreover, even if the !:Jws of socia l change were known, it would nor follow that changes were necessarily in a desirable direction. Although Mill shared the belief that "'the general tendency is, and will continue to be, saving occas ional and temporary exceptions, one of improvement: a tendency toward a bener and a happier state;' he nevertheless acknowledged, "that progress was nut inevitable but the result of conscious human effort based on rationa l insight." This left the door open to the possibility of rea l regression. 28 From the perspective of the new "scientific" historiography which emerged in the nineteenth-century German university. the speculative approach to histOry, represented by the theorists of progress, was, of course, unacceptable. Ranke rejected the idea of progress on twO counts. For one, neglecting a critical examination of the sources, it lacked a scholarly or "scientific" basis. For the other, as we suggested at the beginning of this essay, it violated the historian's sense of the uniqueness of the historical phenomenon. The historian deals with every historical manifestation as something nonreproc\ucible, as an end in itself. For him "'every epoch is immediate to God" 19 and must be judged in terms of its own standards. "Whi le the philosopher, viewing history from his vantage point, seeks infinity merely in progression, development, and totality, history recognizes something infini te in every existence, in every condition, in every being, something eternal, coming from God."' Yet in this assertion of the ultimate value of every individuality, Ranke in turn occupies a spcru iat ive position. Ranke assumed that there is fundamental purpose in history even if this purpose does not express itself in directional movement. Thus, the perfection of history is expressed at every moment in time. This form of historism expresses a historical optimism more radical in a sense than the classical theories of progress. For while the theo ries of 27. Pie rre-Jo~ph Proudhon, Phil% phie d" prog rel ( Paris: M. Riviere , [5).16). p. 49; the English translatio n is mine. 28. John StU3n Mill. A Syll t m of Logic. 7th ed. (1.ooOOn: Longman's, 1868), ll, 5 10,497. 29. Ranke, '"On Progress in History," p. 53.

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ferent from the more broadly social concept ion of histor ical change in the Marxist doctrine of economic determination. The Br itish a nd the American experience of t ransformation, through a series of five stages from traditional economies to mature capitalism and mass consumption, stands as the model for Other societies includ ing the Sov iet Union. Communism appears as a deviation, as "a disease of trans ition," H wh ich under the pressures of economic development will give way to the social and political concomitants of an affl uent consumer society, to a convergence with other highly developed societies. The pressure of development has already led to the "end of ideologies," to the "consensus" of the post-World War II generation of optimistic histOrians on the American na tional past.~4 The Marxist formulations of the "scient ific technological"' revolution, optim istic form ulat ions restricted to Eastern European cou nt ries and largely absent from the much more flexible thought of Western Marxists, give greater emphasis to the social effects of industrialization. For them too "the scientific and technological revolut ion" prov ides the basis for an unalienated, perfected society. "On ly when [he productive forces of human life have reached th is level," observes the Richta group, "w ill opportunities exist for new relationships among people and a new concept of human life. We are standing today on [he soil of the historically fo rmed industrial civilization, but we are beginning to cross irs frontiers and go forward into rhe unknown civilization of the future."'45 Thi s stress on the uniformiry of economic development is quest ioned by Alexander Gerschenkron, who stresses the unique historical factors which determine the economic takeoff to industrialization in specific national settings. The unC<jual economic development of countries at the verge of industrialization prevents a repetition of the British modeL In a study of political modernization, Barrington Moore introduces a sim ilar comparative note; di fferences in socia l relations related to economic modernization explain the very different roads that the various major national societies took. Raymond Aron accepts the notion of the "industr ial society" with its imperative of maximum production, which calls forth uniform forms of control yet which runs inco the barriers of societies and individuals whose character has been formt--d by historyY' Cu ltural and national diversity continues to exist under the veneer of technologically condit ioned uniformity. 4l

R O SfOW, Sl"ges of Eco tlomic G f() u'lh , pp. 162·64. 44. Daniel Bel!. The EIIJ of Ideologies: On the ExhallJt;Oll of Po/iliCllllde"s in the Fifties (G lencoe, Ill.: Fr~ P rt'Ss, 19(0): d . Bernard Slerns he r. CO t/JeIlJIIS. COllfl;et, ,md Amen c"n Hil/o n" nJ (Bloo mingwn: Ind ia na Un;"l· , §;ty Press. 19n); also Jo hn H igham, 'The Cull of America n 'umsensus': H"mugcni zinB Our HiSlo ry,"' Co m · mema,)", 27 (February 1959): 9}- IOO. 45. Richta t't al.. Ci vi/iu tiQtI al the CrouroaJl , p. 278. 46. A. Gerschenkron, Economic &cku·"rdnel1 in HiJlo ric..f PerSl'ecli nl (Cam, bri dge, Mu s.: H arvard Uni"e rsit)" Press, 1%2); Barringlon Muore, Social Origi'l1 of

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Yet these varied critiques still proceed from the assumption (hac industrialization and growth are the destiny of the modern world. A more radical critique takes issue with the fundamental value assumptions of an industrial society. From a fi ctional perspective, Julian Huxley and Georg(· Orwell stress the te ndencies w domination in-

herent in technical rationality. Basic (0 the J udeo-Christian and the H ellenic-Roman tradition is the faith that the world was given to man to control. From tWO very different directions, one neo-Marxist , the other structuralist-anthropological, the relationship of man to nature is called into qucscion. In his early philosophical writings as well as in Capital, Marx had spoken of the "complete inversion " in the relation between the world of things and the world of man. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno see a similar inversion operating in modern society since the Enlightenment but see it nor as a function of private property bur as an inherent quality of scientific-technical civilization. Seeking to emancipate man from myth, they argue, the Enlightenment created a new myth. It assumed that thought could best be expressed in mathematical forms and in doing this created a conceptua l world in which men were depersonalized. RationaliZation and mathematiZation lent themselves to the manipulation of men in the service of production for its own ends. ··Mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."4J Going beyond this, H erbert Ma rcuse and Norman Brown question the very compulsion to produce. 4~ In changing the relationship between man and nature and seeking technical control over the laner, Western civilization laid the bases for the man ipulation and control of human beings. The drive to perform, in industry or sexuality, represents a neurosis. The civilization of the West is thus inherently sick. In a Utopian vein, Marcuse sees in the dialectics of industrial society the possibility but improbability that the achievement of an automated industry will free man fro m the traditional economy of scarcity and the curse of alienated labor and make possible a world in which the pleasure principle will no longer be in conflict with the reallty principle. This attempt to redefine man·s relation to nature 49 and thus to question the fundamental value assumptions of Western civilization, and with it the ideology of progress, is expressed in a different form in srructu r::d anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss questions the unique role of scientific reason as it has been conceived in the Western tradition of DiclalOrship and DemocrolCY: Lord and PeolSanl in the Alolking of the Modern World (BoslOn: Beawn Pres5. 19(6); Raymond Aron. Progrt/JS atld Di/illusio n: The Di,,· leCTics of Alodern Society (New York: Peaeger, ]%8), p. 221. 47. Cf. Ma rx, upi/"I. I, 310: Ma x Horkh eimer and Theodor Adorno, Did/eelic of Enlightenmenl. t11lns. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press. ]972) . p. xi. 48. Herbert Marruse. Erol alld Ch·j/iZdfion (Boston: Beacon Press, 19~5 ) . and One·Dimemion,,{ .Man (Boston: Beacon Press, ]%4 ); Norman O. Brown, life Ifgolin1f Dealh ( New Yor k: Vintage. n.d. ). 49. Cf. William Leiss. The Dominarioll of Nature (Ne ...· York: Braz il1er. 1972).

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philosophy since the Greeks. The mythical and magical thinking of the "savage mind" possesses an equal dignity in its attempt to understand reality. "Mythica l" ' and "scientific" thought do nOt represent "twO stages or phases in the evolution of knowledge. Both approaches are equally valid:' Nor is there continuity or process in time. Modern civilization does not represent a higher form of social life; historical knowledge has no claim to superiority over other forms of knowledge. "History is a discontinuous set." It has no objective subject matter. "We need only recognize that histOry is a method with no distinct object corresponding to it to reject the equivalence between the notion of history and the notion of humanity.")O A very similar idea is suggested by Michel Foucault. 1l It is on ly in one specific period of Western history that men have thought in historical terms. This way of thinking represented an anthropocentric hubris. which gave man a specia l and illusory status in reality and destroyed the balance between man and nature. But Foucault agrees with Levi-Strauss that this "golden age of historical consciousness," which marked the world outlook of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "has already passed.")2 In his early work on the history of insanity in the Age of Reason,H Foucault had tried to demonstrate the inhumanity of an outlook which seeks to dominate and regulate, in this case the insane. with no understanding of the creatiye and humane sources of madness. This attempt at a history, which fundamentally questions the assumptions of histOrical writing since the eighteemh century of the unity of world histOry-the notion of development as the framework fo r historical thought, the special dignity of imellect, and the unique quality of European civilization - is perhaps best represented by the historians and "human scient ists" of the Amlaln circle in Paris, although the work of the AmlaleJ finds its parallel in the historical writing of almost all countries by the 1970s.)4 It is he re that a Copernican view of history, for which rational man no longer occupies the cemer of the stage and Europe appears as one among many cultures, replaces an amhropo- and Europocentric conception. The denial of the unity of world history is not unique. A tradition from Herder 50. Claude Levi·Strauss, Th e Sat'age Milld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 259.263.

51 cr. Miche l I'oucau h , The Order 0/ Thingl: All Archaeolog)' 0/ the HNIIUIII Saellces (New York : Pantheon, 1971), and The Archaeology 0/ Kllowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pa ntheon. 1972). 52. Uv j·Strauss, Sa"age Mind, p. 254. 53. Michel Foucault, Mad'leu and Cil/iljz"tion: A Hillory 0/ InJ"nity ililhe Age 0/ Re"loll, !Tans. Richard Ho ward (New York: Vintage, 19(4 ). 54. Ct. T raian Stoianovich, Fre'lch HillOric"I Method: Th e Amlllftl Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976): J. H. Hurer, "Fernand Braudel and the Mo nde Braudellien:' Journal 0/ Modern HillOry. 44 (1972): 480·5}9: ~rg G. Iggers, New Directions in Europe"" HiUf)riogr"phy (Middl el
admired, bU i nonetheless put in its place as the product of the infantile s t a~,'e o f human progress, ex press the same faith in progress which Engels o ffered upon his return home fro m his first two years in Manchester: he raved to Marx about how much the city had developed in such a sho rt time : whole forests have been CUt down, he Wfmc triumph antly. In count less ways, Engels and Marx expressed thei r conviction that progress was promoted precisely b y rhe destructive and oppressive tre nds the romantics denounced. Slavery, the oppression of women, the explo itation o f wage bbor, the ru inat ion of the peasantry, the despoliation of natu re, the mechanization of life, the destruction o f religious and cultural tradi tio ns, the colonization of formerly independent nations , from Bohem ia to Indi a, from China to Mexicothese and o ther stages in the march of civilization Marx and Engels described in all their ho rrors and then made sure to add that every one o f them was necessary and des irable fo r assuring the eventua l viClo ry o f p rogress. It is as though ther were in agreeme nt with Nietzsche's statement that" the magnitude o f any 'progress' indeed is measured by the m ass of everything t hat had to be sacrificed for its sa ke. "6 The romantic laments over these costs they always dismissed as sent imental , reactionary, and infantile. Th ey would have scoffed at rhe contemporary anth ropolog ist Marsha ll Sa hlins for asserting rhar Western civilization is dangerous "because in the interes t of this growth it does nO! hesitate to destroy any other form of humanity whose difference from us consists in hav ing discovered no t merely othe r codes of existence but ways of ach ie ving an end that still eludes us: the mastery by society of society's mastery ove r nature," 7 It is no tewo rthy , in th is connection, that Engels and Marx reacted angrily and with incomprehension to suggest ions that thei r own critique of capitalism and its ills might have been inspired or anticipated by ro m antic reaClionaries of p revious generations . The philosophic underpinnings of this faith remain a matter of controversy, and so, to some extent , is the degree o f dou bt Marx and Engels generated to qualify their faith. Both of them at various times had moments o f despair during which they thought histOry was taking wrong turns toward barbarism rather than toward the communist uto pia. Both o f them allo wed the possibil ity of such an alte rnative, though both often reassured each other that, in Ihe final analysis, humanity would fulf ill ils dcslin}' of creafing a world fil for human beings 10 li ve in . ~'Io rcover, they seem to have made a clear dislinction 6. Fried rich Nietlsche. bIT Gellea/ogie de . Jll o~a/ (Munich ; C;uld mann. Verlag, 1877 ). pp. 65·66. In Ger man. Ihe Siale men! reads as follows' "Die c'rOssc cines 'Furlsehrius ' bem/HI sieh sugar naeh der Masse dessen. was ih m alles geop ferr werden musste." 7. Marshall 0 5ahlins. CNII/.re and PraClical Reason (Chicago: Un;\'ers; ry
bees, dol phins, and human beings, wh ich appear to be, prima facie at least, patently mOTC advanced or progressive than their primitive ancestOrs. Bur wh:n do we mean when we say that there has been progress in the evolutionary process ? Org3nisms may be proBressive with respect to one or a few attributes, regressive with respect ({) others. For example, bacter ia are able to synthesize all their components and obtain the energy they need for living from inorganic compounds: human beings depend on other org:lnisms. And some evolutionary lineages do not appear to be progressive by any reasonable definition: living bacteria are nOI ve ry different from their ancestOrs of IWO or three bi llion years earlier. Moreover, many evolutionary lineages have become extinct. Nevertheless, some form o f progress appears to have occu rred in biological evolution as the result of a natural process. H ence, it seems worthwh ile to investigate the notion of progress as this may have occurred in the biologica l world. Such investigation mighl yield a notion of progress applicable to ocher domains and, perhaps, of general validity. CH ANCo !;. EVOl.UTION. DIRECTION, AND PROGRESS

111e notiun that living o rganisms can be classified in a hie rarchy going frum luwer to higher furms goes back to Aristotle and, indeed, even to lOG

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earlier times: the creation of the world as described in Genesis contains the explicit notion that some organisms are higher than others and implies that living things can be arranged in a sequence from the lowest to the highest, which is man. The Bible's narrative of the creation reflects the common-sense impression that earthworms arc lower than fi sh or birds, the latter lower th(1O man _ The idea of a "ladder of life" rising from amoeba to man is present, explicitl)' or implicitly, in all p reevolutionary biology. The theory of evulution adds the dimension of time, or history, to the hierarchical classificatiun of living things. The transition from baCteria to humans can nuw be seen as a natural, progressive develupment through time from simple to gradually more complex organisms. The expansion and diversification of life can also be judged as progress; some form of advance seems obv ious in the transition from one or only a few kinds of living things to the more than two million different species living today. It is nOt immediately clea r, however, what is meant by statements such as, "The evolution of organisms is progressive;' or "Progress has occurred in the evolutionarr sequence leading from bacteria to humans." Such expressions may simply mean that evolutiunary sequences have a time direction or, even more simply, that they are accompanied by change. The term "progress" may be clarified by comparing it with other related terms used in biological discourse. These terms are "change:' "evolution," and ··direCtion."· "Change " means alteratiun whether in the position, the state, or the nature of a thing. Progress implies change but not vice versa; not all changes are progressive. The molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the air of a room are continuously changing positions; such change would nut generally be regarded as progressive. The mutation of a gene from a funerional allelic state to a nunfuneriunal one is a change bur definitely not a p rogressive one. The terms "evolution" and "progress" can also be distinguished although both imply that wstained change has occurred. Evolutionary change is not necessarily progressive. The evolution of a species may lead to its own extinction, a change which is nor progressive, at least nOt for that species. And some living organisms, such as bacteria or horseshoe crabs, do nOt s(.'"Cm to be significantly different from their ancestors of millions of generations ago_ 'Direction" and "progress" are different concepts as welL The concept of "direction" implies that a series of changes have occurred that can be arranged in a linear sequence with respect to some property or feature, such thac elements in the later pan of the sequence are more different from early elements of the sequence than from intermediate elements. Directional change may be "uniform" or not, depending on whether every member of the sequence is invariably more different from the first chan each preceding member, or whether directional

