Progress as Parochialism

26 Historically Speaking · May/June 2006 Progress as Parochialism J. C. D. Clark In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes gave an account of his assumptions about human nature: "the Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morali Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand." Not only did desires continually extend to new things; men were also tormented about defending what they had. Power was necessary to secure what had already been won, but this, too, was involved in an endless regression . Consequently, "I put for a generali inclination of all mankind, a perpetuali and restlesse desire ofPower after power, that ceaseth only in Death."1 With devastating candor, Hobbes went at once to the heart of the problem. People are never satisfied: once they have attained a goal, they change their goals. What they have achieved, they fear losing; what they have not achieved consumes them with desire. Within such a worldview, progress, conceived as the incremental and satisfying attainment of stable and ultimate ends, was not a self-evident truth. People who think they have won the argument by saying "progress is real, but it is not inevitable" have forgotten their Hobbes. The shifting nature of ultimate ends is a familiar historical lesson. In the 16th century, state churches were hardly reformed along Protestant lines when many of their members decided that they wished to worship in "gathered churches," rejecting the state church ideal. In the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was divided into secular republics; soon, many oftheir citizens decided that they would rather live in theocratic states, consciously rejecting a "modernity" now perceived as a Western imposition. Examples need not be multiplied. The concept of "progress" was therefore constructed, like any other concept. A story of its origins was often projected back onto 17thand 18th-century Britain, whose history was subtly misrepresented as a result. True, people then increasingly used the term "improvement ," but this was a parochial notion and was Illustrated title page from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, 1651. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. not generalized into an overall theory except for very special reasons. Yet the ideology of "progress" was eventually coined, and has sometimes been internalized by the very people —the historians—who ought to stand back from it and locate it as a historical formation. So historians who examine the idea of progress tend to fall into one of two groups. The first arranges the past as an implicit teleology ; it sees humanity as engaged in a relay race, early pioneers passing the baton to later generations who sprint across the finishing line to attain goals whose nature is held to be constant. The second group of historians dispenses with these proleptic precommitments and is therefore free to notice how late a general idea ofprogress was to emerge. The word "progress" was familiar from an early date; but, like "race," "class," or "revolution," it meant different things over time. Seventeenth-century sectaries had entertained heated notions ofa Second Coming, but (except in North America) these faded after 1660 and did not carry over to an idea of "progress" (even later millenarians neglected ideas of social reform; the supreme event to which they looked forward showed the unimportance ofmeliorist schemes). Neither Locke nor Newton predicted that the conditions of life of the mass of humanity would steadily improve. In the "battle ofthe books" at the end of the 17th century, the "moderns" claimed superiority over the "ancients" in respect of knowledge rather than Gross National Product. But even here, it long remained possible to urge that the science of the classical world had been the origin ofthe achievements of the moderns, who were merely standing on the shoulders of the giants of Greece and Rome.2 In his great Dictionary (1755) Samuel Johnson offered five meanings of "progress": four of them related to motion, one to "intellectual improvement; advancement in knowledge ." None related...