The Possibility of "Moral Progress"

It is the nearly unanimous opinion of historians of the Enlightenment that the most significant distinguishing feature of modernity is the idea of progress. The concept of progress sprang largely from postmillennial Christian eschatology, which suggested that history has a telos: that is going somewhere. This idea had appeal outside Christianity, especially in an age of revolutions. First there had been the Renaissance, which in English means "rebirth", and its accompanying humanist interest in reviving art, literature, and culture and in moving beyond the narrow ignorance of what these new intellectuals called the "Middle Ages". Then there was the Reformation, which freed a generation of Christians from the corrupt rule of popes like Alexander VI and Leo X and which revitalized Christian piety, providing a sense of transcendent security against temporal horrors like the Black Death. Then came the Enlightenment: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and European hegemony over the world. It was a golden age of science and philosophy. Isaac Newton presented a vision of the universe as a self-regulating system: constant, stable, and governed by invisible forces that could only be the hand of God. Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, which expressed confidence that in a free-market economy with no tariffs or controls, the nature of the system would bring about a self-regulated prosperity driven by entrepreneurs and consumers, supply and demand. Charles Darwin showed that the process of competition and natural selection led lower lifeforms to evolve higher mental functions. Writers like Tocqueville and Philip Schaff saw in America an experiment in religious freedom that proved that the religious diversity created by a separation of church and state resulted in a far more vital Christianity than could be found in any of the old European state churches. The Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley saw Britain taking steps toward disestablishment and religious freedom, and expressed his confidence that said freedom would result in the Christianization-- his particular Unitarian brand of Christianity, of course-- of the world. He foresaw the emergence of a global moral, political, and economic paradise that would usher in the Second Coming of Christ. At the end of the 19th century the march of progress seemed irresistible, and anything seemed possible.

And then humanity embarked on the bloodiest century in human history. World War I, early in the century, was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Then World War II came some two decades later, and was infinitely more horrific: the Nazi ideology led to the massacre of millions of Jews, Japan crushed the Pacific in its iron grip of monstrous tyranny, and even Russia-- that inestimable ally of the forces of good-- was in the grip of the cruel Stalin and his Bolshevik army. The end of the World War ushered in a Cold War, and China fell to the mass-murderer Mao and his Communist rebels. Brutal combat ensued in Palestine, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Tibet. The Cuban Missile Crisis showed the world just how fragile is its continued existence. Even after Communism in Russia fell, its democracy remained fragile: Putin shows signs of erecting a new, dynastic fascism in the motherland. China, moreover, is on the rise, Islamic fundamentalism continues to spread, and ethnic violence in Africa is so commonplace that news networks hardly bother to cover it anymore. To say the least, the facile optimism of the Enlightenment has been replaced a century later by a pessimism that is equally infectious.

Recently I reviewed a book by David W. Bebbington in which he was dismissive of the idea of progress. He writes,

Knowledge and the ability to apply knowledge to technical problems have advanced. But that says nothing about moral progress. The napalm bomb is as much a triumph of applied science as penicillin. How increased human knowledge has been put to use shows small sign of having improved over the centuries. (Patterns in History, p. 89)

Bebbington also finds great irony in Shirley Jackson Case' 1943 assertion that "A gradually enlarging circle of mankind has learned to cherish ways of living that exemplify honesty, justice, and brotherly kindness," when at the time she spoke the Holocaust was at its height. The Holocaust, Bebbington says, was history's revenge against modernist theology (ibid., 181-2).

Not everyone shares Bebbington's negative assessment of the idea of progress. Professor J. H. Plumb wrote in 1969 (at the height of the Cold War) that "mankind has improved, materially alas more than morally, but nevertheless both have improved" (The Death of the Past, p. 142). More recently Richard John Neuhaus of First Things wrote,

In the history of our own country, we have put slavery and legally imposed racial segregation behind us, and almost nobody doubts that this counts as moral progress. More ambiguously, there are the recent decades of changing sex roles and redefinitions of the family. The proponents of such changes express confidence that their recognition as progress is only a matter of time. Also in the realm of what we might call political morality, it would seem that we have learned from the catastrophes of the past. Outside the weekend militias, very few people today advocate a regime based upon the superiority of Aryan blood; and outside our universities, very few propose the state collectivization of private property. Moreover, it is surely great progress that, at least in the West, we do not kill one another in wars of religion. Whether this is because of a decline in religious commitment or because we have come to recognize that it is the will of God that we not kill one another over our disagreements about the will of God, it is undoubtedly a very good thing...the immediate point is that those who adhere to the gospel of progress are not without considerable evidence to support their faith. (Source)

Of course, in the same article Neuhaus could muse,

How can one seriously believe in progress at the end of what is undeniably the bloodiest century in history-the century of the Battle of the Somme, of Auschwitz, of the Gulag Archipelago, of Maoism, of obliteration bombing, and of mass starvation as government policy? In this century, so many people have been deliberately killed by other people that the estimates of historians vary by the tens of millions, and they end up by agreeing to split the difference or to round off the victim count at the nearest ten million. One might conclude that it has not been a good century for the idea of progress in general, and of moral progress in particular. (Source)

Neuhaus does not particularly resolve the tension between these strikingly disparate portraits of recent history, though he does repudiate what Bebbington calls the "strong" view of progress, namely that history is marching automatically and irresistibly toward utopia. But, despite some further fears that postmodern nihilism may actually be leading to moral regression, Neuhaus does remain open to a view of progress in which "human beings are free agents who are capable of participating in the transcendent purpose that is immanent in history and holds the certain promise of vindicating all that is true, good, and beautiful" (Ibid.).

