What does progress mean?
Modern people “know” that they live at the lucky end of a long line of progress. Their lives may be full of problems, but at least they don’t have to deal with being medieval – or worse. Modern people know (as many other societies have at different times in history) they are special, chosen, charmed.
On the face of it, this would be a claim of enormous arrogance. How do we “know” that it’s true?
The “proof” of modern civilization is its opposite: savagery. The idea of the savage is central to the modern imagination because it demonstrates, by counter-example, how blessed modernity is. Deprived of the achievements of modernity – technology and large-scale human organization – the life of a savage was necessarily “nasty, brutish and short”. Must the whole of their existence not have been devoted to wishing they were us?
The “proof” is dubious, however, because the “idea” of the savage is, for the most part, pure fantasy. It depends on scraps of speculation about how it was to live as an early human being (summed up in the term of abuse that “Neanderthal” has become), half-remembered adventure stories about modern-day “primitives” (I just saw Pirates of the Caribbean and it seems all these clichés are still cherished and alive), and a few clinging history lessons about the barbarism that was ubiquitous before fridges and cars came along.
(As well as, of course, the contemporary media’s love affair with the misery of all those “pre-modern” people in Africa and Asia, who are dying for the lack of modernity in their lives. In fact, the people in question are possibly the archetypal moderns, far more intimately involved with industrialization, urbanization, climate change and the expansion of markets than the average urban European. Why should we believe the ads and think that the most archetypal figure of the modern age dresses in Armani?)
Now: how would we feel about progress, and modern life, if it became clear that “savagery” was in fact the most blessed and sophisticated state of human existence? If in fact the life of ancient human beings was characterized not by scarcity, but abundance; not by brutishness but by the love of knowledge and feeling?
This is the thesis put forward by , an American philosopher who alleges, in his book, Future Primitive, that there is no case to suggest that human intelligence has increased over the last few hundred thousand years. In his view of things, in fact, the turn to agriculture – which led to the specialization of roles, the accumulation of surplus, and the emergence of cities – divorced human beings from the most astonishing aspects of their own potential. Zerzan’s thesis, and his evidence, are given in much more detail .
In this view, the “savage” is a highly fulfilled creature. Surrounded by resources, his or her labour takes up little of the day, and the majority of the time can be devoted to intellectual, cultural and spiritual activity. Zerzan’s picture activates another great Western story that pre-dates the idea of progress: the idea of Eden, the memory of bliss, where bare man, pre-urban man, lives not in a wasteland but in a garden.
Where do Zerzan’s reflections leave the idea of progress? They strip it, surely, of all its grandest claims, and reduce it to certain kinds of processual intensification. They make it more difficult for us to pity those whose lives are not consumed by this same intensification, and diminish in us the desire to convert. They open us to the likelihood that the grandiose achievement of a whole society may be entirely invisible to us merely because we can “see” only technological advancement and mass human organisation, and neither of these seem to feature there.
I begin this blog with notes on the “primitive” or “savage” because it is essential, when we think about the world’s cities, that we allow for the possibility that the best outcome for the world may not be that the entirety of it look like Europe or America. A popular theme for western travellers when visiting, say, my city of Delhi, is the various sorts of regulation and obedience that would make the place “better”. But this ideal of regulation and conformism has a particular history – a history of enormous violence – and it’s important to accept that people might live wonderful lives without going anywhere near it. How one can develop cities that can successfully accommodate this variety of experience is one of the most essential contemporary challenges for the world’s cities.
I’ll carry on with this soon. Meanwhile, if you’re interested, look at a on my part to wrestle with the rise of certain Third World cities – the astonishing fertility arising from cities that look nothing like European and American cities, and the implications of this for all cities of the future.
It would be better to have the positive aspects of progress without its negative aspects [more envy, lack of communications...]
