Progress: Fact or Illusion? (review)

Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish have collected twelve essays that address the idea of progress—defined here as the “idea that history is a record of improvement in the conditions of human life” (p. 1)—from a variety of perspectives. The essays are drawn (with unspecified exceptions) from “The Idea of Progress Revisited,” a 1991 conference that was jointly sponsored by the Dibner Institute and MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Science. Two authors, physicist Gerald Holton and physician Leon Eisenberg, report that, humanist criticism notwithstanding, the idea of progress is alive and well in their respective professional communities. Five authors make no value judgments about progress, whether as fact, idea, or belief. Their essays, all written from within a Western cultural setting, describe the roles that the idea of progress has played in cultural anthropology (George W. Stocking Jr.), economic theory (Robert Heilbroner), politics (Alan Ryan), feminism (Jill Kerr Conway), and environmentalism (Richard White).

In one of only two essays out of the twelve that critique the ethnocentrism of the Western idea of progress, political scientist Zhiyuan Cui argues that the shareholding-cooperative system developed by rural Chinese industry offers third world countries an alternative to either embracing progress on Western cultural terms or rejecting it as a goal. In the second, Ali A. Mazrui traces the ethnocentrism of the idea of progress to imperialistic universalisms deeply embedded in modern science and Christianity. For Mazrui, these institutions are the drivers of progress within Western culture and of the projection of the value of progress onto all other cultures. In an eclectic essay that ranges over Ignatius Loyola, philosophy, mysticism, books of etiquette, advertising, performance testing, and various technologies, John Staudenmaier argues that only a balance between the “light” of reason and the “holy dark” of affect (p. 199) can avoid the stultifying conformity and standardization that have been the legacy of the Enlightenment project and its idea of progress. Leo Marx argues that while the Western idea of progress has in fact been measured by domination of Nature, humanity would be better served by an idea of progress measured by “degree of achieved accommodation with biophysical nature” (p. 218). Bruce Mazlish alone in this volume defends the idea of progress, seeing the “breakdown of our belief in the idea of progress” (who “our” refers to is not specified) as a “major crisis” of our time (p. 34). Mazlish acknowledges the force of the attacks of critics of the idea of progress from Nietzsche to the postmodernists, but asks, plaintively, how shall we organize time and write history if the idea is rejected? We will be “rudderless in a sea of change,” forced to choose between a cyclical view of history, in which the meaningfulness of events is limited because contextual, or one in which events are meaningless because random. Furthermore, while validating the claim of moral progress is problematic, there are unambiguous “pointers,” among them an end to slavery and the improved status of women, that justify our faith in the claim. And “unmitigated benefits” have accrued from science and technology, for example the global eradication of smallpox. (This, of course, might not be appreciated as an “unmitigated benefit” if somehow smallpox were to reappear in a population never vaccinated or no longer immune from decades-old vaccinations.)

Sixty years ago Lewis Mumford called the idea of progress the “deadest of dead ideas.” Mumford’s judgment followed by fifteen years J. B. Bury’s conclusion that the idea of progress would not continue directing human activity, as his classic study of its history argued it had done for over three hundred years. By the 1930s, writers such as Toynbee and Spengler had popularized cyclical models of history that discredited both the fact and the idea of progress. But progress refuses to play dead, refuses to be immured in the (virtual) museum of exposed ideologies and outgrown cultural myths. This book, while hardly groundbreaking even in the idea-of...