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lohippus ). These trends represent directional change, but it is nor obvious that they should be labeled progressive. To label them progressive, we would need to agree that the directional change had been in some sense for the better. That is, in order to consider a directional sequence progressive, we need to add an evaluation, namely, that the condition in the latter members of the sequence represents, according to some standard, a melioration or improvement. The directionality of a sequence may be recognized and accepted without any such eva luation being added. Progress implies directional change, but the opposite is not true. TIlE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

Evolution, direction, and progress all imply that there is a historical sequence of events that exhibits a s}'stematic alteration of a property or state of the elements in the sequence. Ptogress occurs when there is directional change towa rd a better state or condition. The concept of progress, then, contains two elements: one descriptive- that directional change has taken place, the other axiological-that the change represents an improvement or melioration. 2 The notion of progress requ ires (hat a value judgment be made about what is better and what is worse according to some axiological standard. However, contrary to the belief of some authors, ~ the axiological standard of reference need not be a moral one. Moral progress is possible, but not all forms of progress arc moral. The evaluation required for progress is one of bener versus worse or of higher versus lower but not necessarily one of right versus wrong or of gM versus evil. "Bener" may simply mean more efficient, more abundant, or more complex wit hout connotating any reference to moral values or standards. Progress, then, may be defined as tyuematie change in a jeattlre belonging to all the m embers of a ! eque'l ce in me/) a way rhaf poJterio r member! of the sequence exhibit an improvement of thaI feattl re. More simply, progress may be defined as directional change t oward the better. The antonym of progress is "regress." Regress or retrogression is directional change for the worse. The two clements of the definition, namely, directional change and improvement according to some standard, are jointly necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of progress. Directional changc (and progress) may be observed in sequences that are spatially tather tha n temporally ordered. Biologists use the term "dine" to describe changes associated with geographical displacement, for example, a gradual increase in individual size with increasing latitude. Clines arc examples of directional change recog2. T.A. Goudge, The A rcem of Life (Toronto: University of Toronro Press. 19(1 ) .

3. For example. M. Ginsberg, Moral ProgreJl, Fruer J..e P; for every j > i. Net progren does not require that every member of the sequence be better than all previous members of the sequence and worse than all its successors; it requires only that later members of the sequence be better 011 the average than earlier members. Net progress allows for temporary fluctuations of value. Formally, if the members of a sequence, nli are linearly arranged over time, net progress occurs whenever the regression (in the sense used in mathematical statistics) of p on time is significantly positive. Some authors have argued that progress has not occurred in evolution (or in human hisrory) because no matter what standard is chosen, fluctuations of value are always found to have occurred. This criticism is va lid agai nst the occurrence of uniform but not net evolutionary progress. Also, neither uniform nor net progress requires that progress cominue forever or that any specified goal be achieved. The raleof progress may decrease with time; progress requ ires o nly a gradual improvement in the members of the sequence. It is possible that a p rogressive sequence may tend asymprotically roward a finite goal, that is, continuously approach but never reach the goal. The distinction between un iform and net progress is similar but not identical to the distinction proposed between uniform and perpetual progress by CD. Broad and T.A. Goudge.4 Perpetual progress, as defined by Broad, requires that the maxima of value increase and that the minima do not denease with time. Using the symbols given above, Broad's perpetual progress requi res that for every Tn; there is at least one tn j (j>i ) such that Pi >P" and that there is at least one mk (k. < i ) such thaI p Wilson's views concern ing the penetration of biological concepts inro sociology and on the possible limitations that genetic factors may impose on the range of human behavior certainly call for criticism and debate; but I }6. Edward O. Wi lson , Sociob;%8)': The N ew Sym hesis (Cambridge, }'Ia~ ~. : H ar_ vard Uni,·ers iry Press, 1r. For some expert commemar)' and ni(i(is rn see the leners in Scitllctl, 211 ( 191:1 1): 649·56. In an)' case, regardl('ss "f tlH' proc('sses underlying pa.~( ('xtinc(ions, the disappea r. ance of great numbe rs of s peI (Moscow : Foreign Language Publ is hing House, 1947). p. 27 1

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that there are many very interesting things to be discovered on this scale. Rather, Fermi was expressing some confidence thac our present understanding of phenomena on this scale is accurate enough that any new discoveries will also fit easily into the picture we have and so will not really be so surprising. The statement is, therefore, as much one about the relation between theory and observation as about new discovery, and it is time that I turned to that aspect of progress in physics. Progress;n Theoretical UnderIta1lding The relat ion between progress in observing new phenomena and progress in theoretical understanding of physical phenomena can be illustrated by simple diagrams. At any time, physicists know of a cer· tain restricted set of phenomena, indicated by the areas with horizontal lines in Figure I. At the same time, the available physical theories are able to explain some part of these phenomena, but not all of them. These theories are indicated by areas with vertical lines in Figure I. Fig. I. Observation and Theory in Physics at Some Time

The ""explained·' phenomena are those represented by the intersection of the tWO circles. These theories also can account for yet undiscovered phenomena, indicated by the regions that have only vertical lines within the circles. In this snapshot of physics, I am ignoring possible inconsistencies between theories that are used to explain disparate phenomena. Such situations have occurred for some intervals, as in the panicle and wave pictures of light in the early twentieth century, but they tend not to last very long.

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The undiscovered phenomena predicted by theories at any time provide a direction fo r further progress in physics that is complementary to the unexpected new phenomena d iscussed above. As a result o f both of these types of discovery, if we take another snapshot of the state of physics at a later time, we would see something like thac in Figure 2. H ere some of the previously undiscovered but predicted Fig. 2_ Changes in Theof)' and Obscn'ation Over T ime

""...-- ....

phenomena have been found so that there is more overlap between theory and experiment. On the ocher hand , new phenomena nor encompassed by older theories have been discovered, which furnish a new challenge to theorists. Finally, theoretical advances have brought some know n hUI previously unexplained phenomena within bounds of understanding and have also led to prediCtions of still more undis· covered phenomena that can be sea rched for by experimental physi CIStS.

All of this is a kind of intellecrualleapfrog, in wh ich theorists and experimenters are constantly meeting one another·s challenges and also sening new problems for one another. At the same time, developments within theoret ical physics or within experimental physics induce progress in each subfieJd that is somewhat independent of what is going on in the other_ Examples of this laner situation were the development of experimental spectroscopy in the latter half of the nineteenth centu ry and the creation of general relativity theory in the early twentieth century. One measure of progress in physics is the extent to which the thi ngs that have been observed up to some given time are understood through the theories available at thar time. By that criterion, phys ics progresses when theoretical breakthroughs, such as quantum mechanics, are made, and that certainly agrees with the physicist·s intuition. However, the use of this criterion alone might also suggest that physics retrogresses when new phenomena, such as radioaCtivity, are discove red which do not fit into existing theories. That conclusion would certainly be counterintuitive. Therefore, there must be orher criteria by which progress can be said [0 occur in these circu mstances.

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Another such criterion for progress involves the logical union of those phenomena that have been observed and those that are implied by a set of theories that are both logically consistent and consistent with all observations that have been made up ro the time in question. This union represents the maximum set of phenomena that physicists have reason ro believe in at any given time. To the extent that there is an increase in either of the two components, progress has occurred. According to this criterion, theory and experiment operate somewhat independently. Experiments that confirm existing theories do not represent progress by this criterion, nor do theories that simply reproduce known observations. Only an extension of one aspa:t beyond the bounds of the other would be regarded as progressive. For example, the fact that Maxwelrs theory of elenromagnetism could interpret light as an electromagnetic wave was not progress in this sense. However, this theory did predict similar waves of different frequency, which were eventually observed by Hertz. The theory, therefore, was p rogressive in that sense whereas Hertz's confirmation of the theory was nOt. Of course, there can also be experimental discoveries that are inconsistent with existing bodies of theory. These discoveries show that something believed to be true was not true, and thus they can diminish the range of believable phenomena since all of the implications of the now discredited theories are discarded. Such discoveries do not represent progress by either of the criteria I have mentioned. Perhaps a further criterion involving the removal of erroneous views could cover this type of development, but I am not sure how to formulate that criteflon. The intuition that the second criterion of progress attempts to capture is that it is easier to make theories that account for known phenomena than it is to predict new phenomena correctly. Perhaps a similar intuition is behind Karl Popper's view that falsifiability is the essence of a proper physical theory . However, I think that Popper's view, and the second criterion I have described, underestimate the difficulty in making any theory that accounts for an existing body of observation. Espa:ially in a mature branch of science, in which there is a substantial "backlog" of knowledge, it is usually an intellectual feat to find any set of ideas from which this knowledge can be dt.oduced. That is why I think that at least twO separate criteria, rathe r than a single norian, must be used to judge progress. New ModeJ 0/ Exp/,malion One of the striking features of physics during its histOry has been the extent to which changes have been required in the type of theory that is acceptable as an explanation for phenomena. An early example was the shift from explanation in terms of innate properties of individual objC

isolate any gene in quantity , to study its function in a simplified environment, and to manufacture many desired products. A decade ago such a discovery would have been greeted solely as a remark::able breakthrough. In the current atmosphere, however, public discussion focused much more on the risk of inadvertently creating and releasing dangerous new organisms. This contingency was initially raised by a group of molewlar biologists. Their concern was very much in the tradition of responsible science. But they departed from tradition in one respect: perhaps in order to disprove the recent charge that scientists have been elitist in making decisions for the public, they expressed their concern publicly before they had timl' to explore the matte r extensively. Their candor was acclaimed initially, bur it soon gave rise to widespread public anxiety, particularly after a handful of other scientists raised an alarm. By now much of the apprehension has subsided. It may beof interest to summarize briefly the main scientific reasons, which I have reviewed elsewhere in greater detail. 4 ( 1) After severa l years of wo rk, in hundreds of laboratories, with such chimeric bacteria, the hazards have remained entirely conjectural: no illness or environmental damage has been traced to this source. (2) Mutant baCterial strains have been developed with a remarkable, novel safety fe ature: they require special nutrients that are lacking outside the laboratory. and without these compounds the cells rapidly self-destruct. (3) It has recently become dear that bacteria transfer DNA from one species to another promiscuously (employing, in fact , the same enzymes that investigators extract and use for in vitro recombination). This finding makes it extremely likely that the recombinants with human DNA now being made in the laboratOry wou ld not be a novel class of orga nisms after all, since E. coli in the mammalian gut would occasionally take up DNA released from dying host cells (as well as DNA from other bacterial ceUs ). (4) In nature novel mutantS are continually being generated, and only an infinitesimal fraction of these innovat ions pass through the sieve of natural selection and sutvive. Mon.'O ver, this survival depends not on the properties of a single gene bur on the adaptive value of a balanced set of genes; and insertion of DNA from a distant source, in the new technique, is almost certain to impair that balance. (5) Since {his insertion adds only about 0.1 percent to the DNA of the host E. coli, a recombinant will retain the mode of spread of E. coli and will be restricted to the habitat of that organism (the vertebrate gut ). Hence, epidemiological experience with pathogens closely related to E. coli is pertinent-and it is reassuring. Indeed, from the inception of the debate no expert in epidemiology or infectious disease supported the view that E. coli might inadvertently yield 4. Bernard D. Davis. "The Rew mbin am ON .... Scenarios: .... ndromeda Strain, Chimera, and Civlcm," Ameri,atl ScietlliJl, 65 (1977) : 5'17-55.

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recombinants as hazardous as the already known major bactcrial pathogens-organisms rhat have already been selected in evolution for rhe ability co spread, and that may rurn up in any diagnostic laboratory at any time. Moreover, though the history of microbiology includes several thousand laborawry infections, and a few microcpidcmics, no large epidemic of any pathogen has ever arisen from a laboratory , (6) Ironically, views on rhe possible spread of tumor virus genes by bactcria, which started the discussion, have rotated 180 degrees. Viral DNA cloned in bacteria, from which it can be released o nly as naked DNA , is over a million times leSJ infectious to an animal rhan the same DNA released from its narural animal cell host, as a complete viral particle with a protective coat . ~ Hence, an investigator can now prepare such DNA more safely in bacteria than by the conventional (and unregulated) methods in animal cells. (7 ) Since mild pathogens arc much more common than severe ones (for example, the common cold versus the influenza virus), it seems exceedingly unl ikely that a serious pathogen could be inadvertently produced without any warning. With these developments, and after a n enormous amount of discussion, public anxiety abated. The very real th reat of restrictive and even pun it ive legislation has been dropped, and the National Institutes of Heahh guidelines regulating this research have gone through twO successive stages of relaxation. But reason prevailed only after a great deal of time and money had been spent fighting exaggerated o r nonexistent dangers. Moreover, a large regulatory bureaucracy was set up. Starting on this slippery sl0lX' may be the greatest p r ice of all, unless the experience helps us to develop better mechanisms for evaluating risks in highly technical areas. For such bureaucracies not only are costly in time and money, and occasionally obstructive: their rigidity also inhibits the sense of playfulness and of artistic creativity that has characterized much of the beSt scientific research. TH E NEED FOR IMPROV ED ASSESSMENT OF POSSIBLY DANGEROUS ACTIONS

Concern over actions that might create dangerous materials is clearly legitimate in principle. Moreover, in practice scientists have had little trouble in agreeing with public agencies on regulations over demon strably dangerous materials-inflammable, explosive, coxic, or radioactive. Problems arise, however, when the h azards are matters of judgment more than of demonstrable fact. In both circumstances the assessment of the hazards is a technical job, beSt handled by those with the requisite special knowledge, while the subs(.'qucnt process of making policy should involve a wider group. 5. 1\1. A. Israel, H. W . Chan, M. A. Martin, and W. P. Rnwe, ··M()Ie Life Sciences, 1977); and in The H"J/inSI Cenle r Repo ~/, 6(6) (1 976): 32··10

