History of the Idea of Progress

Robert Nisbet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351515467
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The idea of progress from the Enlightenment to postmodernism is still very much with us. In intellectual discourse, journals, popular magazines, and radio and talk shows, the debate between those who are "progressivists" and those who are "declinists" is as spirited as it was in the late seventeenth century. In History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet traces the idea of progress from its origins in Greek, Roman, and medieval civilizations to modern times. It is a masterful frame of reference for understanding the present world.

Nisbet asserts there are two fundamental building blocks necessary to Western doctrines of human advancement: the idea of growth, and the idea of necessity. He sees Christianity as a key element in both secular and spiritual evolution, for it conveys all the ingredients of the modern idea of progress: the advancement of the human race in time, a single time frame for all the peoples and epochs of the past and present, the conception of time as linear, and the envisagement of the future as having a Utopian end.

In his new introduction, Nisbet shows why the idea of progress remains of critical importance to studies of social evolution and natural history. He provides a contemporary basis for many disciplines, including sociology, economics, philosophy, religion, politics, and science. History of the Idea of Progress continues to be a major resource for scholars in all these areas.

Part I

The Genesis and Development of the Idea of Progress

Chapter 1

The Classical World

IS the idea of progress to be found in classical Greek and Roman thought: the idea that mankind has slowly, gradually, and continuously advanced from an original condition of cultural deprivation, ignorance, and insecurity to constantly higher levels of civilization, and that such advancement will, with only occasional setbacks, continue through the present into the future? The answer to this question is an emphatic yes, as the contents of this chapter will make evident.

It would be disingenuous, however, to omit reference here to the long-held, contrary view of this subject, one with a great deal more currency than the one 1 have just stated. From at least the time of Auguste Comte, whose volumes on Positive Philosophy published in the 1830s made the “law of progress” the very foundation stone of his view of civilization, the judgement has prevailed that the ancients knew nothing of the idea of the continuous progress of mankind from past to future. So learned a mind as Walter Bagehot wrote in 1872: “The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so much reject the idea; they did not even entertain the idea.” J. B. Bury, in his Idea of Progress, also denied the existence of the idea of progress in Greek and Roman thought (and in Christian thought as well) on the grounds, first, that their philosophers lacked awareness of a long historical past within which progress could be discerned; second, that they were victims of their own belief in a theory of historical degeneration (with the story of mankind perceived as one long decline from an original golden age); and, third, that Greek and Roman philosophers were generally com- mitted to an envisagement of human history as endlessly and recurrently cyclical, thus making any thought of linear advancement through the ages quite impossible.

Bury’s assessment of the matter—which, as noted, only echoes the assessments of Auguste Comte and a large number of other nineteenth-century philosophers, scientists, and historians—remains to this moment a part of the conventional wisdom regarding the classical world. Thus John Baillie, in his learned The Belief in Progress, finds the faint beginnings of the idea of progress not earlier than the beginning of Christianity. F. M. Cornford argues in his The Unwritten Philosophy that a conception of progress could not possibly have existed in Greece—so deeply and widely held was the idea of historical degeneration. The erudite W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s in London, in his Romanes Lecture—-delivered in 1920, the year Bury’s book was published-—declared that this “pernicious superstition” was the spawn of modernity, with not a trace of it to be found in either classical or Christian thought. R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History does not allow the ancient Greeks even a true sense of time and history, much less a conception of progress. And Hannah Arendt, who was so perceptive of the nature of the idea of progress and its capacity for evil as well as good, denies flatly that “such a thing as the progress of mankind [existed] prior to the seventeenth century.”

Weighty testimony indeed. But the truth, I believe, lies in the opposite corner. Through the specialized scholarship of such eminent classicists as Ludwig Edelstem, M. I. Finley, W. K. C. Guthrie, and Eric R. Dodds—not to ignore earlier studies by Frederick J. Teggart, Arthur O. Lovejoy, and George Boas—we have come to see that the Greeks and Romans, contrary to conventional interpretation, did have a distinct awareness of a long past, did see a measured progression of the arts and sciences and of man’s estate on earth, and did on occasion refer to a future in which civilization would have gone well beyond what it was in their own time. In the late sixth century, Xenophanes wrote: “The gods did not reveal to men all things from the beginning, but men through their own search find in the course of time that which is better.” Ludwig Edelstein, who regards Xenophanes’ words as the first statement in Western history of the idea of progress, assures us that Xenophanes meant his generalization to apply to the future as well as to the past and present.

