Report Arianna Publishing
Of Alain de Benoist
Source: Francesco Marotta
The idea of ​​progress appears as one of the theoretical presuppositions of modernity. Not without reason, we were even able to glimpse the true "religion of Western civilization". Historically, this idea is formulated, sooner than had been assumed, around the 1680, within the framework of the dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns, in which Terrasson participates, Perrault, the abbot of Saint-Pierre and Fontenelle, to become more precise following the initiative of a second generation which mainly includes Turgot, Condorcet and Louis Sébastien Mercier.
Progress can be defined as a process that accumulates stages, the most recent of which is always judged preferable and better, that is, qualitatively superior to the one that preceded it. This definition includes a descriptive element (a change occurs in a given direction) and an axiological element (this evolution is interpreted as an improvement). It is therefore a change oriented and oriented towards the better, at the same time necessary (the race of progress does not stop) and irreversible (no turning back is possible). The improvement, inevitable, it means that the next day will always be better.
Progress theorists are divided on the direction of progress, the pace and nature of the changes that accompany it, probably its main actors. However, they all adhere to three key ideas: 1) A linear conception of time and the idea that history has a future-oriented meaning. 2) The idea of ​​the fundamental unity of humanity, called in its entirety to evolve in the same direction. 3) The idea that the world can and should be transformed, which implies that man imposes himself as the sovereign master of nature.
These three ideas originally come from Christianity. Starting from the 17th century, the development of science and technology determines their reformulation in a secularized perspective.
For the Greeks, only the eternity of the cosmos is real. Authentic Being is immutable: the circular movement that ensures the eternal return of the same in a series of successive cycles is the most perfect expression of the divine. If there is uphill and downhill, progress and decline, it is within a cycle which can only be followed by another (theory of the succession of ages in Hesiod, of the return of the golden age in Virgil). On the other hand, the greatest determination comes from the past, not from the future: he finishes arch it refers first of all to the origin ("archaic") as an authority («archon», "monarch").
With the Bible, history becomes an objectifiable phenomenon, a dynamic of progress that aims, from a messianic perspective, to the advent of a better world. Genesis assigns man the mission of "dominating the Earth". Temporality is the vector thanks to which the best are called to gradually reveal themselves in the world. Consequentially, the event takes on a role of salvation: God reveals himself historically. Furthermore, temporality, is oriented towards the future, from Creation to Parousia, from the Garden of Eden to the Last Judgment. The golden age is no longer in the past, but at the end of time: the story will end, and it will end well, at least for the elect.
This linear temporality excludes any eternal return, every cyclical conception of history, from the image of the alternation of ages and seasons. From Adam and Eve, the history of salvation unfolds according to a necessity that has always been established, advances with the ancient Alliance e, in Christianity, culminates in an Incarnation that cannot be repeated. Saint Augustine will be the first to draw from this concept a philosophy of universal history that encompasses all of humanity, called to progress from age to age towards the better.
The theory of progress secularizes this linear conception of history, from which all modern historicisms derive. The biggest difference is that the afterlife gives way to the future and that happiness replaces salvation. In Christianity, progress indeed remains eschatological rather than historical in the literal sense. Man must try to build his salvation down here, but in perspective of the world above. He hasn't, on the other hand, no control on the divine plan. In the end, Christianity condemns insatiable desire and, like Stoicism, maintains that moral wisdom consists in the limitation rather than the multiplication of desires. Only the millennialist current, inspired by the Apocalypse, precedes the Last Judgment by a thousand years of earthly reign. Secularizing Augustine's vision, will inspire the spiritual posterity of Joachim of Fiore.
To arrive at its modern formulation, the theory of progress therefore needed additional elements which manifested themselves at the beginning of the Renaissance, and blossomed starting from the 17th century.
The development of science and technology, combined with the discovery of the New World, It thus nourishes optimism, opening the way to an infinite number of possible improvements. Francis Bacon, who is the first to use the word «progress» (progress) in a temporal and no longer spatial sense, states that man's role is to dominate nature by knowing its laws. Descartes also suggests that men become masters and possessors of nature. The latter written for Galileo Galilei «in mathematical language», it then becomes mute and inanimate. The cosmos no longer makes sense. It's nothing more than mechanics, that must be dismantled to understand and exploit it. The world becomes a pure object of man-subject. Man undergoes the conviction that, thanks to reason, he can only rely on himself.
The cosmos of the Ancients thus gives way to a new world, geometric, homogeneous e (presumably) infinite, governed by the law of cause and effect. The model that applies is a mechanical model, more precisely that of a clock. Time itself becomes homogeneous, measurable: it is the "time of the merchants", which takes over from the "time of the peasants" (Jacques Le Goff). The technical mentality arises from this new scientific spirit. The technique has the main objective of accumulating utility, that is, to help produce useful things.