1%

BERNARD

D . DAVIS

Bm a myth can promote communal cohesion only if it is widely enough accepted by the community. The Hapis could all believe in the power of the rain dance because their world view would not lead them to test it. In a modern, science·based society, in contrast, any testable assum ptio n or claim will inevitably be tested, and if it proves to be objectively fal se, it will be disputed. The expected communal cohesion then becomes dissension between rationalists and believers. (We need only note how Western religions have increasingly narrowed their jurisdiction, abandoning their earlier role of providing supernatural explanations in arcas now taken over by science.) Accordingly, however convenient it would be if everyone would ignore any questions of fact in the troubled area of heredity and intelligence, for the sake of peace and harmony, this simply cannot happen. Our society is tOO committed to the reality principle, at lellst in areas that bear on our bread-and-butter activities. And the question of the distribution of intellectual potentials arouses intense reactions prc 216

GERALD

H O LTON

thcmata he uses (even if he is sometimes vaguely aware of them, as when he notices that the concepts he works with are "theory-laden"). BUI the historian of science can chart the growth of a given {hema in the work of an individual scientist over lime and show its power upon his scientific imagination. Thematic analysis, then, is in the firsc instance the identification of the particular map of various rhemata which, like fingerprints, can characterize a scientist, or a pan of the scientific community, at a given time. lt can be shown that most of the themata are ancient and long-lived. Many come in opposing dyads or triads that show up most strikingly during a conflict between individuals or groups that base their work on op'posing themata. I have been impressed by the small number of thematic couples, or triads; perhaps fewer than fifty have sufficed us throughout the history of the physical sciences. And of course I have been interested to see that, cautiously, thematic analysis of the same sort has begun to be brough t to bear on significant cases in other fieJds. ' 9 With this conceptu:d tool we can return to some of the puzzles we mentioned earlier. Where does the conceptual and even emmional support come from which, for bener or worse, stabil izes the individual scientist's risky specularion and confident suspensions of disbelief during the nascent phase? The result of case studies is that choices and decisions of this sort are often made on the basis of loyal dedication to thematic presuppositions . Or again, if, as Einstein claimed, the principles are indeed free inventions of the human mind, should those not be an infinite set of possible axiom systems to which one cou ld leap or cleave? Virtually every one of these wou ld ordinarily be useless for const ructing theories. H ow then could there be any hope of success, except by chance ? The answer must be that the license implied in the leap to an axiom system of theoretical physics by the freely inventing mind is the freedom to make such a leap bur not the freedom to make any leap whatever. The freedom is narrowly circumscribed bY:1 scientist's particular set of themata that provides constraints shaping the style, direction , and rate of advance of the engagement on novel ground. And insofar as the individual sets of themala overlap, the so-called progress of the scientific commun ity as a group is similarly constrained or di[(~([ed. Otherwise, the inherenrly anarchic con notations of "freedom" could indeed disperse the total effort. As Mendcleev wrote: "Since the sciemific world view changes drastically nm only from one period to another but also from one person to another, it is an expression of creativity. . .. Each scientist endeavors to t ranslate the world view of the school he belongs to into an indisputable principle of 19. A brief survey uf thematic amllysis is providt>d in the Inuodunion and Chapter I of ("",raid H oll on, T he Scientific Imagination: Call' SrudieJ (Ne .... Yurk: u.mbridge Universi ty Press, (978)

Tou iJrd iJ T ht'O T)' 0/ 5ci ,

descroying that complex balance of incentives upon which efficiency and growth depend." None of these problems of growth and technology seriously troubles most of the Third World. Their demand for material progress, as Crawford Young argued in an earlier essay, tends TO be sustained, though there are intermittent traditionalist reactions. It is also true that the Third World has experienced significant economic growth on the average, with both striking successes and failures to show as a result of the last dCt::ades of effon. Hollis Chenery makes the point that many, perhaps mOSt , of the countries of the Third World reject the experience of the West, in which growth in the first part of the nineteenth century was accompanied by increasing inequality. Their demand is for growth with equitable distribution. That this is possible is demonstrated by the experience of such countries as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore. Growth successes such as those of Brazil and Mexico essentially benefit the upper-income groups. This leads Chenery to the conclusion that a simple per capita measure of national income is misleading, that we require a new method of computing economic growth weighted by the distribution of the growth in income among the various income groups. To estimate the prospectS for a significant alleviation of poverty in Third World countries in the next decades, Chenery and his colleagues prepared a simulation of growth and disrriburion over the next twenty years. It shows that the absolute number of poor defined by current criteria in the year 2000, assuming the continuation of current trends, would be at about the same level as in I %0, though the proportion of poor might drop frum 50 percent to 20 percent of the population in developing countries. A policy mix that would reduce poverty in rhe Third World is well understood; the problems are essentially of a political , social, and cultural order.

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[II

inadC<Juacy in food p roduction, and overcrowding. Brooks's ana lysis of various of these pred ictions would indicate th:H many of the concerns of the Mal thusians about this problem are overly pessimistic a nd based, in some cases, on somewhat si m plistic models of the future development s in technology. Brooks's analyses show that from the point of view of the previous history of technology, the pessimism of the Ma hhus ians is unwarranted. We can ant icipate improvements in. for example, recovery of mine ra ls from ores, recycling, and approprj· ate uses of energy, presumably frum nuclear sources and/ or solar ones. T he ques tion of environmental pollu tion is really three sepa rate problems: ( [ ) general chemical and radiaIion contam ination because of industrial and agricultu ral p ractices, (2) deter ioration of narural ecosystems because of the preemption of more land for human use, and (3 ) changes in g lobal climate because of the buildup of COl and/ or other general atmospher ic contamination. T hese consequences are all different in their causes, the intensity of their threats, and the degree to wh ich technology, careful social planning, and regulation can control their adverse effects. Brooks suggests that a great deal of concern arises from a gene ralized increa se in public sensitiv ity to some of these problems rather than fro m precise indications of rea l and immediate dangers. H e arrives at the same conclusion which pervades many of these essays concerning, on the one hand, rhe discrepancy between our technology and intellect ual achievements and the possibili t ies these offer for coping with our problems, and, on the other hand, the inadequacy of our pol itical and social skills to implement and uti lize these achievements for the common good. He points up, perhaps more than any other amhor, the political and cultural dilemma of modern society in which decisions regarding the application of te8A) ( 1976 ).

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certain COSt, provided sufficient energy is available, either through reOmic Growth, and World Population:· in Aialentll1. pp. 4 1·46; and H. E. Goeli er and Alvin Weinberg. "'The Age of SubstilOlabilil}':· in ibid., pp. 68-7). J l. Bnx, ks and Andrews, ··Mi neral Resources .. · 12. Ulrich Pete rsen and R. Sleven Max,,·ell, ··H istorical Miot'rol ProduCtion and Price Trends;· ,\lining Engineerillg, j anuary 1979, pp. 25-}4.

Ca/I TeclmQ/ogy AUllre Unending Alateri,,/ Prog ren ,'

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slowly accelerating price rise as declining grade or accessibility begins to outweigh technological improvements ; in this stage the search for substitute resources based on more abundant raw materials tends to be intensified in response to price competition. Petersen and Maxwell point out that most resources have barely entered the begi nning of the third phase as yet. Because of the tendency of resources to be more abundant and more widely distributed as are grade or geological accessibility dedines, the rising price phase tends to be prolonged. Th us, for example, Hafele and his colleagues have suggested the oil production will tend to reach a pl:1tt'au ex tending for as long as fifty years, with production from unconventional sources gradually replacing the declining production from conventional sources as production costs and prices gradually rise . Substitute energy sources are also necessary, of course, to meet rising consumption demands so that oil g radually will have to be replaced, but the necessa ry replace. ment rate may be much slower than wou ld be suggested by the con· ventional picture of a bcll·shaped produCtion curve for a finite resource which reaches a maximum as the resource is half deplered. 14 In addition to the effect described above on the production side, as an economy becomes more mature, its resource intensity, defined as the ratio of resou rce consumption to real gross domestic product (GOP), tends to go through a maximum and then decline. Thus, steel consumption per unit of GOP is abom half in the United States what it is in countries in an earlier phase of economic development. In Britain the ene rgy consumption to GDP ratio reached its maximum in 1880 and is now about half of what it was then-abou t the same as in 1800. For the United States the drop ha s been about 40 percent. Since these declines are due to advancing technology, the peak of energy and resource intensity in presentl y developing countries wil l tend to be reached earlier in their development and be lower than it was histor· ically in the countries which industrialized earlier; this is because the newly industrializing countries can take advantage of more recent technology and arc not condemned to retrace the steps of thedevelopcd countries. 111is latter point is well illus trated in the case of Japan, many of whose industrial processes arc 25 to 40 percent more energy· cfficient than comparable older installations in the Uniced Staces. l~ The resource picture outlim.-d above is supponcd by the hiscory of many mineral reservcs between 1950 and 1970. Reserves are defined

I'

13. Wolf H iifele, A. M. Khan, and H . H, Rogner, ··Geographi( DiversifY in Energy SuppJ)· and Demand:· invited paper, First Arab Energy Conference. Abu Dhabi. March 4-8, 1979. 14. See M. King Hubbe rt. ·'E nergy Resources,"' in Ref(Juf(;n J.lld ALm,ed. i'res mn Cloud (San Franc isco, Ca,: W. H . Freeman, 19(9). 1) , UmberlO Colombo and O. Bernardini. A Low Ellergy Grou'l h 2030 Scellll';Q and the Perspe(fh'es f or WnJefll Eu rope. r('porl prepared for the Commission of the European Communitie s, Panel on Lo w Ene rgy Growt h. July 1979.

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as the toral proven resource wh ich can be produced with eXIsrmg technology at e xi sting prices. The know n resource is already much larger than reserves, and there is also a large, undiscovered resource which can be inferred from general geological considerations. As te(hnolo~,'}' improves or prices rise, uneconomic known resources are converted into reserves while the resulting st imulation to exploration locates undiscovered resources which are ultimately convened into reserves. There is little economic incentive to generate reserves that represcnt more than ten to twenty years of supply at current rates of consumption. For oil and gas in the United States, the reserve-Io-production ratio is aoout tcn years whereas in the world as a whole it is around thirty years, largely because of the size of the Middle East oil fields. On the o ther hand, because of the extent of coal deposits, the reserve+tO-production rat io for coal is nearly fou r hundred years. During the 1950-1970 period, reserves of most minerals increased many times; in many cases the increase in rese rves was more than the cumulative production during the inte rvening period. The reserve increase ha s been a factor of forty-five in the case of phosphates , a factor of six in the case of oil, a fa ctOr of thirteen in the case of iron, and a facto r o f four in the case of aluminum. u~ When we compare d1e price of minerals to the earnings of labor during the twentieth cent ury , we find an even more dramatic result. A day's wages buys eigh t times as much copper in 1970a$ irdid in 1900, six t imes as much iron, neurly thirty-two times as much aluminum, and tcn times as much crude pet roleum-stil l more than twice as much of the latter even after the latest round of price rises. In the early 1970s a day"s wages cou ld buy six times as much residential electricity as in 1945 and ten times as much gasolineY Geologists have criticized this o ptimistic picture by pointing out that many resou rces do not exisr in a continuous gradation of are qua lity o r geological accessibility. The sim plistic idea of a smoothly a nd monotonically rising curve of abundance versus price is an economic abst raction that is not well supportcd by geological evidence, especially in the case of the lcss abu ndant minerals such as uranium, chrom ium , manganese, or mercury, for which we are dependent on ore bodies having more than one hundred times the average concentration of the clement in the earth 's crust . The favorite example of the economists is copper, which indeed docs appear to show a continuous distribution of ore grade versus abundance, but this seems to be not rhe most common case. IS Where there arc gaps in ore grade distribu16. Donald B. Ricf' t "( al. , GOI'e rnmell/ and the Na/ie .,·r ReJQur«(!1. R epo rt 0/ the NIltionlll Comm;Jj;,m ell Supplier Ilnd Shortllger (Washington. D.C : USGPO. 1976), esp. Chap. 2. 17. Ibid .• p. 19. 18. T here i5 slill signi ficant disag«"2.

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tion. 2~ Measurcmem of ground-water contamination from hazardous chemical waste dumps and some evidence of loca lized health cffects anributablc to hum an exposures from these dumps arc caken as further

warnin,!; signs.lOr cannot look forward to an annual increase of much more than 1 percent-even though rhe economy is growing at twO or three rimes that rate. Furthermore, there is nothing automatic about the improvement in distribution above S800, as shown by Mexico and Brazil.

The V4rietier 0/ Exper;ence Although acceptable time series data are available for only a dozen or so countries, they indicate a considerable variation around this average relation. Table I gives selected measures of overall growth a nd of the share going to the lower 60 percent for countries having observations for a decade or more. They arc divided into three groups according to the share of rhe increment in income goi ng to the poor. The five good performers show over 30 percent of the increment to the bottom 60 percent whereas the three poor performers show less than 20 percent. Whether distribution is gerring better or worse is indicated by compari ng these increments to the initial distribution and 11 . This analysis is adapted from MOnlek Ahluwalia, Nicholas Carter, and H ollis (henery, "Growth and Povl:'rtr in Develuping Countries,"' in SI1"1iCI1~rll/ Chllnge lind Development Po/icy. ed. H ullis (henery (Ntw York: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1979) Tht units are 1970 U.s. dollars of constant purchasing power, which in the poorest countrits are betwrt!n 2.5 and ) times the per upita inwme convened at official t xchangt rates.

'"

HOLLI S 6 . C HENERY

TABLE 1 Ch,mges in Income But, ironically, there is also much to be said against it from the same standpoint, particularly with reference to some negative effects it has had upon previous progressive developments. Consider the following points. First, in the classical conception , ··rhe law" was a comprehensive, 18. See Poggi, Del'elapment oj the Modem Slale, pp. 101·04. 19. The liabilities of juridical thinking in the oontext of advanced industrial societies are mostly related 10 the nature of its ultimale referents, normalive (as against cognitive) expcnations. See Niklas Luhmann, Ruhulaziolagie (Reinbek : R(lwohJI. 1972), I, 40fi; and N. Luhmann. ··Die We hgesellschaft ,·· in his Sazialagilch e A.I/· kliil'1mg 2 (Cologne: Westdeumher, 1975), pp. 51-7l.