M. I. Finley, in his TJie World of Odysseus, suggests that a recognition of the advancement of mankind through the centuries may be found even in Homer. The dread Cyclopes were seen by Odysseus as devoid of all culture, even agriculture (“they neither plant anything nor till,” Homer writes); but they were also seen as examples of what the Greeks themselves had once been, so far as culture was concerned. Behind the account of the Cyclopes, Finley writes, lies “a distinct view of social evolution. In primitive times, the poet seems to be suggesting, man lived in a state of permanent struggle and war to the death against the outsider. Then the gods intervened, and through their precepts, their themis, a new ideal was set before man, . . .” An ideal, Finley concludes, that would go a long way toward generating the actual progress the Greeks experienced down through the great fifth century B.C.

By the time we come to the fifth century B.C. awareness of and fascination with the idea of progress were relatively widespread. At the very beginning of that century Protagoras set forth his view that the history of man had been and would remain a progressive history. “By the classical period of Greek thought.” writes W. K. C. Guthrie, “the idea of a past Golden Age had been very widely replaced by the view of man’s early condition as ‘brutish’ and ‘disorderly.’” These words—-especially “brutish” or “animallike” are repeated as an echo by a number of writers. In this chapter we shall see abundant evidence of Greek and Roman belief in the progress of mankind through the ages as expressed in Hesiod, Protagoras, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Lucretius, and Seneca. As Protagoras put it: “In the course of time” or in Plato’s words, “little by little,” and pedetemtim pr ogre dient es, or “step-by-step” in Lucretius’ statement of the matter.

I am not arguing that the perspective of progress is the entire story of classical belief. There were those who were convinced that degeneration rather than progress was the true picture of man’s history, that a golden age had once existed, with all subsequent history one of decline and decay. Some of the writers we shall be concerned with in this chapter were able to hold to concepts of progress and of degeneration. None of this is to be denied. But it might be noted that we do find in our own century contrasting views of progress and decline, even theories of recurrent cycles. The point is not that the Greeks and Romans were unaware of the phenomena of degeneration, that they were without any belief whatever in a primordial golden age: it is that along with these beliefs existed beliefs in the progress of man from the remote past through the present, even to the distant future. Preoccupation with the future may not have been the same obsession among classical thinkers as it was among philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but, as Edelstein has demonstrated in detail, belief in progress extending into the distant future is to be found throughout the entire period that stretches from Xenophanes at the end of the sixth century B.C. to Seneca in the first century A.D.—belief for which the words of Seneca are entirely apposite: “The time will come when mental acumen and prolonged study will bring to light what now is hidden. . . . the time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of things so obvious.” We shall commence our story with Hesiod, who was second only to Homer in his appeal to not only the Greek philosophers but to countless other European thinkers down to the beginning of the modern age.

Hesiod

Any account of belief in progress among the ancient Greeks must begin with this extraordinary and so often misunderstood Boeotian farmer-philosopher of the late eighth century B.C. Almost invariably he is cast in the lineaments of pessimism (which to be sure he was not wholly lacking in) and of unqualified belief in degeneration from past to present and in the hopelessness of the future. But there is another, truer, and far more fertile Hesiod than the conventional one, and we shall be concerned here with him. For he is the real source of the Greek belief in progress, through history and reform.

His Theogony is cosmic in scope, a history of the formation of earth, sky, ocean (each likened unto a god or goddess), and of the convulsive couplings of gods and goddesses and the resulting births of new ones, which kept the universe for so long in a condition of war and other torment that makes Hobbes’s state of nature seem mild by comparison. “Verily, at first Chaos came to be,” Hesiod tells us—-but then shortly after, Earth and then, indis pensably, Eros or Love (in the Symposium Socrates, three centuries after Hesiod, would pay tribute to Hesiod’s vital introduction of Love). Afterward Heaven appeared on the scene, to He with Earth in one of the most cataclysmic embraces known in all literature, thus giving birth to Cronus who in turn sired, and came from jealousy to hate, Zeus. The great and ultimate achievement of Zeus, Hesiod declares, is the creation, but only after frenetic battles with the feared Titans and his theft of their awesome thunderbolts, of order and stability in the world. No one reading The Theogony could possibly deny Hesiod, or so it seems to me, a very real sense of both the passage of very long periods of time and of the progressive amelioration of the world in which humanity was to come into existence.