There is an evident convergence between this scientific optimism and the aspirations of a bourgeois class on the verge of asserting itself on national markets whose creation went hand in hand with that of territorial kingdoms. The bourgeois mentality tends to consider them valid, and even real, the only calculable quantities, that is, mercantile values. Georges Sorel will see later, in the theory of progress, a "bourgeois doctrine".
In the 18th century, classical economists (Adam Smith, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume), for their part, they rehabilitate insatiable desire: the needs of man, according to them, are always subject to increase. It is therefore in the very nature of man to always want more and act accordingly, constantly trying to push his first interest to the maximum limit. Combined with the surrounding optimism, this argument tends to relativize or erase from the mind the theme of original sin.
It is therefore underlined, with particular insistence, the cumulative nature of scientific knowledge. The conclusion drawn from this is the necessary nature of progress: we will always know more, so everything will always get better. Given that good intellect is "composed of all those who preceded it", the constant superiority of the Moderns can be deduced from this: «We are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants», says Bernard of Clairvaux, and taken up by Fontenelle. Therefore the authority of the Ancients no longer exists. Indeed, tradition is perceived as a natural obstacle to the advance of reason. The comparison between present and past, always to the advantage of the first, at the same time it allows us to reveal the motion of the future. Comparative motion thus becomes absolute: progress, initially expressed as the result of evolution, is established as the principle of this evolution.
Another idea, already formulated by Saint Augustine, it is that of humanity conceived as a unitary organism, who would have progressively abandoned the childhood of the "early eras" to enter "adulthood". Turgot thus speaks of the «human race, considered starting from its origin […] which appears in the eyes of the philosopher to be an immense whole that has like every individual, his childhood and his progress". Mechanism here gives way to organic metaphor, but it is a paradoxical organicism since neither aging nor death are taken into consideration. This vision of a collective organism that constantly becomes "more adult" will give rise to the contemporary idea of ​​"development" understood as indefinite growth. In the 18th century, it encourages a certain contempt for childhood, which proceeds hand in hand with disdain for origins and beginnings, always considered inferior.
The notion of progress also implies the idolatry of new: every new thing is better in its own right simply because it is new. This thirst for "new", systematically considered synonymous with best, it will quickly become one of the obsessions of modernity. In art, it will lead to the notion of "avant-garde" (which also has its counterparts in politics).
The theory of progress now has all its components. In the 1750, Turgot and later Condorcet, they express it in the form of a belief that is formulated in a simple way: “The total mass of mankind is ever advancing towards greater perfection”. The history of humanity is therefore perceived as absolutely unitary. What has been preserved from Christianity is the idea of ​​a future perfection of humanity and the certainty that humanity is headed towards a single goal. That which is abandoned, it is the role of Providence, replaced by human reason. Universalism is founded, from now on, on a reason «one and entire in each one», which overflows every context and transcends every particularity.
In parallel, man is not just a being of desires and needs, which are repeated without respite, but also an infinitely perfectible being. A new anthropology makes it a clean slate at birth, a virgin wax, or attributes to it an abstract "nature"., totally dissociated from its concrete existence. Human diversity, individual or collective, it is seen as contingent and indefinitely transformable through education and "the environment". The notion of artifice becomes central and synonymous with a refined culture. It is assumed that man realizes himself only by opposing a nature from which he must free himself in order to "civilize" himself.
Humanity must then free itself from everything that could hinder the unstoppable advance of progress: the "prejudices", the "superstitions", the "weight of the past". It is mentioned here, reflexively, to the justification of the Terror: if humanity has progress as its necessary goal, anyone who hinders progress can legitimately be suppressed; anyone who opposes the progress of humanity can legitimately be excluded from humanity and declared an "enemy of mankind" (hence the difficulty of reconciling the two Kantian affirmations of the equal dignity of men and the progress of humanity). Modern totalitarianisms (Soviet communism, national socialism) they will spread the idea that there are "excess men", whose mere existence prevents the advent of a better world.
This attitude of rejection of "nature" and the "past" is often represented as synonymous with a liberation from any determinism. Actually, determination by the past is replaced by determination by the future: it is the "sense of history".