'" gapless whole, a system where

GIANFRANCO POGGI

tout se Item. As such, it both reflected and sustained that basic acquisition of the process of consolidation of rule, the unity of the State. Again, as such, it was (as I ind icated ) the referent of a un itary, though ram ified, body of knowledge. Bur there is no comparable unity among the cognitive resources supplied to the state by nonlegal disciplines. One might say that today's state runs no longer on knowledge but on know ledges (compare the French sa-voir!) and that these are increasingly isolated from onc another. The much lamemed fragmenration of the state's administrative apparatus may be due in pan to the intrinsic incommensurability of the several bodies of nonjuridical knowledge which supposedly orient the activities of its units and subunits. $c{:ond, both the Continental donrineof the RechtJIlaat and the English doctrine of the rule of law presuppose (among ocher things) that the activity of state organs can be programmed "conditionally," that is, by stating general circumstances under which those organs must ca rry out certain measures; for this makes it possible ro monitor and correct a concrete cou rse of administrative action (or inaction) by checking its correspondence with the general program in question. instead, thc increasing reliancc on non juridical knowledge leads to administrative activity being programmed "by objective," that is, by assigning it a task and allowing it discretion in devising lines of action to that task. This may well be a (more) rational way of programming administrative activity; bur it displaces the traditional (and perhaps the only ?) way of binding and controlling its discrcrionality. In turn, this threatens the progressive requirements of objectivity and accountability in the operations of the stace.20 Finally, a related, negative effect of the reliance upon nonjuridical knowledge is that it downgrades the significance of lay judgment and thus assigns the citizenry the" role of passive, uncomprehending spectators (and perhaps beneficiaries ) even of state activities which affect them qu ite closely. Basically, a view of the political process as activated largely by high-grade inputs of specialized, scientific knowledge discourages citizens from entertaining and expressing opinions on political matters based only on their natural competencc for moral judgment. Such a delegirimation of cri tical, participant citizenship (and partisanship) is less likely when purely juridical knowledge is in question since law is man-made and ultimately embodies moral choice, amenable to persuasive argument and not to scientific demonstration. (Put otherwise, "There ought to be a law" is definitely citizen talk. "There must be a computer program" is not. ) The disruptive interferences between distinctive institutional embodiments of political progress do not all run onc way, later embodiments interfering with previous ones, bur also the orher way around. 20. See

Ren~te

1973), Chap. 4.

Ma)·ntz and Frit z Scharpf, P/4"""glo rg,milll/iool (Munkh: Piper.

17 Progress and Public Policy AARON WI L DAVSKY

In the 1960s America fell in love with the Rachel of social reform and found itself instead married ro the Leah of big government. She was bigger, but she wasn't bener. It proved more inspiring ro long after the unobtainable object ives of giam governmemal programs than to wonder if they were worth having. Overinfatuated with the good they sought to do, Americans overemphasized tbe evil they had done. The idea of progress in public policy was, if not speedily seduced and abandoned, at least slowly suspended, if nm discarded. Unrequited love easily rurns on its object. Along the way, cha racteristic American optimism was subjen to severe shock. Retrogression rather than progress became the expectation. Why ? Americans were bener educated, more talented,a nd richer in human and material resources than ever before. Their sense of socia l justice, though far from perfen, was certainly sharper than in earlier times. Challenged m pur up or shur up, they opened [heir coffers so wide as to shame a Croess us. Where, in {he early sixties, defense took up some 45 percent of the federal budget and social welfare programs around 20 percent, a scant decade later these proportions and priorities were radically reversed. Relativel y and absolutely, social welfare, from food stamps to Medicaid to Social Security, loomed larger o n the government horizon. For [hose who doubt [he relative decline in defense spending, sec Figure 1, whose statistics are clear and convincing. Why, then, were n't we-the-people happy? Why did we recoil from our fondest hopes, damning what we had so earnestly desired ? Actually This essay was wrinen upon reflecting o n the implications of doctrin es of progress. as discussed by the other contributors to this volume. on my understanding of deve!opments in public poli cy; Set' my Speaking Truth to Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).

"',

The Modem Slal(.' (md the Idea 0/ Progreu

359

In particular, during the process of functionalization of rule, the bureaucratic model, originally associated with its rationalization, has preserved its influence upon the state's organizational patterns, with particularly damaging effects in the twentieth century. The bureaucratic preference for hierarchy and vertical communication, the bureaucratic strategy of constructing for each line of activity a distinctive, permanent unit, with an establishment of its own enjoying secure employment and protected career expectations and viewing the size of its budget as its maximand, and a "passion for secrecy"-these legacies of eighteemh- and nineteenth-century orga nizational thinking, first emOOdied in the early ministerial apparatus, have played havoc in the context of a state seeking to perform more and more functions on behalf of a more and more complex, changing, and "demanding" society_ The persistence of bureaucratic organizational patterns is largely responsible for the most visible and lamentable trends in the structural configuration of the contempora ry state apparatus: its sprawling gigantism, its fragmentation, and what could be called its introversion, that is, the tendency of each unit, subu nit, and subsubunit to expend most of its energies in purely internal concerns rather than in anending to its original functional assignment . Gigantism, fragmentation, and introversion, in turn, largely accou nt for two massive phenomena which impede the effective functionalization of rule to the society's welfare: the costliness of the state apparatus, and the tardiness and inefficiency of irs mode of operation. In my view, consideration of both phenomena should cou nterbala nce the tendency, in much contemporary literature, to account for current difficulties mainly by reference to the magnitude, urgency, and incompatibility of societal demands. It may be noted that this last interpretation, though often advanced to "cool"' some expectations placed on ,he state by progressive opinion, overlaps in fact with a panicular line in progtessive thinking, to the effect that the chief difficulry in the program of fun crionalizing rule lies in the essentially divided nature of society itself-for only a thoroughly unified society can be effectively and coherently served in its entirety. A radical version of th is line of thinking goes on to suggest that the norian itself of rule presupposes a div ided society; that, therefore, the ultimate progressive target is the unification of society and, by the same token, the Ulppreuiol2 0/ rtlle. A few concluding remarks are in order concerning this radical argument, which is of cou rse best represented by Marxian thinking about the state. 21 2 1. 1 am rrfrrring exclusively to Marx 's own Ihinkingon Ihr Slate (as [rrad that thinking, of coursr ). Wh alevrr its justification, and its happy and unhappy outwmes, the o rientation pragmaticalI)· pursurd vis-a-v is Ihr Slalr by Marxist panies, bOlh in the Wrsl and in thc East. is a ,"rTY different matlrT. For a Tf"CCnt commentary on thr

,60

G [ANFRANCO POGGI

The Marxian demand for the suppression of rule stands in a line of legitimate succession co [he three phases of progressive thinking about rule we have discussed. Its legitimacy in this sense is suggested, if not proven , by rhe fact chat the demand in question echoes the original aversion from politics of progressive thinking and, to thac extent, represents a return to its roots. However, whether authentically progressive or not, onc may wonder whether the position in question is correctly argued and whether the suppression of rule is feasible. There probably is a logical connection between a divided society and the phenomenon of rule. It is also plausible that a divided society cannOt be served (politically or otherwise) as a whole. However, Marx erred in seeing class interest as ultimately the sale significant cause of a divided society. His emphasis on economic antagonisms must be complemented by an insight best articulated by the so-called Machiavellian tradition, to the effect that whatever its relation to other social divisions, rule itself divides societ)'. In and of itself, the possession of or exclusion from faculties and facilities of rule generates contrasting interest orientations between the respective groups. Indeed, any attempt at unifying society centered exclusively on its economic processes might well, paradoxically, reinforce the asymmetry and antagonism resulting from the increased significance of rule. Machiavellian thinking disassociated itself from the progressive tradition by treating the phenomenon of rule as not only autonomously significant bur also as utterly inevitable and as virtually unmodifiable. n To me, the succession (to use once more the terminology introduced above) of consolidation, rationalization, and functionalization of rule, in spite of all attendant limitations , difficulties , and setbacks, suggests that thete can be (there has been) such a thing as "progress in politics." True, its achievements have so far been mixed, less permanent, and less radically innovative than one might have wished. But they have been substantial enough to establish that enlightened purpose can exercise some positive leverage even upon a phenomenon as dangerous as that of rule. fateful mutual implkation of 5O(;jalism and the stale. .\.ee Evan Luard, Socia/ism Wilho,1t the State (London: Macmillan. 1979). Pari L 22. See Vilfredo Pareto's sarcastic reference 10 the nm ion of ""rule of law" (or, ralher, RechUlIaat. o r "Sl3to di dirino," in Italian) : "I apologize to the reader for not defining this beautiful entity, bUI all my searches have fa iled to locate ii, and I would as soon dt'Kribe the Chimera"; Trattato di loci%giol genera/e (Mi lan: Comunit;i, 1%4), p. 6}2, par. 2182.

362

AA II. ON

WllDAVS I< Y

Fig. I. Growth in Federal Government Spending ••••••• TOtal defense spending - - - - - Total non-defense spending - - - - Total federa l spending as a percentage of GNP

" ~ 20

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G_ BINGHAM PO WELL , JR .

later, in the 1870s, only Francc and Switzerland could claim broad manhood suffrage among the European nations. Not until after the First World War could one point to some twenty nations, including most of the industrialized ones, having representative assemblies holding major IXllitical IXlwer and elected by most of the adult male IXlpulation,8 Second, it is obvious in the early discussions of American democracy that the founders believed that effective citizen control would require an informed and attentive citizenry, juSt the son of citizenry that prOIXlnents of social progress like Condorcet were expecting to emerge everywhere, Despite the many false starts and doomed hopes and despite the widespread condemnation by many progressive thinkers of juSt those new institutions of interest groups and political parties that were to prove essential in linking citizens and rulers in modern democratic societies, the nineteenth century found the pressures for increased popular involvement in political life inexorable, The processes of scientific, technological, economic, social , and rultural change carried with them an impetus for popular legitimation of governmcnt. The breakdown of traditional rultural and religious bases of authority, the increase in education and literacy, the growth of the belief that men can conttol their fate and act to improve their cirrumsrances, the need of governments to expand their activities and extract greater resources from their citizens in order to cope with domestic changes and intetnational threats-all these drove leaders in the countries achieving early modernization to increase [he levels of citizen involvemcnt.9 Experimentation and international example, as well as ad hoc response to domestic pressure from the new groups whose cooperation was essential for national growth and stability, led to the creation of representative assemblies with growing powers and the spread of the suffrage. to with the da ta a nd a nalysis of J R. Pole, Politic,,1 RepTeJenlalio'l ;'1 E'lg/"nd "lid the Orig;m 0/ the A merica" RepliMic ( N ew York: SI. Mar!;n·s Press, 1%6). The suffrage la ws uf each S1:1 tC "'crc madc thc basis uf el igi bil ity for vOl ing in Cong rcssional elections in lhe run sti lution uf 1787. 8. My uwn analysis suggests tha1 e vcn ignoring thc qucsliun of womcn·s suffrage, thc rc wc re unl)' abom nine democracies among 1he funy-e ight nations in 1902, 1wCnty,t wo democracies amo ng the S;x1)'· four independent na1io ns in 1920, 1we my> onc dcmocraci cs a mung lhc six ly- five natiu ns in 1929- 1930, thi rt), de mocracics among lhe 121 natio ns in 1960_Th is ana lysis dra ws upon .... rt hur Banks, Crou· Po/ily Time Series D~la (Ca mbridgc, Mass.: MIT P re5s , 1971 ), for est imates of thc selection bases and effecti\'eOl'sS of legislaturcs aoo upon a variel), of sourccs for cSli males of clectora l suffragc , espe.:ially Ste in Ro kka n, "Mass Su ffrag c, Secret V01ing, and Political Panic;· pa tiu n," Arthi,:es Ellropee" de Soci%gie, 2 ( 1%1 ): 132· 52; and Thom as T. Mackiea oo R ichard Ruse , The Inte rnalio .,aI A lmanac 0/ Electo ral HiJlory (New Yurk: Free P ress, 1974). 9. See Rukkan, "Mass Suffragc"; a nd Stcin Ro kka n, Citizem, Electio" J, amJ Part ies (Nc w Yo rk: D av id McKay , 1970), fur d iscussion of mass suffrage. 10. See Pe tc r Gerlich, "Th e InS1 itu tio nalizatio n of European Parli amcnts: · in Alla n

379

These nincteemh- and ea rly nvcmierh-cemury experiences seemed offer powerful empirical support for each of the strands in the idea of an association of social progress and democracy. Those nations attempting democratic government without a basis of social progress, as in Latin America, seemed foredoomed to instability and failure . II Those nations achieving substantial progress seemed to be driven toward democratic government, whose workings in practice then seemed to help keep leaders in check and press government toward progressive reforms. Taken together, these experiences seemed to weave the two distinct strands of "progress and democracy" into a single, tight fabric of liberal thought. Moreover, the pracrical experience with representative democracy in action also made visible, at least to the most clear-sighted observers, the essential role of political panies in organizing alternatives for the electorate and in aggregating enough of the diffuse political resources to make it possible to formu late, choose, and sustain public policies for citizens to evaluate. In his comparative study of six democracies, James Bryce observes quite matter of factly that parries are indispensable for democracy ro work in praCtice and ro link the inevitable "ol igarchic" specialization of policy making and governing with the general choosing of policy orientation preferred by citizens: to

To begin with parties are inevitable. No free large country has been without them. No one has shown how representative government could be worked without them. They bring order out of the chaos of a multitude of vOters .... So few people think seriously and steadily upon any subject outside the range of their own business interests {hat public opinion might be vague and ineffective if the party searchlight were not constantly turned onP Although more elegant formulations of the logic of competitive democracy have been developed since, most nmably those of Schumpeter, Dahl , and Downs, l) the basic consolidation of a modern image of democratic government, in theory and practice, seems to have been achieved in the 1920s and its place, implicitly and explicitly, in the vision of "progress" settled. Works by various social theorists in the subsequent decades have continued, despite some serious challenges to democra'}' (discussed belo w) to ncsh out these images. Kornberg, ed .. Legi1/~/u rts i'l Compa roJli l'c Pcr,pC(lil'C (New York: Da,lce: /I C~oss· N"lion,,1 UtUS"! /lnal· pi, (New York: Wi ley, 1973 ), pp. \86·S7.

50(411 Prog ress and Ube ral Dem ocracy

387

certainly found evidence, as have others, that outcomes of elections and parcy coalition formation in the developed countries had impact on public policies. n For example, the presence of a leftist government in power was associated with increases in the size of government revenue as a percentage of gross national product (GNP) between 1960 and 1970, with increased role of income taxCS as a percentage of GNP in the same period, and with liberalism of national abortion policy in 1970. These relationships between democratic political outcomes and policies hold among the eighteen industrialized democracies even after taking account of relative wealth, the religious make-up of the population, and the nacure of the parcy sys tem. H But it is very difficult to make acceptable comparisons between democracies and nondemocracies. The beSt studied area is th at of economic growth . Bergson·s careful analysis of investment and growth of the Sovict bloc nations and the almost entirely democratic nations of the Organization for Economic Coclperation and Development (O£CD) in the 195Q; and 1960s suggests some advantage to the latter, although there were wide variations within each type.H Among the nations at similar economic development levels , the OECD nations did somewhat better in growth, bur not significantly. However, they were able to achieve their growth with lower levels of investment, suggesting more efficient production and less consumer sacrifice to yield the same outcomes, (These results hold if we exclude nondemocratic OECD nations. ) The beSt performer in all respects was Japan. Bergson's results do nor necessarily demonstrate the superiotity of democracy as a system, even under the limited condition of the 1950s and 1960s, as the primary contrast is between centrally controlled economies ·and market-oriented economies, not between regime types. But they are at least encouraging. Among poorer nations, C. H. Huang's recent analysis suggests only slight and not significant differences between democratic and nondemocratic countries in average economic growth rates in the 1960s and early 197Q;, although democracy and higher degrees of competition were associated with greater use of inflationary policies)'; Examinations of income inequality patterns are also inconclusive. 32. Po well. Coml!mpo ra f)' Dam ocrllcicJ, Chap. 9; and 5(.'(' Edward R. Tufte, Political ComrQI 0/ the Enmomy (Princemn, NJ.: Princemn Universicy Pr~ss, 1978), and the studies cited therein. H. Powell, ibid., Chap. 9. }4. Abram Strgson, ·'Development UnderT",'oSystems: Comparative Productivity Grnwth Since 1950:· W orkJ PolitiC!, n (jul)' 1971 ): 579-617. 35. Chung-Hsiou Huang, ··Democracy. Competition, and Development: The Polit ical Economy of Inflation and Growth in [)e\"eloping Countries:· Ph.D. disserratiun, Uni\'ersicy of Rochester, 1979. Chap. 4. My comparison of thirty-fuur nondemocracies and twelve democracies also shows identical median raIl'S of growth in gross domestic product per ca pita 1968-1973 acrording to data in the World Bank, W orld T"bles 1976 (Washington, D.C: Wo rld Bank, ]976). (Thisromparison ~xdu des majoroil produ(Cers.)