I agree with Neuhaus that the "strong" view of progress is untenable, and that any advances that are made in human history will be rooted firmly in free agency. But I also tend to be skeptical of Bebbington's sweeping dismissals of the idea of progress altogether. I hope here to make a few strides toward the enunciation of an idea of progress for the twenty-first century.

First of all, I'm not certain it is fair to judge the moral state of humanity in the twenty-first century by the scope of the bloodshed the century has seen. In the last 2,000 years, the population of the world has increased from about 200 million to 6 billion. In 1900 the population was only 1.7 billion, which means that in the last century it increased more than threefold (Source). In the same period human technology leapfrogged from the Victorian Era, with its trains, rifles, and electric lighting, into the Digital Age of tanks, surface-to-air missiles, and ICBMs. There can be no question that humanity's capability to inflict vast amounts of damage on vast numbers of people increased dramatically over the last hundred years, and that technological progress has significantly outpaced any moral progress that might have occurred. Our chances of getting a bad apple, so to speak, are now three times as high as they were in 1900, and the ability of a single bad apple to spoil the whole bunch has been enhanced due to the ready availability of potentially devastating technology. So while there can be little question that the Holocaust was the most horrific event in the history of the world, there can also be little question that such an event was simply impossible prior to the 21st century. Premodern societies carried on genocides of their own. One need look no further than the Old Testament for a record of the systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group, in this case the Canaanites. Had the Israelites had at their disposal the tools of Adolf Hitler, the Bible might be filled with tales of gas showers and cremation chambers. Nor would the Israelite histories have a monopoly on such stories, for respect for human life in the ancient world was unfortunately sorely lacking.

It is worth adding, in a similar vein, that the idea of progress is closely related to historical memory. The hope of the modernist is that humanity will learn from its mistakes by internalizing the memory of events like the Holocaust. Since humanity had little experience of the devastating effects of things like nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-intellectualism, people in the 1930's had no reference point for identifying the warning signs in the Nazi regime. One would hope that we have learned our lesson and that, with the help of historians, World War II will not be repeated. To say that humanity is capable of progress is not to say that we don't usually learn the hard way.

It also probably is not fair to judge the march of moral progress by events that occur outside the West. The early proponents of progress recognized that there was something unique that had begun in the West, linked (they thought) to democracy and liberty, and that the rest of the world still lived in what Westerners considered heathen barbarism. Shirley Jackson Case claimed only that "a gradually enlarging circle of mankind" was progressing, not that progress could be found to be equally potent in every time and place.

The early proponents of progress were only partially correct to think of a return to the state of nature as the key to progress. Newton's concept of a perfectly orderly, symmetrical, self-regulated universe has since been modified as more data have been collected. The universe, it turns out, is much less orderly and much more dangerous than Newton realized. Paleontology and geology have made the extinction of the dinosaurs proverbial in our culture, reminding us how precarious is our position at the top of the food chain and at the pinnacle of the evolutionary scale. Adam Smith's laissez-faire prescription has been found to be less stable than he originally thought, and banking structures like the Federal Reserve have been introduced to help regulate it. (And in any case, a capitalist free-market economy is itself more a social structure than a state of nature.) Religious freedom has not resulted in the Christianization (let alone the Unitarianization) of the world, and in fact the toleration of Islamic fundamentalism in European nations is now widely perceived as a deadly threat to the fabric of progressive Western values. The fact is that while there is an unquestionable link between competition, liberty, and progress, controls are also necessary. We have to scan our skies for near-earth-objects. We have to tweak interest rates and prevent monopolies. We have to stress integration for immigrants and outlaw extreme religious practices.

In other words, what the West discovered in the Renaissance and in the decades that followed was that progress is made possible by channeling human ingenuity through appropriate structures. This is the case with a properly-structured and regulated capitalist economy, for example. Another example is that of the academic community. Although historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn has occasionally been portrayed as a postmodern pundit and a disbeliever in the scientific process, that's not the case at all. Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was designed to show how, far from the traditional picture of a researcher doing "pure science" for the good of mankind, the scientific process is channeled through the social and political institutions of the academic community. It involves competition for grants, prestige, fellowships, and tenured faculty positions as much as noble goodwill. But far from negating the value of science, Kuhn's observations actually give us insight into the nature of progress. The great breakthrough in Western civilization that made its technological advancement possible was the emergence of social, political, and ideological structures that more effectively channeled human ingenuity than had ever been done before. In the past several centuries more and more effective structures have emerged, as for example the introduction of "peer review" in the academic publishing world. The same has occurred in the sphere of moral progress, which has been facilitated in the United States by the development of more critical historical methodologies and by the American synthesis of republican and liberal constitutional government (as well as of civil religion and separation of church and state). The reason that progress has failed to occur in the same way outside the West has a great deal to do with the absence of these (or similar) structures and, in some cases, a deeply ingrained cultural antipathy to these structures.

All of this is to say that, despite setbacks and despite the outpacing of moral progress by technological progress, I remain hopeful that moral progress is possible especially in parts of the world that preserve historical memory and that have Western-style political and social structures. I also remain hopeful that, despite the apparently bleak prospects at present, it may be possible for similar political and social structures eventually to take root in the non-Western world. This is where the free-will mentioned by Neuhaus comes in: we need to apply our human ingenuity to the task of helping establish democratic and/or progress-inducing structures in other parts of the world, preferably without imposing them by means of immoral wars.