The optimism inherent in the theory of progress quickly extends to all areas, to society and to man. It is hypothesized that the reign of reason leads to a simultaneously transparent and pacified society. Considered beneficial to all parties, the "sweet trade" (Montesquieu) is called to replace exchange with conflict, whose "irrational" causes will be progressively eliminated. The abbot of Saint-Pierre states thus, long before Kant, a "perpetual peace project", which Rousseau will criticize harshly. Condorcet proposes to rigorously perfect the language and spelling. Morality itself must present all the characteristics of a science. Education aims to accustom children to get rid of "prejudices", source of all social evils, and to make use of reason alone.
Humanity's march towards happiness is therefore understood as the completion of moral happiness. For the men of the Enlightenment, given that man will act in an increasingly "enlightened" way in the future, reason will be perfected and humanity will also become better. Progress, far from affecting only the external framework of existence, it will therefore transform man himself. Progress achieved in one field will inevitably be reflected in all others. Material progress determines moral progress.
On the political level, the theory of progress is quickly associated with an anti-political animus. The gaze placed on the State by the theorists of progress is however ambiguous. On the one hand, the State harnesses the autonomy of the economy, considered as the sphere of "freedom" and rational action par excellence: William Godwin states that governments by nature create obstacles to man's natural propensity to evolve. On the other, allows man, in the contractual tradition inaugurated by Hobbes, to escape the constraints of the "state of nature". The State can therefore be both an obstacle and a driver of progress at the same time.
The most common idea is that politics must become rational. Political action must cease to be an art, governed by the principle of prudence, to become a science, governed by the principle of reason. In the image of the universe, society can be considered a mechanism, of which individuals are the cogs. It must therefore, be managed rationally on the basis of principles as regular as those observed in physics. The sovereign must be the physicist responsible for making "social physics" evolve towards "the greatest public utility". This concept will inspire the technocracy and the administrative and managerial conception of politics that will be found in a Saint-Simon or an Auguste Comte.
A particularly important question is to know whether progress is indefinite or whether it leads to a final or terminal stage which would be either an absolute novelty, or as the most "perfect" restitution of an original or previous state: Hegelian synthesis, classless society that reconstitutes primitive communism (Marx), the end of the story (Fukuyama), etc. At the same time, the question arises of knowing in advance whether the final goal exists, if there was one. What does progress lead to?, however much it results in something other than itself?
Who, liberals tend to believe in indefinite progress, to an endless improvement of the human condition, while the socialists rather give it a happy end, well determined. This second attitude brings together progressivism and utopianism: perpetual change results in the stationary state, the movement of history asserts itself only to better predict its end. The first attitude, however, is no longer realistic. On the one hand, if man is on the path towards perfection, as a call to fulfillment, it must one day cease to perfect itself. On the other hand, if there is no understandable goal of progress, how can we still talk about progress, since only the recognition of a given goal allows us to affirm that a new state represents, with respect to this goal, an improvement compared to the previous state?
Another equally important question is this: progress is an uncontrolled force that acts on its own, or men must intervene to accelerate it or even eliminate what hinders it? On the other hand, progress is regular and continuous, or implies sudden qualitative leaps and ruptures? You can accelerate progress by intervening in its course or you risk it, by doing so, to delay its implementation? Here too, the liberals, advocates of the "invisible hand" and "laisser-faire", they separate from the socialists, more volunteers, if not revolutionaries.
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It was precisely in the 19th century that the theory of progress reached its apogee in the West. However, it is reformulated in a different climate, marked by industrial modernization, scientistic positivism, evolutionism and the appearance of the great historicist theories.
The emphasis is then placed on science rather than reason, in the philosophical sense of the term. The hope of a "scientific" organization of humanity and of the domination of all social phenomena by science is spreading. It is the theme to which Fourier tirelessly returns, with his Phalanstery, Saint-Simon, with its technocratic principles, Auguste Comte, with his Positivist Catechism and his "religion of progress".
The terms "progress" and "civilization" tend to become synonymous at the same time. The idea of ​​progress serves to legitimize colonization, which should spread, anywhere in the world, the benefits of "civilization".
The notion of progress is reformulated in the light of Darwinian evolutionism, the evolution of the living being itself reinterpreted as progress (particularly in Herbert Spencer, which defines progress as evolution from simple to complex, from homogeneous to heterogeneous). Consequentially, the conditions of progress are significantly transformed. Enlightenment mechanism is henceforth combined with biological organicism, while his ostentatious pacifism gives way to the apologia of the "fight for life". From now on, progress comes from the selection of the "most suitable" (the "best"), in a generalized competitive vision. This reinterpretation encourages Western imperialism: since Western civilization is "the most advanced", it is also inevitably the best.