388

G.

BINGHAM

POWEll, JR.

Among the poorer nations there seems to be no significant relationship between the income share going to the lower 40 percent and whether or nor the nation had a democratic regime, once onc comrols for level of economic development. Among the somewhat bener-off countries, the communist nations for which data are available (as they are not for the U.S.S.R.) give a larger proportion to the lower 40 percent of citizens than the noncommunist countries, which are primarilydemocracies.36 However, the large sh ares extracted by the government sector and the lack of citizen control over these expenditures, as well as the absence, at least until recently, of production response to consumer spending demand, limit the implications of such equality forutiJization in pursuit of the indiv idual's own ·desires. Moreover, the communist nations have patterns of political privilege and welfare inequality that do not show up in such statisticsY Within the developed democracies, the presence of political parties expressing clear-cut class groups seems a powerful factor in shaping redistributive policies) H Perhaps the absence of such panies in most of the poorer nations, along with fi scal constraints, helps explain the lack of democratic impact on redistributive policies there. One relevant set of studies does point Out that military regimes are more likely to spend more of their income on "defense"; ~? other studies indicate chat defense spending is often at the cost of welfare expenditures. 4o In summary, it seems that the democratic regimes have a clear advantage in the promotion and maintenance of citizens' liberry and security and, perhaps, in containing domestic violence. There are, however, few systematic differences between the performance of democratic and nondemocratic regimes in terms of welfare policies. Economic growth levels are sim ilar, as best one can judge, and regime type is not the major factor shaping them , despite some inflationary tendencies among democracies. The communist systems probably do better in the income share going to the lower-i ncome groups but sharply constrain the usc of that income. Among poorer nations, regime rype has apparen tly little impact on equality. Although exploration of differences between types of nondemocratic systems might reveal more suggestive patterns, the overall expectation that democratic regimes would promote greater citizen economic welfare is nOt 36. Calculated from data in H ullis Chenery el aI. , Redin riblltion with Growth (New York: Oxford Unive rsity Press, 1974), pp. 8-9. 37. See the diS(Ussion in Almond and Po .... ell, Comparative Po/itics, pp. 324ff. ; aod set' John M. Echols, "Does Communism Mean Greater Equality ?" paper delivered at the 1976 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 2-5, 1976. 38. Harold Wilensky, The lYle/fare Stale a'id Equ../iIY (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Powell, CQnlempQr~f)' DemO&falic Performance, Chap. 7. 39. Eric A. Nordlinger,Soldiers in Po/ilia: MililaryCoJiP s lind Go~'ernm ent (Englewnud Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, L977), pp. 66·68, L66-70. 40. Wilensky, The We/fa re Slate.

389

Social Prog ress Ilnd Llbe rlll DemocTIl"

supported. Yet, it is worth nocing, given the contemporary doubts, that even in poorer countries the democratic regimes do nOt perform significantly worse, on average, than their authoritarian counterparts. The evidence for the association of progress and democracy in the past twenty years, then , finds that social progress seems to contribute to sustaining democracy; democracy contributes to sustaining liberty and security, but its impact on social welfare varies widely. CONTEMPORARY DOUBTS ABOUT DEMOCRACY

The empirical record, although mixed, tends to be consistent with the broad theoretical argument for the associat ion of democracy and prog~ ress. Yet we are beset with doubts about democracy. A number of writers , from many points of view, have predicted its forthcoming demise, in one form or another. Granted that democracy has always had its critics, even at the high point of its poSt- World War I triumph, it is notable that some of the present-day criticism and concern is coming from social critics and theorists who have long been defenders of the democratic faith. At least one line of thought seems to predict that anOther fundament al trans formation of the idea that progress and democracy arc associated is going to be forced upon us. To understand these doubts and their implications for the idea of progress, it is useful to classify the different doubts about democracy in terms of their relationship to expcnations about progress. Figure I presents an analytical classification of the doubts about democracy that have received some prominent recent expression. The Fig. I. A Typology of Contemporary Doubts About Progress and Democracy Progress and Democracy Assumed to Be: Positively Related

§"

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Progress Is Failing:

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So Will

International, Cultural, and H istorical Factors Predominate in Sustaining Both Progress and Democracy

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" lde"ze ideologiche e poliri.he d#i giova"i;n ;Ialia (Mi lan: Valentino Bompiani, 1974), p. 65. 33. Abraham Maslow, ;\IOlil'alion a,uJ PIJ~JO naIiIJ (New York: H arper, 1 9~4) . YI. Jean Knutson, The Human fJdJil 0/ the Polity (ChiCllgo: AJdine. 1972). p. 86.

Changing Popular Auilutills Tou'ard Progreu

417

It would seem that societies therefore should exhibit patterns of needs reflcrting their levels of socioeconomic development and ability to meet the variety of psychic needs of their populations. We note that the latter mayor may nOt be dosely related to the former . We further nOte that it is not only national means that are important but also the pattern of distribution of needs throughout the population. An elite dominated by self-actualizers should behave quite differently from one containing large numbers of individuals with unmet lower-order needs, even if general population means are simi lar. It should also be pointed our that the fulfillment or satiation of a need does nor mean its abandonment bur only that it recedes from prominence and is replaced at the tOp of the ranking by other, more pressing concerns. The well-fed do not lose their interest in food , but they cease to be obsessed by it-unless driven by childhood deprivation-so that they rank other needs higher. Let us admit that the empirical evidence for the existence of the need hierarchy, at least in the neat pattern laid OUt above and in the works cited above, is at beSt ambiguous. It "makes sense," bur its existence has not been empirically demonstrated in an incontrovertible fashion. One major study found thar all needs tended to be met together) ~ The thorough review inJean Knutson's Human Basis of t he Po/it)' explicates the theory itself but docs not attempt to disconfirm it. Perhaps, like other grand theories, the need hierarchy theory is useful to suggest middle-range theories but is not itself direct ly testable. Maslow's need hierarchy has inspired a theory of value-change in advanced industrial society articulated by Ingleh art in work first reo ported in 1971 and developed further in later works.)6 lnglehart argues that the affluence of the past generat ion has joined with the expansion of higher education to increase greatly the percentage of the population high on the need hierarchy. He does not label these people self-acrualizers, and he did not originally set out to test Maslow's need hierarchy as suchY Rather, inspired by Maslow, Inglehart devised a method for separating those high from those Iow an the hierarchy through a battery of questions that tap respondents' ranking of the priorities attached to a series of national goals. ' s Those who choose 3~ .

Erik Allardl. Abnul Dimtlm;nm 0/

If'tI'/,,,.,,

(H e lsi nki:

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Companuive Sodolugy, 19H). 36. For examplc, sec the fullowing by Ronald Inglcharl: "The Silent Rcvolution in Europe: Imcrgcn.er.nio nal Changc in PO$t·lndustrial Societics," AmeN'"'' Polilical Science Revie w, 65 (De1 Politic,,1 S,;eoue Ret·jew, 73 (March 1979) :

2HH6.

420

S AMUEL H.

IJAMNES

nation of generation and lineage differences. 4J The results show that there are minimal differences of either eype between parents and children. There is no support for generational conflict theories: "Simi_ larity within the family is far more frequent than disagreement. "44 Thus , continuity be('.vcen generations also reduces the likel ihood of rapid alterations in the patterns of value cha nge : posrmarcrialists simply exhibit in a purer o r morc extreme form tendencies present in their parents. We must nOt negle.r of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1973). p. 16 1. \"0J.

Coweplions o/ Ihe Sel/ in "II Age 0/ Prog re.u

439

To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in thei r beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature; and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal, Hellen ism, and human life in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what we call sweerness and light. Difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationalness of the ideal have all our rhoughrs. H In such a passage, as we move ahead in the dialectic of discourse we have been reconstructing, we can make out the first contradictory part of the hypothetical character type giving way to a refined, attenuated, and hypertrophied version (in part) of the second, although it does not quite recognize itself as such. Arnold himself was intermittently aware of such contradictions, both in terms of the dominant character type and of the larger social and cultural contradiccions of which they were in some measure refractions, And he proposed to deal with them by a deliberate process of distancing: It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect acrion which I am

thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work, Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism, The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them, On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying (hat whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by t his small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of pracrical life will always have a dizzying and amaccing effect upon [he most collected spectacor, and tend to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself CO the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service.9 Arnold's contribution co the classical humanist tradition in its modern phase was decisive; there are few of us who have not in one way or another been touched by it. But it is no discredit to him to say that 8. Mal[he .... Arnold. CNltNre lind A.u.rch)', \'01. 5 of The Complele Prose Wor.tl oj Matthew Arnold. ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Universi ty of Michigan Press, 1%5), p. 167. 9. M3l[he .... Arnold, "The Functio n o f Criticism at the Present Time," in U!CINrtll a.'" Ersa)'s in Crilicil m, \'0 1. 3 of The Complele Prole Workl 0/ Mililhew Arnoid, ed. R.H . Super (Ann Arbor: Uni\'ers icy of Michigan Press, 1% 2), pp. 274·75.

440

STEVEN ", ,, R eus

we can now see that it was a holding action, that it brought time and space within the prevailing social order for certain protected and privileged kinds of thought and behavior, and that it has not prevailed. The next major figure in the tradition, I shall have to address with shameful brevity. John Ruskin began as a disciple of Carlyle, a conventionally religious evangelical Christian, and a criric of paiming and architecture, who believed in the redemptive power of an as well. H e believed that an appropriate response to and appreciation of art and a rchitecture were in a society inseparable from sound public behavior, morality and justice, and he strove in his writings to amend and correct public taSte in the hope of establishing social and moral deliverance in his own time. Despite his great success with a large public, he was dissatisfied, since his prophetic utterances seemed to be going unheeded. By the mid-1850s he had lost his faith in dogmat ic religion, turned away from writing about an, and began to write a series of brilliant critical denunciations of political emnomy, the industrial capitalist syStem as it was functioning at the time, and the styles of life and of self of the dominant middle class . Redemption and transcendence could now only be achieved by direct interventions into the social and economic order itself although Ruskin was never altogether consistent about what those intervent ions should be or how they might take place. I can think of no more dramatic demonstration of the contradictions that I have been referring to than this eruption and about-face. These writings of Ruskin were greeted, not surprisingly, with a storm of outrage and abuse. But Ruskin went even funher. He tried to put these twO different tendencies tOgether in a series of writings and social experiments that he sponsored and paid for , in which the transcendent powers of an were to be combined with effons at social restoration. These noble Rrojecrs were not merely contradictOry; they soon revealed that they were incoherent, and Ruskin himself, a member of the bourgeoisie in England (his father was a wealthy wine merchant), whose Protestant ethical side was overdeveloped to the point of deformation and who was tOrmented by personal as well as cultural demons, lapsed into general incoherence and then into the silence of deranged mental powers. An astute foreign observer had been taking note of these developments. "I have been reading the life of Thomas Carlyle:' he writes: this unconscious and involuntary farce ... Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes ... constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it. ... The craving fo r a strong faith is no proof of a Strong faith, but quite the COntrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of skepticism . ... [In Carlyle there is} a constant passionate dishonesty against himself-that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of coutse, in England he is admi red precisely

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for his honesty.,., At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one, The foreign observer continues his observacions about his VictOrian contemporaries: They are rid of the Christian Goo and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality, That is an English consistency, . , . In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably aweinspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith , one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet . This morality is by no means self-evident. ... Christianity is a system. . . . By breaking one main concept Out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary rcmains in onc's hands . . When the Engl ish actually believe that thcy know "i ntuitively" what is good and evi l, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantec of morality, we merely witness the e//eCJI of dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the streng th and depth of this dom inion, . , . For the English, morality is not yet a problem. to The inim itable ferocity , superiority and hyperbole of tone and state· ment belong, of course, to Nietzsche, and the passages I have just cited come from The Twilight 0/ the Idols, whose subtitle is How One Ph;/oIophizeI with a Hamm er. It was written in 1888, the last year of Nietzsche's sane life. In it, Nietzsche is saying that the entire development that I have synoptically and inadequately recounted was misconceived, misbegotten, and corrupted from the very beginning; that the entire Victorian effort to find other and alternate centers of authority and value when the one supreme transcendent value had absconded was cowardly and farcical. What he, even in his genius, fail s to see is that this very effort constitutes part of the abiding interest and value (as well as the limitations) of the central Victorian figures. What he fails ro see as well is the sociocultural element, the element of class, in these inrellectual goings-on. For all of these crea tivecritical figures were ind ividual members of thc middle class or bourgeoisie, who addressed that class from within its social and cultural order. If their careers and writings embodied the cross-purposes of that order and the strains of what it was like to be an individual within it, those writings were also directed toward their fellow members of the middle class. Such works were as oftcn as not fiercely critical of the audience they were written for, and one of the singular ci rcumstances 10. Fried rich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the /dolI, in The Portable NielZuhe, ed. and trans. Walte r Kaufmann (New Yo rk: Viking Press. 19H), pp_ 521, 515· 16.