But for all the interest that The Theogony generates with its rich sexual and parturitional imagery, its episodes of terroristic war, mutilation, destruction, and final outcome of good, it is Hesiod’s Works and Days we are obliged to turn to, at least for purposes of our narrative. This is the work, written, it is judged, after the Theogony, that makes it possible for one commentator to declare Hesiod the first in the European tradition to use poetry for purposes of instruction: moral, religious, yes, but also political, social, and economic. In many ways, the book is a miscellany. We get from it extremely practical advice on the tilling of the soil and the proper harvesting of crops, on the proper ways to conduct business relationships, on the condition of justice in Hesiod’s time (appalling!), and on a great many other matters rooted in past, present, and also, by implication or adjuration, the future.

Among the book’s bequests to posterity are two which have had immense influence in Western thought: Hesiod’s telling of the myth of the successive, metallic ages: the golden, silver, bronze, and iron (with an age of heroes intercalated between the third and fourth); and second, the myth of Prometheus and his stealing of fire from Mt. Olympus to give to mankind, thus generating mankind’s capacity to move from primordial deprivation and fear to eventual civilization. There is a third myth, that of Pandora and her forbidden opening of the chest, thus inflicting upon man miseries not before known, which might be termed the genesis of male chauvinism in Western thought. 1 shall pass over it as it is not as closely related to our subject as the other two are.

Let us begin with the myth of the ages. The idea of a succession of ages over a long time span is by no means original with Hesiod or the Greeks. Other, much older literatures in the world, Egyptian and Babylonian included, make reference to these ages in one context or other. There is indeed, as has often been pointed out, a certain degree of archaeological sophistication in them. Irrespective of moral and spiritual implication, the succession from gold to iron has some correspondence with the actual historical succession of cultures in early times in the prehistory of Europe. Use of gold for ornamental purposes undoubtedly preceded use of silver, certainly of bronze and iron.

But Hesiod’s employment of the metallic ages is indubitably set in spiritual and moral contexts. It is important, however, to observe that Hesiod, in Works and Days, does not refer to ages as such, but to races. Thus in his telling it was the “golden race” that the gods first created. This race, we learn, was characterized on the one hand by ignorance of the practical arts, and on the other by moral probity, peacefulness, and, in general, happiness. This race existed in the time of Cronus, predecessor to Zeus, and eventually they were removed, hidden in the earth. Following them is the “silver race.” “in no way like the first, in body or mind.” Such indeed was their wickedness, their fondness for war and other kinds of strife, that Zeus, by now supreme, put them out of existence. Thee Zeus created a third race, one of bronze. What this race of men cherished above all things was martial combat» They were hardhearted but nevertheless impressive in their pursuit of valor. Their armor, housing, and implements, were all made of bronze; iron had riot yet come into being. This bronze race, Hesiod writes, destroyed themselves through unending warfare and went down without name or any other identity to Hades. Zeus then created a fourth race, of ‘“hero-men”—also skilled in the arts of war, brave and bold in battles at Thebes and Troy, and, unlike their predecessor race, aware of and respectful to justice. Eventually they too disappeared, many by death in battle, but others, by Zeus’s own providence, permitted to live eternally, in happiness and moral probity, on the Isles of the Blest. Last of all comes the “iron race.” of which Hesiod himself was a member. He has much to say about the toil, the torment, the injustice, the cruel deprivations to which his own racéis subjected. Hence the famous words: “Would that I lived not among the fifth race of men, but had died before or been born afterward.”

Clearly, there is basis for the conventional interpretation of the myth of the ages : that of a cycle of degeneration beginning with the golden race and culminating in the iron; a cycle that would repeat itself endlessly, thus giving foundation to Hesiod’s wish that he had been bom earlier—among men of gold, say, at the beginning of his own cycle, or later at the beginning of the new cycle, also golden. There is basis for this reading of the myth, and I am frank in saying that until three or four years ago Î so read it myself.