It is precisely then that social evolutionism reaches its peak of popularity. The history of humanity is divided into successive "stages"., which mark the different stages of its "progress". The dispersion of different cultures in space is transposed over time: "primitive" societies would send back to Westerners the image of their past (they are "contemporary ancestors"), while the West would present them with their future. Condorcet made humanity pass through ten successive stages. Hegel, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Freud, ecc., propose similar schemes, ranging from "superstitious belief" to "science", from the "theological" era to the "scientific" era, from the "primitive" or "magical" mentality to the "civilized" mentality and the universal realm of reason.
Combined with scientistic positivism, which concerns anthropology first and foremost and nourishes the illusion that culture can be measured absolutely in terms of value, this theory is at the origin of racism, which perceives traditional civilizations as definitively inferior, both as provisionally late (the "civilizing mission" of the colonial powers consists in making them fill this gap), and postulates the existence of a universal criterion, an overarching paradigm, which allows us to hierarchize cultures and peoples. Racism therefore appears directly linked to the universalism of progress which in turn hides an unconscious or hidden ethnocentrism.
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The criticism of the idea of ​​progress will not be discussed here, which in the modern era begins with Rousseau, nor of the countless theories of decadence or decline that have been opposed to it. It will only be noted that the latter often represent (but not always) the double negative, the specular reflection, of the theory of progress. The idea of ​​a necessary movement of history is preserved, but in a reverse perspective: the story is interpreted, not as a constant progression, but as an inevitable regression (punctual or generalized). Actually, the notion of decadence or decline appears to be just as difficult to objectify as that of progress.
For at least twenty years, works on the disillusionments of progress are multiplying. Some authors go so far as to say that the idea of ​​progress is nothing more than a "dead idea" (William Pfaff). Reality undoubtedly has more nuances. The theory of progress is seriously questioned nowadays, but there is no doubt that it survives in different forms.
The totalitarianisms of the 20th century and the two world wars have, with all evidence, the optimism of the previous two centuries was undermined. The disillusions on which many revolutionary hopes were shattered have given rise to the idea that current society, however disappointing and senseless, despite everything, it is the only one possible: social life is increasingly lived within the horizon of fatality. The future, which now appears unpredictable, inspires more anxiety than hope. The worsening of the crisis appears more likely than a "bright future".
The idea of ​​unitary progress is demolished. It is no longer believed that material progress makes man better, or that progress achieved in one field automatically has repercussions in others. In the "risk society" (Ulrich Beck), material progress appears ambivalent. It is recognized that benefits come at a price. It is clear that wild urbanization has multiplied social pathologies and that industrial modernization has led to an unprecedented degradation of the natural environment. The massive destruction of the environment has given rise to ecological movements, who were among the first to unmask the "illusions of progress". The development of technoscience, In the end, it also raises the question of purposes. The development of the sciences is no longer perceived as something that always contributes to the happiness of humanity: the same knowledge, as we learn from the debate on biotechnology, is considered a threat. In ever larger sections of the population, we begin to understand that more is not synonymous with better. A distinction is made between having and being, material happiness and happiness "tout court".
However, the theme of progress remains significant, even if only on a symbolic basis. The political class continues to appeal to a group of "forces of progress" against the "men of the past" and to thunder against "medieval obscurantism" (or the "customs of another era"). In public discourse, the word "progress" retains overall a broad resonance or positive charge.
The orientation towards the future remains equally dominant. Even if we admit that the future is full of threatening uncertainties, we continue to believe, logically speaking, that things should overall improve in the future. Replaced by the development of cutting-edge technologies and media planning of fashions, the cult of novelty remains as strong as ever. However, we continue to believe that man is all the more "free" the more he completely uproots himself from his biological ties or from his traditions inherited from the past. Dominant individualism, – combined with a Western ethnocentrism that is now legitimized with the ideology of human rights – is expressed through the destructuring of the family, the dissolution of social bonds and the discredit of traditional Third World societies where individuals are still in solidarity with the community they belong to.
But above all, the theory of progress remains widely present in its productivist version. It nourishes the idea that indefinite growth is both normal and desirable and that a better future necessarily passes through the constant increase in the volume of goods produced, and also that it favors the globalization of trade. In the current era this idea inspires the ideology of "development", which continues to consider societies to belong to the Third World (economically) behind the West and to make the Western model of production and consumption the exhilarating destiny of all humanity. This ideology of development was entirely formulated by Walt Rostow, that in 1960 enumerated the "stages" that all societies on the planet must go through to access the universe of consumption and mercantile capitalism. As several authors have argued (Serge Latouche, Gilbert Rist, ecc.), development theory is ultimately nothing more than a belief. Until we have abandoned this belief, we will not yet have closed the argument on the ideology of progress.
A.D.
Translation by Cristina Laura Masetti