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in all of this is chat these writings were actually read; they were a((ended to, responded to, they even may be said to have exerted an influence on the middle-class readers who were the objcn of their critical intentions. What Nietzsche also fails to see is that other developments were going on. These developments represent two distinct and coherent branchings out from the mainstream of critical discourse that we have been tracing. The first of these is to be found in the life and work of William Morris. Morris begins as a disciple of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold. He starts out as a Pre-Raphaelite, moves on to restore ancient buildings, founds the Kelmscon Press, designs books, c1orh, and furniture of preindustrial integrity, and becomes a leader in the effort to design a new style of civilized individual life within a vulgarized, ugly, and industrialized capitalist world. Bur he also does something else ; he becomes a socialist, reads Marx, and goes on to become a revolutionary communist. This succession, integral and consequent as it is, represents the firs t structural break in the discussion , the first stepping outside the boundaries in which the discourse had been contained. It represented a new conception of the relation of classes, offered a new group of notions of what an individual person within society might be or become, and, above all, held Out the hope, to be realized in the revolutionary future , of a recaptured transcendence, a redeemed humanity, and an impeccable moral authority external to ourselves here on earth. The second development had occurred some years before and was incidentally connected with the first. In 1868 there appeared in the W eIlminiJter R eview a review essay of three volumes of William Morris·s early poetry. It divided itself into two parts- the first was an intelligent appraisal of the works under discussion; the second was a kind of tacked-on conclusion, which does not really derive from what has come before. H ere are some extended passages from that concluding section of the review: To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without--our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals- the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natu ral elements to which science gives their names? .. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them-the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and soundprocesses which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the acrion of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far our on every side of us these elements are broadcast, driven by

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443

many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are bur a few our of ten thousand resulting combinations. That clear, perpetual oudine of face and limb is bur an image of ours under which we group rhem-a design in a web the aCtual threads of which pass OUt beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is bur rhe concurrence renewed from moment to moment of forces parting sooner or lateran their ways. Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame mote eager and devouring. . . . At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp, importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflection begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence, the cohesive force is suspended like a trick of magic, each object is loosed into a group of impressions, colour, odour, texture, in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell on this world, not of objeCts in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering , inconsistent, which burn , and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further, the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the indjvidual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that, which we can only conjecture to be without. Everyone of those impressions is the impression of an individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step further still, and tells us that those impressions of the individual to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight ; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also, all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleering, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines irself down. It is with the movement, the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off, rhat continual vanishing away, that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. Such thoughts seem desolate at first ; at times all the bitterness of life seems concentrated in them. They bring the image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed pass into new com· binations. Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment. The service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as well, to

STEVEN MARC US

the human spirit, is to stanle it into a sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea is choicer than the rest ; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and amactive for us for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given co us of a variegated, dramatic life. H ow may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How can we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two things, persons, situations-seem alike. While all melrs under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution ro knowledge that seems by a lifted. horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend . Not to discriminate every moment some passionate att itude in those about us and in the brilliance of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is on this short day of frost and sun to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing opinion and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte or of Hegel or of our own. ... The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot entet, or some abstract morality we have nOt identified with ourselves, or what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us .... Well. we are all condamnes. as Victor Hugo somewhere says: we have an interval and then we cease to be. Some spend th is interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in an and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the "enthusiasm of humanity." Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of an for an's sake, has most; for art comes to you profess ing frankly to give nothing but the highest

Conceptions of the Self

ill 1111

Age 0/ Prog rtm

quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. II These passages, with omissions, were reprinted in 1873 as the conclusion to Pater's The Renaiuance: Studin in Art a11d Poetry. Pater was, I should hasten to add, a disciple of Arnold and Ruskin. He also, it seems, did nOt quite realize what he had written, and as a result of the clamor these pages aroused, he dropped the seaion from the second (1877) edition of the work because, as he said, "it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall." And when he did restore the conclusion in later editions, he progressively modified its wording so that its force was diluted and weakened. In any event, and nevertheless, the cat had been let Out of the bag, and we can appropriately regard these pages as the spe.

Th e Anllnul the Idea of Progreu

45'

always the same, the first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and left nothing to those that followed them, but tran· scription of the same events, and new combinations of the same images. Whatever be the reason, it is commonly observed that the early writers arc in possession of nature, and their followers of art: that the first excel in strength and invention, and the latter in elega nce and refinement. ' When Johnson comments on Pope's translation of the Iliad of Homer in his "Life of Pope" 0779-1 78 1), he seems, like a proper neoclassicist, to be leaning more heavily toward the advantages of the progress which has led to the civilized moderns: There is a time when nations emerging from barbarity, and falling into regular subordination, gain leisure to grow wise, and feel the shame of ignorance and the craving pain of unsatisfied curios ity. To this hunger of the mind plain sense is grateful; that which fills the void removes uneasiness, and to be free from pain for a while is pleasure; but repletion generates fastidiousness , a saturated intellect soon becomes luxurious, and knowledge finds no willing reception till it is recommended by artificial diction. Thus it will be found in the progress of learning that in all nations the first writers are simple, and that every age improves in elegance. One refinement always makes way for another, and what was expedient to Virgil was necessary to Pope .~ From Homer to Virgil to Pope, johnson is apologizing for the loss of Homeric qualities by praising those which Pope has substituted from his later vantage point. In what may seem to be an enormous concession to the progressive advantages enjoyed by Popc, j ohnson has subtly displayed his remarkable balance in judgment. Terms like "ele· gance" and "refinement" carry thei r negative underside along with the praise they intend. And however splendid Popc's accomplishment, however unequaled anywhere before (as johnson announces), its greatness is tied {Q the fact that it is an imitative achievement, an achievement in translation, the carrying over into these times and this language of the o riginal vision of another. In j ohnson's distinCtion between original, barbaric ancients and imitative, elegant moderns, as in H ume's distinCtion betwee n the history of the arts and the history of thought, we can find the implicit opposition between the intuitive and the rational , the insti nctual and the learned. From the earliest days of aesthetics in the West, theorists 3. Samllel Johnson, The Hhlory of Rar 2JOO. trans. W. Hooper (Dublin: W. W ilson, 1772), II, 1·27. 7. Ibid., 1, 198.

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calculates, there will be thirty-seven million mathematicians living equal to Newton, thirty-seven million poetS living equal to H omer, thirty-seven million writers of comedy as good as Moliere. These are, Fourier admits, estimates only. Other explorers of utopian existence foresee an entirely different status for literature and the arts- a distinctly inferior status. Some writers hold that the arts could not flou rish in a society devoid of conflict ; even jf literature continues to be written it will be a tepid affair compared with the glories of the violent past. The Abbe Turgot believed that ahhough the knowledge of nature and of truth is infinitel y cumulative, the arts, which exist primarily to give us pleasure, have fixed limits that were reached ages ago by (he Greeks and Romans. (Condorcet, Turgm's follower, specifi cally rejected th is notion in the tenth epoch of the E!quiue.) If science, technology, morality, and orher areas of human activity are linearly progressive, while the fine arts are not, clearly the arts will playa diminishing role in the new world to be born. Turgot, like a number of his contemporaries, accepts the future impoverishment of the life of the imagination with marked complacency. Another theorist who depreciates the role of literature in the good society is Morelly. As he sets down the laws for his utopia in Nature'! Code (1755), Morelly allows the fine ans a place, bur a carefully circumscribed place only. Poetry, painting, and oratory are confined to celebrating the beauties of nature and science and the achievements of culture heroes. Other products of the imagination like tales, fables, or absurd fictions, or speculative arts or sciences nor immediately useful to society-these are frowned upon, sacrifices to a mode of life in which, as Morelly says, all things have been brought to perfeaion. 8 The arts fare even worse in Megapatagonia, a country described by Restif de la Bretonne in a utopian fiCtion known in English as The French Daedalu! ( 1781 ). Here in this primitivistic society, whose language is French written backwards, the arts are generally despised. When asked if they have theaters and plays in their country. a Megapatagonian informant replies that such entertainments are for children or a nation of children only. We want true pleasures, not artificial ones, he says. "We want only the real." The Megapatagonians have outlawed myth and allegory-modes of saying that which is not-as obstacles to truth; and they look on most poetry, other rhan the celebratory mode. as absurd and dangerous. Painting is equally de· spised as child's play and useless : "Our portraits," they say, "are our handsome men and our beautiful women whom we see every day."? The key statement in this utopian denigration of the arts is "We want 8. Morelly, Code de '" nIIlllre, ed. Gilben Chinard ( Par is: R. Clavreuil, 1950), pp. 22. 318,321.

9. Nioolas-Edme Resri f de ]a Bretonne, l4J. DI~QII~·tme all1/ ,,,le pa, IJolam; 011 Ie di ddle jran(ais (Leipzig, 1781 ), 111, 503, 505. 514.

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The COiff of Wop;"

only the real." Restif touches here on a persistent theme in utopian literature. The Megapatagonians crho Socrates's question in the Re· pllblic: "If a man were able actually co do rhe things he represents as well as to produce images of them, do you believe he would seriously give himself up to making these images and take that as a completely satisfying objen in life ?" In utopia, where life is good, the mimetic arts are often said to be superseded by life itself-they become superfluous. Literature, painting, and the rest become sacrifices to that happiness which it is the function of progress ro besrow on man. Successors to Enlightenment writers pick up this problematic theme in interesting ways. A good example is William Morris's New! from Nowhere, one of the most attractive of all utopian fictions. In the green and pleasant England of the fUTUre that Morris envisages, on ly Ellen's grandfather regrets the progressive enfeeblement of literature that he has not iced in the years since the new order was established. Why is it, the old grouch complains, writers no longer produce novels like Vallity Fair? Ellen, a clear-eyed, forthright representative of a good many ucopian women, puts the old-fashioned novel -reader in his place. Books once had a positive function, Ellen says, when they helped palliate the miseries of people's lives; but they have no place today, "When will you understand that after all it is the world we live in which interests us; the world of which we are a part, and which we can never love tOO much? Look!" she says, laying her hands on the shoulders of the two lovers, "Iook! these are our books in thesedays!" IO Ellen echoes the Megapatagonians' sentiments: "We want only the teal." It is disheartening co realize that there is no more place for great literature in the good society imagined by Morris than there is in the bad society of Huxley's Brave New World, where art is replaced by obstacle golf and rhe feclies. Everyone knows of Huxley's own personal devotion co literature and painting and music. I find it peculiarly poignant that at the end of his life, when he tried to negate the negation of Brave New World by writing the positive utopia lsi.md, H uxley found it necessary to devalue rhe arts and to denigrate literature savagely. Literature, concludes his spokesman in lslatld, is incompatible with human integrity, with philosophical truth, with a decem social system-incompatible with everything, he says, "except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspi ration, and unnecessary guilt." Huxley was convinced like so many others that the negative correlation between literature and the g<x>d life was absolute. One had to choose between them; and for him, as for his eighteenth-century predecessors, only one choice was possible. Among the twentieth-century heirs of the Enlightenment who have pondered most carefully the fate of the artS in a putative g<x>d society 10. William Morris, Newl from N oU!h ..~e (Bos ton: Roberts Brothers. 1890). Chap.

22

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ROBERT C . E I. I. IOTT

of the future :l rc the Marxists. It is well known that Marxist eschatology contains no clear picture of man's estate on the other side of histOry. However, when progress has brought man from the kingdom of necessity [0 the kingdom of freedom, when there is no basis for class conflict and the state has withered away, when man's labor is no longer alien::ned and he has immensely increased leisure, then art-if art there be- will doubtl.:ss take forms far different from those we know today. Marxists differ inevitably on how they foresee these developments. One of the central points of difference is on the question of whether an and literature will develop in [he new society in form s recognizable to us, or whether the need for arc, as such, will disappear, supplanted by the satisfactions of the good life. Trotsky is characteristically vigorous on these issues:

In a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one's daily bread, in which community resta urants will prepare g(X)(!, wholesome and tasteful food, for all to choose, in which communal laundries will wash clean everyone's good linen, in which children, all the children, will be well fed and strong and gay, and in which they will absorb the fundamental elements of science and an as they absorb albumen and air and the warmth of the sun, in a society in which electricity and the radio .. . witt come from inexhaustible sources of super-power at the call of a central burton, in which there witt be no "useless mouths;' in which the liberated egotism of man-a mighty force! - will be directed wholly roward the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the universe- in such a society the dynamic development of cul ture will be incomparable with anything that went on in the past. Il Even in this society of the future, founded on fr iendship and sympathy and love for one's neighbor, there will stil l be competition, says Trotsky, but competition subl imated to a higher and more fertile form . Energies which once went into political struggles will be chan nel ized into technique, into construction, which also includes art. Parties will form over social issues: the location of a new canal, the distribution of oases in the Sahara, the regulation of climate, a new theater, two competing tendencies in music. In the tense debates over aesthetic schools and tastes the human personality will grow and become polished. The explosions of collective nervous energy and the collective psychic impulses which make for the creation of new a rtistic tendencies will continue. Certain literary modes will. of course, be ruled our: mysticism, for example, and the kind of romanticism that is really mysticism in disguise. "Our age cannot have a shy and portable mysticism," Trotsky ! L Loon TrOfSk}' , literafure and Ref'o/ulio'l ( Ann Arbor: Uni"ersity of Mich igan Press. 19(0), pp. 188-89.

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T he C01l1 of Utopi"

writes, "something like a pet dog that is carried along 'with the rest: Our age wields an axe:' Similarly, "we shall no longer accept a tragedy in which God gives orders and man submits." Moreover, he adds, "there will be no one [Q write such a tragedy." In general, however, Trotsky thinks that the new an will revive all the old forms: comedy, be
Paul Tillich, the refugee from Nazi Germany, also helped import to America some of the continental distrust in progress. A religious socialist in Germany and nm politically passive in America, Tillich reached to his Lutheran roots in order to decry any faith in "a metaphysics of progress." Nothing ontological, in the strucrure of being, brought the promise of progress-though its absence did not mean for Tillich that humans were free to be irresponsible. They would nor be likely to break off the quest for meaning in life. But times changed "for the bener," and shortly before he died in 1%5, Tillich had trouble recalling how and why he could ever have joined in the radical celebration of the 'breakdown of progressivism" after 1914. In his Systematic The ology he agreed that there could be progress in technology C better and beuer") and methodology. IS He also found some progress in education and the overcoming of spatial divisions and separations within and beyond mankind. Still, in creativity and morals Tillich found no progress. Jews had even more dramatic reasons than these Orthodox and Protestant thinkers to undergo a crisis of faith in progress. Some Jewish thinkers feel that their loss of faith may be permanent because of the Holocaust. In the nineteenth cenrury, Jewish religious thought in Western Europe had undergone an emancipation and an enlightenment. In various modern or Reform versions, Jews embraced progress as enthusiastically as did Protestant liberals and Catholic modernists. 17. Sidney Pollam, The fdea of Prog~esl; Hillory lind SocielY (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1971 ), pp. 197-98. 18. Cited by Wagar, Good Tidings, p. 216; see Paul T iUich, Syllem.al;e Th,a/o8Y (Ch icago: University of Chicago Press. 1%3 ), III. 338-39.

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Thus, the French OrientalistJames Darmes(C(er in 1892 fused humanist and biblical thoughc: Two great dogmas . .. ever since the prophets, constitute the whole of Judaism : the divine unity and Messianism, unity of law throughOUt the world and the terrestrial triumph of justice in humanity. These are the twO dogmas which at the present time illuminate humanity in its progress both in the scientific and the social order of things, and which are termed in modern parlance, unity of forces and belief in progress. For this reason,Judaism is the only religion that has never entered into conflict, and never can, with either science or social progress, and that has witnessed, and still witnesses, all their conquests withOut a sense of fear. These are nor hostile forces that it accepts or submits ro merely from a spirit of roleration or policy in order to save the remains of its powcr by a compromise. They are old friendly voices which it recognizes and salutes with joy, for it has heard them resound for centuries already, in the axioms of free thought and in the cry of the suffering heart.19 Few Jewish thcologians could find such a faith at all credible aftcr Hitler. Typical of North Americans who have completely revised their views of histOrical progress after the attempts ro extinguish European Jewry is the theist philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a Canadian who survived Auschwitz. His thought has grown ever more radical, as has that of many Jewish theologians since the Israeli wars of 1%7 and 1973, after which Jcwish survival became a vivid issue. But as early as 1955 Fackenheim was reflecting autobiographically on "Judaism and the idea of progress:" In pre-Hitler Germany, in the climate of enlightenment and romanticism, he had deve loped the firmest belief that hisrory had a purpose, that it "had followed a path of necessary progress in the past, and the guarantee for its infinite perpetuation was implicit in history itself. " Only in one respect did the liberal Jew ever have ro do any tailoring : "History no longet required irrationa l incursions of a supernatural God; its purJXIses were realized by men inspired by the Ideal:'lo In that context the Jew had to discover his place. Judaism must contribute ro progress. Fackenheim and his generation later rebelled against this firm belief on three grounds. The first was religious; being "neoorthodox" themselves in many ways, they had a religious objection. "If history is necessary progress, brought about by men, then there is, so to speak, nothing left for God to do:' Second was the concept of a Jewish mission. Jews were losing their n~sary sense of superiority needed 19. Quoted in Nahum N . Grau er, ed., T he DynamiC! 01 Emancipation: T he Jew in the Modern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 19(5), p. .\2. 20. Emil L. Facke nheim, Que!t lo r Paff and F.IIMre: Ell"" it! ]tlw;,h The%Sl (Bos.o n : Beacon, 19(8), p . 84.