I do no longer. Careful reading of the myth itself and a placing of it in conjunction with other themes of Hesiod’s work suggests something rather different. In the first place, the sequence given us by Hesiod is by no means one of unrelieved worsening of the lot of mankind. There is no doubt that for Hesiod the first of the races, the golden race, was indeed a pure and happy one, devoid though it was of the skills and arts which would in time increase man’s material comforts. But the very next race created (there is no implica» tion in Hesiod of any genetic descent of the races) is not a second best in any sense. It comes close to being the very converse of the first. The bronze race that is third in order of time is markedly better than its silver predecessor and the next succeeding race, that of “hero-men,” is better yet. This, as noted, is the race that acquitted itself so valiantly that those not killed in war were settled by Zeus in the Isles of the Blest.

Nor, to come now to the real point, is the iron race as monolithically evil as conventional interpretation would have it. Moreover, this race is far from being committed by Zeus to early extinction because of its injustices and immoralities. True, Hesiod tells us that Zeus will destroy this race, but that declaration ends with the words “when they come to have gray hair on their temples at birth,” a fate Hesiod does not seem to believe to be exactly imminent. His comment, taken in larger context, is much like our own “until hell freezes over.” a reference of unlikelihood, not of serious expectation. And consider the following passage from Works and Days. It appears after one of Hesiod’s several condemnations of those who fail to observe justice and thus cause much unhappiness.

But to those who give straight judgment to strangers and to the men of the land, and not aside from what is just, their city flourishes, and the people prosper in it. Peace, the nurse of children, is abroad in their land, and all-seeing Zeus never decrees cruel war against them. Neither famine nor disaster ever haunt men who do true justice; but light-heartedly they tend the fields which are their care. The earth bears them victual in plenty, and on the mountans the oak bears acorns upon the top and bees in the midst. The wooly sheep are laden with fleeces; their women bear children like parents. They flourish continually with good things, and do not travel on ships, for the grain-giving earth bears them fruit.”

This is no golden age of the past that Hesiod is writing about, but rather the kind of life that all of his own race may anticipate provided they clean up current injustices and commit themselves to lives of rectitude. It is, only too clearly, progressive reform that Hesiod is holding up to us, reform that can make life for this contemporary iron race of men not only endurable but desirable. The eminent Berkeley classicist, the late George M. Calhoun, a half-century ago reached this assessment of Hesiod in his book, The Growth of Criminal Law in Ancient Greece:

One cannot read far in the Works and Days without perceiving that here is the genesis of our political literature. For the first time an author addresses himself consciously and deliberately to the social and political problems of his day. He presents a vigorous arraignment of things as they are, and also a program of reform, founded upon the twofold gospel of industry in the individual and justice in those who rule the state. Bitter as is the poet’s sense of personal injury, it is almost lost, as he progresses with his theme, in righteous indignation against the greater social wrong of which his own experience is but a single instance.

Let us go back again to the famous lines in which he laments the hardships and injustices of his own age: “For now, verily, is a race of iron, Never do men rest from toil and hardship, nor from suffering by night, and sore cares shall the gods lay upon them. Howbeit, even for these shall good be mingled with evil.” (Italics added) Any dispassionate reading of that final line suggests no doomsayer at all, but instead a mind that can see and foresee the good that comes from discipline, hard work, and honesty.

Why would Hesiod be as admonitory to his brother Perses as he is in the following lines, if only inexorable decline and destruction were seen by Hesiod to lie ahead?

To you. Perses, Î speak with good intent.... Long and steep is the way thereto, and it is rough work at the first, but when one has reached the top, easy is it thereafter despite its hardness .... Both gods and men are wroth with a man who lives in idleness, for in nature he is like the stingless drones who waste the labor of the bees, eating without working; but let it be your care to order your work properly, that in the right season your barns may be full....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Part I The Genesis and Development of the Idea of Progress
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Classical World
• Chapter 2 The Early Christians
• Chapter 3 Medieval Currents
• Chapter 4 The Renaissance: Some Cross-Currents
• Chapter 5 The Great Renewal
• Part II The Triumph of the Idea of Progress
• Introduction
• Chapter 6 Progress as Freedom
• Chapter 7 Progress As Power
• Chapter 8 The Persistence of Progress
• Chapter 9 Progress At Bay
• Epilogue
• Index