49

MARTIN E . MARTY

to pursue a mission as teachers of mankind, and this was morally and inrelleClually intolerable. But most important was the brutal fact of Nazism: A view still popular in America holds that history progresses necessarily bue inrermi((enriy; relapses may occur, but these become ever less serious. But co me Nazism was, and still is, not a relapse less serious than previous relapses, but a total blackout .... History is regarded as necessary progress only by those who are relatively remote from the evils of history . ... The real conclusion I derived . .. is that if even a s ingle brave and honest deed is in vain, if a single soul's unjust suffering goes unredeemed, that then histOry as a whole is meaningless. With th is conclusion, the progress view of history, so far as I was concerned, had suffered total shipwreck.

Yet God did not die and history was nor meaningless for Fackenheim and others in the mainstream of Jewish theology, Nor would the Jewish thinker use his loss of faith in progress as an occasion for moral inactivity : He must work harder than ever before for the survival of Judaism and for justice-all in rhe name of God, ll A POSITIVE STEP

Roman Catholics generally sha red the mistrust in progress from World War I until [he 1950s, though we shall note two or three important exceptions, Then in the 1960s they could point to a kind of official stamp on a faith in progress thanks to Gaudiutn et Spn, a forwardlooking document of Vatican II , Its linkage of human progressivism with the Gospel of the Kingdom was rather caut ious and unsatisfying to restless Catholic liberals, But this document showed a move far from the old anti modernism of the Church, In one frequently quoted text, it could play both ends in terms of the middle it so assuredly occupied: "Earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom. Nevertheless, to the extent that the former can contribute to the bener ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the kingdom of God." n A papal encyclical, Popu/orum prog reJJio, was a far more emphatic stamp of approval on this impulse to create human progress under div ine authority. A gathering of well over two thousand bishops from all over the world may well have been influenced by the spirit of the early 1960s, but it was also in the strand of a long-developing more positive Catholic view of human endeavor. The toweri ng figure in Catholic philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic in the period when nco21. Ibid .. pp. 8H7. 22. Austin P. Flannery, ed .• D OCllfliC O/IJ 0 / V"/ ic",, lJ (Grand Rapids, MidL &rdmans. 1975 ), p. 9}8; see a critical discu ssion in GUS tavo Gutierrez. A Theology 0/ Liberaf; MI: Hiuo r)". Politics, " "d 5..1",,/;0.1, trans. Siste r eardida Inda andJo hn Eggleson ( ~iar}'kooll, N .Y.: Orbis Books. 197), pp. 168ff.

Prog .-el1 in TWf!mief h· Ce m,,'J' Theolog)'

49 1

orthodoxy reigned in Protes tantism was Jacques Maritain. Through the decades he developed a moderate view of progress, which he called "imegral humanism." Maritai n was morc posi tive than Tillich , who had been the Protestant figure bridging the eras. Maritain discerned moral progress developing as "the explicit knowledge of the various norms of natural law grows with time." This progress produced the prohibition of slavery and a more humane mode of waging war and govern ing. But even as Maritain mentioned these signs, he had to point to a comparable growth in evil, a fact that made Christian grace necessary. Yet the fact that Christians had higher extra temporal goals never left them free to let up on their effort "better and better" to serve society, Maritain's 'New Christendom" was to be a semisecular and truly free civilization.H Fra nce was the sou rce of much preconcilia r progressivist thought. Wagar has singled out as a leader Emmanuel Mounier, editor of Elpri: and a leader in the French Resistance. This personalist thinker, influential far beyond French Catholic theological circles, attacked the Christian pessimism of the decades. He advocated a "tragic optimism" that saw in the midst of evil some human progress. Thus, technology had led "from a condition of immanent servitude to an inhuman nature, to a considered mastery over a humanized nature. " Mounier was explicitly Christian in his progressive claims, a fact that made his thought congenial to otherwise more timid Church leaders : Thristianity gives man his full stature and more than his full stature, It summons him to be a God, and it summons him in freedom. This, for the Christian, is the final and supreme significance of progress in history." God wished human liberation: "Humaniry,Jara da le, slowly, p rogress ively," 24 The voice of a new episode and the most unguardedly progressive thinker in recent Catholicism was theJesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chard in, No one could accuse him of shapin.g his outlook to match the spirit of the times in the church or the world. As far as the Church was concerned, Telhard was so out of step that the Jesuit order permitted almost no publication of his writings until after his death in 1955, As far as the mood of the world was concerned, he was committed to a metaphysic of progress that was consistem through both world wars; indeed, he could in some wrirings reduce those wars to a footnote, He even incorpora ted the invention of nuclear armamcnts into his ideology of progress. Today the Teilhardi an star has declined, but in the midsixties, "when wise men hoped," it shone. The lure of his having been silenced may have helped Tcilhard find a following in the freer postconciliar climate. Catholics were also hungry to find a synthesis between faith and science or evolution a nd Providence, and Teilhard provided many with that. n Quoted by Wagar, Good Tidingr, pp. 246.48. 24. Ibid., pp. 249· 50.

'92

M"RTIN E.

M"RTY

"Barely credible," Gilkey would have to call his "Note on Progress" written after the World War I experience in 1920. Even then Teilhard already defied the "immohilists" who lacked passion. "The truth can now be seen: Progress is not what the popular mind looks for, finding with exasperation that it never comes." Progress is not immediate ease, but a force. "h is the Consciousness of all that is and all that be," wrote the enrhusiastic evolutionist:

can

"Nothing moves," a first sage will say. "The eye of commonsense sees it and science confirms it:' "Philosophy shows that nothing can move," says a semnd. "Religion forbids it-nothing must move," says a third. Disregarding this triple verdict the Seer leaves the public place and rerurns to the firm, deep bosom of Nature.... Gazing upward, tOwards the space held in readiness for new creation, he dedicates himself body and soul, with faith reaffirmed, to a Progress which will bear with it or else seep away all those who will not hear. In 1941, in another work that remained unpublished unti11959, the priest sustained chis absolute faith in progress, an outlook that so many Catholics and humanists found inspiring in the mid-sixties. "Some Reflections on Progress" were the reflections of a man who proudly identified himself as a palaeontologist but who was more mystical than scientific. '"There are stronger scientific reasons than ever before for believing that we do really progress .. · he wrote in spite of bitter disillusionment with human g<XKiness in recent years. ··We are dealing with a question of facts and we must look at the facts."' First looking back on three hundred million years, Teilhard then looked ahead and showed thac humans still possessed "a reserve, a formidable potential of concentrat ion, i.e., of progress."' And the "blind" forces of the universe, he thought, were in inexorable complic· ity with the human. But ··we ~an progress only by uniting;· as a law of life; for this, a common human vision would develop. Such language is rare in the eighties, bur a century from now it is likely that histOrians will be quoting people like Teilhard to recreate the theological and secular mood of the early 1960s: "1 am convinced that finally it is upon the idea of progress, and faieh in progress, that Mankind, today so divided, must rely and can reshape itself."· 2 ~ The work in which those essays appeared, The Future of Man, appeared in the Uniced Scates in 1964. A few years later Teilhardian faith was being seriously challenged, and disillusionment again set in. But had he lived, nothing in T eilhard·s outlook would have prepared him to let short-term setbacks deny his vision of human complexity and unity on the way to '·the Omega point" of consummation in Christ. 25. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The FIJlure Qj M,m, lrans. Norman Denny ( New

York: HarpC'r & Row. 1%4), pp. 19. 24,61 , 63, 64,69-75.

ProgrelJ in Twemieth.Cemury Theology

493

A FURTHER POSITlVE STEP

Protestantism had no towering figure to match Teilhard, but its own progressive episode did rely on the thoughts of a more restrained believer in human development, the martyr to Hider, Dietrich Bon· hoeffer. He was a Lutheran theologian schooled in the qualified vision of that tradition. But in the very heart of darkness, a Nazi prison, he went against the Zeitgeist and began to reach for resources in the biblical and Protestant tradition to explain his vision of "a world come of age:' If one had explicitly posed the norian of progress to Bonhocffer, it is not likely that he would have simply subscribed to it. Yet he did picture a developmental view of reality in which God progressively withdrew from the role as nurturer of human processes while human· ity was coming past adolescence to ··religionlessness'· yet still faithful adulthood. "Religion·' to Bonhocffer connoted routine and repressive pieties, obsolete patterns of metaphysics, and a view of God as the filler of gaps in human knowledge: Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ··working hypothesis" called ··God.·· In questions of science, an, and ethics th is has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions ; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God" - and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affaits generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more groundJ6 One would have thought that to a theologian who remained Christocentric this development would cause dismay, but Bonhocffer and those of his outlook came to cheer it. His biographer Eberhard Bethge said that Bonhoeffer did nor turn optimistic about humans ··becoming bener and be(rer·· - how could he in a Nazi prison ? Bur hedid believe in "responsibility,"· ··the unreversible capability and duty of adults individually to answer the questions of life in their own particulat fields and within their own autonomous struCtures:· 21 The secular theologians like H arvey Cox and the Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson, author of Hone!f t o God, drew upon Bonhoefferian concepts of technological and JXllitical "adulthood" to develop theologies chat sounded very progressiv istic. Cox in Th e Secular City took the image and the reality of the modern city as exemplars of postsacral progress. "Massive residues of magical and superstitious world-views·· survived, but Cox saw these being exorcised. The city, he 26. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ullers and Papers from PriIQn , ed. Eberhard Bcthge (New York: M~cm ill~n ), pp. }25-26. 27. Quoted in James w. W~l fel, lkmhoel/e r 's TheolQgy: Ct..uic.1 "nd Ret·ol,, · lion.ry (Nashville. Ten n.: Abingdon, 1970), p. 306, n. 49.

494

MARTIN

E . MARTY

thought, was the sphere of liberation and renewal. The very anonymi£}' of the city contributed "to the maturation of persons" as the world moved tOward irs own adulthood. Cox asked his readers to celebrate the unfolding of this City. 28 Several years later he was back with The FeaII of FoolI, The Sedllction of the Spirit, and Tllrtlillg East, works which seemed to represem a complete about-face because they returned to the celebration of what had to Cox earlier looked residual: myth and symbol. Yct in his best-selling prime, Cox gave g reat impetus to both the Proccsram and Catholic belief in progress. Jewish reviews, written out of the spirit of post-Holocaust musing, were almost unanimously crirical of his optimism and belief in "better and better" human situanons. My contention that some sort of belief in progress remains latent in liberal theological thought finds confirmation in this eruption of progressive theology that began in the fifties and came to a climax around 1965. The public situation briefly encouraged its vision. Western intellectuals momentarily took cheer from the progressive example of Pope John XXIII and took hope from the Second Vatican Cou ncil which ended that year. Marrin Luther King embodied the hope of many that a racially and economically divided society would progress toward integration and social jusrice. The New Frontier and Great Society of Jo hn F. Ke nnedy and Lyndon B. Johnson looked like the unfolding kingdom of God ro m any America ns and some sympathizers elsewhere. Alongside the new views of progress in religion and politics thete also developed a faith in technology among humanists and theologians. Chtistian thinkers called an end ro their disgtaceful tetteat in the face of scientific discovery and an unwillingness to defend a "god of the gaps" who was located wherever human knowledge gave out and mysterious ignorance began. They then reached for the language of progress and even utopian optimism. Less than a generation later, to borrow Gilkey's phrase, people would nor only fin d such a theory of progress "barely credible" but would dismiss it as simply incredible, To recover something of the movement's mood, it is worthwhile to listen to an exuberant statement by a member of the "sC(;ular theology school;' William Hamilton. The Baptist professor published his essay "The New Optimism" in the quarterly Theology Today in January 1966. Given what we know of the time that the editing processes take and the internal evidence of the text, we may deduce that H amilton must have wrirren it in the spring of the Selma to Montgomery civ il rights march or in the early summer of 1965 when Congtess was passing progressive legislation. It must have been JUSt before the cities began to burn in a time of racial unrest or immediately before the administration heated up American involvement in the Vietnamese War. 28. Harvey Cox , The SecIJ/a r City (New York: Macmillan, 1%5), pp. 150, 83-84.

Prog~eu

in Twentieth-Century Theology

49'

The faith in progress came back with a vengeance to the theologians of Hamilton's breed. Theologies change for many reasons, wrOte Hamilton. "Everybody knows, or at least feels , that the time of troubles for the neoonhodox ecumenical-biblical-kerygmatic theology has arrived:' It was on the defensive because its doctrine of man, as voiced by Reinhold Niebuhr, was now no longer plausible simply because it was '"in pan a pessimistic theology." Ham ilton suspected that "one of the reasons neoonhodoxy now doesn't work is that this pessimism doesn't persuade any more:' Belief in progress or optimism, "an increased sense of the possibilities of human act ion, human happiness, human decency, in this life," was regnant. l9 The death of the gloomy Christian poet T.S. Eliot and President Johnson's State of the Union message, both on January 4, 1%5, symbolically signalled the move from pessimism to optimism, from alienation to politics, from blues ro the freedom song. Hamilton noted an instance of the new belief in progress in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, the technological optimist; his thought would "remind some of the venerable doctrine of progress over which we have preached so many funeral orations."' Also, the "gaiety, ... absence of alienation, [and] vigorous and contagious hope at the center" of the civil rights movement were Hamilton's "most decisive piece of evidence."' He prophesied that "the sixties may well be the time for play, celebration, delight, and for hope."' This was the language of imposed systems of relevance because Hamilton now urged "hunti ng up of biblical Of theological foundations for something . .. that has already taken place .. . :' Now, "we trust the world, we trust the furure , we deem even many of our intractable problems jusr soluble enough to reject the tragic mode of facing them." This was to be nOt an optimism of grace, said Hamilton, but an optimism of worldl iness.3o What sounds now like puffery for the passing ZeilgeiIt of 1%5 was an effervescent expression of a spirit shared by many more sober thinkers, whether secular or theological. The period from the mid19505 to the mid- l960s in some respects bore resemblances to the "national period" in America, which Alfred North Whitehead characterized as a period when "wise men hoped, and ... as yet no circumstance had arisen to throw doubt upon the grounds of such hope:' 3[ It was as if tWO world wars, economic depression, the Cold War, and a nonaffluent world beyond American borders were nonexistent, or out of memory and sight. One could argue that theology should stay with what is intrinsic to its tradition and philosophical development and 29. William Hamilton, "The New Optimism: ' in Thomas}.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Raji",/ Th eology .md the Death oj God (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 19(6), pp. 1 ~7, 158, 1)9. W. Ibid., pp. 164. 16~, 168, 169. 31. Alfrc-d North Whitehead, Effayl ill Science a'lli Phi/owphy (New Yo rk: Philosoph ical Library, 1948 ). p. 114.

4%

MARTIN E.

MARTY

that profound thinkers would do well to be aloof from or in opposition to [he spirit of the times. Thus, during the period between the wars they might well have reassened a compensarory faith in progress born of their heritage when people were dispirited, and they might JUSt as well have questioned the heady optimism of 1%5. But being as steadfast as that would demand a vision and heroism (hat few thinkers can sustain. An exception and a bridge to the next period was Jacques Ellul, a French Protestant lawyer and lay theologian, who has through a variery of changes in cultural mood been persistently denunciatory in his view of progress. Ellul makes a sharp distinction berween a supernatural hope that looks for divine intervention in history and a faith in progress that derives from a "s hallow" view of the empirical situation, Christian hope to the theologian, says Ellul, should exist "in spite of."

Thus hope is ... a "giving the lie to the realm of death." All hope is always in that category, At whatever level it is encountered, it is always thiI giving the lie to something obvioUl which man considets unimpeachable, to a fatality to which man bows. It arouses man to go beyond that. This is indeed why it has no place except in a situation without hope. Ellul was utterly pessimistic about tffhnology, modern politics, mass media of communication, and the other spheres of life from which the new progressives of the mid-sixties took hope. Ellul saved his most acid tone for the theologian whose book better than any other captured the progress-minded "secular theology; ' Cox's The Secular City. Wrote Ellul, this work offers [he public a justification for what is going on in the world, for what man is in process of doing. It is true that modern man in his most fallen aspect wants exactly above;: everything else that someone should come along to tell him that he is right in doing what he is doing. That was the springboard for all the propaganda. It supplies precisely the "solemn complement" (t hat Marx rightly accuses religion of supplying) .... Since man's technological powe~ is constantly increasing, the Church's message consists in giving assurance that it is up to man to create his own destiny ... Th e Secular City is the prime example, for our modern society, of the opiate of the people. H Cox, of course, did not see himself as someone who used religion as an opiate bur as someone who reached into the tradition for latencies that went back to the biblical creation and exodus accounts. He and H amilton were the more public and effervescent exemplars of a school of thought that had been developing in spite of Jewish thought about 32. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Timllol Ah.ndonment ( New York, Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 204, 152-53.

Progress in Tu'emielh .Cemu". Thl0'

srone of judgment, and the emphasis on experience became the emerging cultural norm. In the srory that I am pursuing, there were three changes that, woven rogether, made up this change in moral temper. These were (1) the growth of the idea of a radical individualism in the economy and the polity and of an unrestrained self in culture; (2) the crossover from religion ro the expressive ans (literature, poetry, music, and painting) in the problem of dealing with restraints on impulse, particularly (he demonic; and ( 3) [he decline of the belief in heaven and hell and the rise in the fear of nothingness, or the void, in the realm beyond life; the coming to consciousness , in short, of nihilism. The interrelatedness (but not integration) of these three we call "modernity"-the turning away from the aurhority of the past, the shrinking of the realm of the sacred. and the Faustian quest for tOtal knowledge. which sees man spinning into the vonex of the Wis.rendrang from which there is no surcease. To take these up seriatim : I. ·'The impulse to write autObiography may be taken as virtually definitive of the psychological changes to which the historians point;' writes Professor Trilling.1 The clearest case in poior is Rousseau's Con/cH ion!. What scandalized his contemporaries was not his scarological remarks bur the very first word in the book and the very tOne of that first paragraph. Rousseau begins :

I am commencing an undertaking, hitheno without precedeor, and which will never find an imiraror. I desire ro set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my hean, and I know men. I am not made like any of those J have seen; I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not bener, at least I am different. Whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.8 (Nature may have destroyed the mold, but the culture recreated it, and the imit3rors, unfortunately, have written endless advertisements for themselves.) It is not JUSt Rousseau's claim [ 0 unigueness that is ceorral; that is merely a matter of psychology. It is a deeper change in the nature of culture and character structure. In the polity, the claim of individualism was for liberty, ro be free of all ascriptive ties. But in the culture, the claim was for # beration: to be free of all constraints, moral and psy7. Ibid., p . 24.

8. The Co n/elJjonl 0/ Jeall·Jacqllef R01IJU,." (Ne w Yo rk : Mode rn Lib ra ry, n.d.), p . ,.

508

DANIEl.

BEtl.

chological, to reach out for any experience that would enhance the self. 2. Religion has always lived, dealing as it does with the most basic human impulses, in the dia lenical (ension of release and restraint. The great historic religions-Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism, and Christianity-have all been religions of restraint, Underneath have been the subterranean impulses-the Dionysian frenzies, the Manichean dualities, the gnostic assaults on the exoteric doctrines, the idea of the Holiness of Sin-that have beat against the great walls of religious taboos. The crossover from religion to the expressive arts has not only meant that restraint has gone slack; it has also meant that the demonic impulses in men (once channeled into religion, once used by particular religions against others) have now become polymorph perverse and pervade all dimensions of modernist culture. If experience is the touchstone of the self, then there can be no boundaries; nothing is unattain· able, or at least unutterable; there are no sacred groves that cannot be trespassed upon and even trampled down. That movement, which we call Modernism, was of course a great source of energy and vitality, and the century from 1850 to 1950 (and its peaks, from 1890 to 1920) ca n probably be seen-in painting, literature, poetry, and music-as one of the great surges of creat iviry in human culture. But there was a price: the fact that the aesthetic was no longer subje\4

DANIEL BEll

In this remarkable essay, Lukacs cited the novels of Boris Savinkov, the Russian socialist revolutionary who was one of the assassins of Minister of Interior von Plehvc. Murder is not permitted; murder is an unconditional and un forgivable sin. Yet it is inescapably necessary; it is not permitted, but it mllst be done. And in a different place in his fiction, Savinkov sees nOt the justification of his act ( that is impossible), but its deepest moral root in that he sacrifices not only his life, bur also his purity, morality, even his soul for his brothers. The corruption of political religions is not just the ebbing away o f revolutionary fervor and the establishment of a new bureaucratic class in office. It is, to use theological language, the victOry of the devil in seducing anguished men to sign that pact which makes them surrender their souls. And if the thought o f Savinkov could induce Lukacs TO make that leap of faith over the credo abH/rdum, what is one to say of Lukacs' silence when, in 1924, the Bolsheviks murdered Savinkov, by throwing him out of a window, fo r his cominued opposition to the Bolshevik regime? But Lukacs had already sold his soul. As Theodor Adorno said of Lukacs, he "is desperately tugging at his chains, imagining all the while that their clanking heralds the onward march of the world-spirit [ urelegeist]." '~ I believe that the "ground impu lses" behind aestheticism and political religions are exhausted. These were the impulses to abolish God and assume that Man could take over the powers he had ascribed to God :md now sought to claim for himself. This is the common bond between Marx and Nietzsche and the link between the aesthetic and political movements of modernity. The phrase "God is dead" clearly has no denota tive meaning. Nor do I think Nietzsche meant it so. It is a form of religious pornography, and I have to explain my restriCted meaning o f the tcrm.16 The Friihliche Wissel1schajt (translated variously as The Gay Science Of The l oyflll Wisdom ) is a fo rm of pornography in the sense that Machiavelli 's The Prillce is a kind of political pornography and de Sade's justine sexual fX.>rnography - not so much for the content as for the intention to shock people in a highly spe
550

CON TRID UTORS

Policy Program at Stanford University, received his Ph.D. fro m the Uni ve rsity of Wisconsin in 19~5. He has been editor of the JOIlNlal of ECQnomic Hisl ory and is the author of P(mpec/jves on Tech ,lOlogy and (with Walter Vincenti) Th e Generation and Dil/ulion of Teclmological Kllow1cdge: The Case of BriffHlnia Bridge. AARON WILDAvSKY recei ved his Ph.D. at Yale Unive rsity in 1959,;s Professor of Po!itical Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former dean of tnc Graduate School of Public Policy. He is aut hor or coauthor of The PoliliCl of the Budgetary ProccJS. Planning alld Budgeting in Poor CO fmtrier. Budgetj'lg: A Comparatit,c Theo ry 0/ Budgetary ProCCfJeJ, and Speaking Trut h to Power. CRAWFORD YO UNG, Professor of Po litical Science, University of Wisconsin, received his Ph.D. at H arvard Unive rsity in 1964. He has been an associate dean o f (he graduate school at Wisconsin and a dean of the faculty of social sciences, Nadonal University of Zaire. He is the author or co-author of Politic f ill the Congo, fuue s 0/ Political Det'elopmem, and The Politics 0/ Cultural Pluralism.

IND E X adaptjv~nt$s.

it

!.1§.

~

aes.hc,icism, liQ, ill lli Afghanis,an, !IT.!!2. JQ!. LO:1 Africa and roloo i.tism, !:!!!:!l2. 2lo22 and na[ionalism, 23

and prog,e'6 i" uilicism. ~ and ,he work of all. ~ ,edemp'i~e po"..,r of, oMO as religiOfl, fiR. 0161,68 and ulOpi., 468·69, ill,Jil Asia, !1Z.. ~ 21

Eos', ii!l:l

nlogio l ,hrulS '0 lUlU'" of. ~ evolUlionary, iJl} and eugenics mo"ernem, l.1l:.11 and formalion of new species, IAL..48. key concep" in, ~ mectron
I N D EX

~nd rcdi~trjb",i"n.

ill

rela'k~l of, IV .. .ori.J " ·elfor". ill ond rising price ,,( space .nd ,ime, 2ffi..,1J ",Ie of s uvernm"m in, Ul2 and satisfaCtion, 2('('·71 illoJj in Th ird W",ld. llL ill W'e, «,'" mudd <Jr. ill c(W'um ic p,,,sr,..;s. M2:ill

COnCernS

.fleeting. ill.:lJl

WntempmH}' di.illusionme", " 'ill" MS! CO, tS

"r.

13

and em"i",nm entol Wn«'fns. il..h12 .nd !;v;.)'. !.!!1. IJi6 and theo'y of "iemif;e dt-,'ck'pmem.

=

~nd

.ot olit)· of experience . 221_23 2ll!. and un;fic:ui!ut;unar)' "ppmach fO, 11!i and "'ion"lit)'. lli.:i.:! scientific stud}' of. 23ll:.1Z Ethiupi •• !!Z, !!2. lill eugen ic t1l("... me m. W.:12 Europe as bea.... r of progrcs>. 12. i} civilizing mi,s"'n of. 41 and hi ..",y of t he ",d~ni.m, as hiSlorial por2
INDEX

and four s(aS~s of d""ek'pmem. 12 35 hi.\tory of :;ciem"i""i"". 12 ~~ man;h of ' ..ason, 12 Marx ;an concep' of, 68 moquie", I,""~l de ambi,'a leoce of. ",ward hi"ori, .nd control of n.lUre Ihmugh knowlrogC'. 2 and hisOd, tl6 reJotion \llip of, to, ",her sciences. U!(h8J theoret i"I, l.6l Planck. Max. liQ.llL 22fh2l PI,m, t 28

m

p".."r)' a nd Ihe he",ic " !,'t'. i l l as religion. ill resista nce "f, '" idea "f p"'gre~., ~

'"

INDEX s;>cred~ss 01, in ~$I ~icism. III Po l.nd. ill lable, !ilU pol;, i,,1 panies, 2 poli' i,,1 pr08«'s.s Ind Nonomic rrans lurma.ion, 9:8 and koo,,-led~, II . nd mal~rilJ producliv i,y, II .nd sc~,ific rru,r$, U poli,icol ~Iigi"", ll.ld1 poli' io .nd pru& nes.s. ll1llB.:ll.16Il .nd religion , !ilU and Kienrilk nw:,hod, 13. .nd "iolen(~ , ~ pollution. Set environnw:nr, pollution of Po pe , Alexander, ill popular ion. !fI, 2'l1:2fI. populal ion grotl·th. Zl!i:2'.I: po .-.~,.. y

alley;ariot! of, Ul:U.1l!lll. .l!i2 .nd pru&nes.s, ll2:j2 progress U :u:rumula,ion. 2:i I nd ldap'iv~oes., H. J.12. i,;6. in Alrico, HZ and .Iien"ion. !2. 2l .mb;,,,i!), o f, t8 in .he IrIS. Me .n, progrns io in ~ia, 81 15 u p i•• ,ion. J.j I~omem of, a nd e,hiCl, ~28-29 belief in. and educa,ioN-1 ins.i,urions, ill in biocMmimy. l.i8:!l1 biologic3l. See biology. prog'eos in and Buddhism, l2. 86 .nd bureaucracy, 11 15 change. lO6:.Ul2 Chris, i. n i&. of, 10 . 00 ellssal belids, ~ ~ Ind wloni.li.rn, 1l1!1:22 Ind rommunism, II 12 .nd «>n(~prions uf sel f, !l.il:!1B Condorcer'~ vioiun uf. .l:!1l..W .od con fl ie" ~3-~4. ~ I nd Conf",ia ni sm, 12 runscious,,"s as d r" 'ing force of. 1.5 .nd ronsolidl' lon 01 ",Ie, Hi:11 .nd cun.roI o'·~' na,une, & iQ. 2Z.lli I nd cu.p""" ion •• g com of, l8. 2:i c. i,eri. of. l!!.l6I!:1J .nd cu llu",1 he,i'age. !l.1 ond rullo'al §el f.llfirma,iun. 2202Z .nd rumula,i'-e " ol h, 21 dNli~ o f,.nd di u olo. ion of bourgeois (ivili.,uion. Mi .00 ddffi§t', U . nd defensi'-e mockrn i.... lion. 1U. 82:20 defined , L 22-26, J.Q2. W:.ll. 227·"\(1 4lQ in Th ird Work!, IU .nd democracy _S,ademocracy, Ind progru. and ..U hope uf, ~ lory 0(. 1.1 and ~a of historical 5Cq~ n.c .. , 461 and idea of Providtnce. lj!l, m incompatibility of a ocn.., of history ... ith,

.u

indic' lJk' nt uf, by Rouneau, 62 individual i•• , Z and ins. i,u.ions. l32dJ and lsl>om. ~ and Judaism, 18&2ll Ind Kam. Z .nd kno ... lcd!C'. ~ .nd Leninism. 1.2 logical f~O!ur~. of. ~ .nd Lucrede aoo phik>SCl"rning liber,] democracy • .w1 violence ami «onomio; groMh , lll. ill and democr",y, l& :l21..:2l t