We should define "progress" before writing about it. Progress of a country or civilization is related to the variation of the amount of labor needed for people to live socially acceptable lives. Where good progress has been made, the proportion of time available for leasure (the opposite of working time) should be comparatively high. Progress is not simply the rate of growth or increase in efficiency but it is the past history of this when spread over time and taken all together (integrated).
Unfortunately its not as simple as this due to two factors. 1. The distribution of this proportion amongst the various classes of people is also most significant and 2. the degree of unemployment is also significant.
Consequently the society that has progressed the most has a) no unemployment but b) its various classes of people all have roughly the same proportion of leasure time and c) confirms to the average living standard with only small differences.
Clearly many countries have huge differences in these three aspects of living of their peoples and it can therefore be said that whilst technology has developed, the amount of true progress that this has caused is terribly small. The reason for this situation is clearly not to be found in the technology itself but the way that it is governed and used.
The question of poverty amongst riches is an old one and it was first answered more than 100 years ago by macroeconomist Henry George whose book "Progress and Poverty" opens with the "Great Enigma of our Times" namely the existance of poverty in a society where extremly wealthy people are the ones who benefit the most from recent technology. The reason George give for this enigma is that it is due the monopoly of the natural resources, particularly the land and it productivity as a function of population density and the way its surplus bounty is not properly collected for use by the whole community. The surplus bounty is of course the ground rent, a potential earning power of every site within the reach of society. Much of this rent is due to the amount of local investment in the infrastructure of the town. The earnings of this kind of investment is a public and not a private benefit, but in fact the opposite is mostly the case.
Thus a clear understanding of the meaning of progress and some relatively simple arguements about it, can help us see the truth.
Thanks, David Chester, for interesting comments.
"Progress", in your picture, leads to a better society - defined by the greatest possibility equality of leisure, income and access to employment.
Who could deny the desirability of such a society? I would simply offer a few provocations.
First: the unequal distribution of leisure is a less simple idea than when Marx and others wrote about it in the 19th century, and when the "leisured classes" seemed to have a monopoly. Leisure is now significantly diminished in all income groups, and the financial elites might actually have less of it than many other people. The 19th century idea of labour as an imposition has been replaced in many people's lives by the idea of self-fulfillment through [hard] work, and this has to be acknowledged by people who wish to imagine the ideal society.
Second: "progress" is a process, not a state. You describe elegantly a desirable state, but the process by which it might be achieved is unclear. The project of equalising all these parameters - leisure, income, access to employment - implies a high level of centralised information about everyone in a society. (Unless we are talking about a kind of early modern municipal society where there is high transparency about everyone one the community.) The establishment of such centralisation is not an innocent process, and may carry with it many detriments to utopia.
Finally: Like other pictures of the ideal society, yours is not self-evident or universally accepted. In the US, especially, many would say it implies an unacceptable curtailment of individual freedom. Whatever you think about that, you would have to acknowledge that some will see regression where you see progress and that the resulting battles to impose a vision will not necessarily improve human life.
I would only add that the picture I began with, that of the romanticised savage society where there are ample resources, abundant leisure, and almost no variations in "wealth", still seems to do well by your criteria!
Thanks again.
David Chester's stark language of progress seem a little dogmatic. Defining progress as a qualitative distinction imposes a belief system onto the reader: One persons progress is anothers genocide.
If a person, defined as not being a member of a progressive society, is suddenly given all the qualitative trappings of progress, has their life been improved? What desires and motivations of the individual does progress hope to fulfill?
Certain that the counter argument would be that progress allows the individual to meet their desires with equal opportunity, the retort is: But thats crap isn't it.
There will always exist vast numbers of individuals that fall outside of this concept of progress, it must then be seen that the concept is flawed. Concider the following expressions: 'Money can't buy you love.', 'You can't take it with you when you die.', 'If I could change anything about my life it would be....'. It is certain that the expressions all allude to something greater than materialism, spirituality perhaps, whatever its label is, its constituent parts are not the tangible gifts of opportunity.
The automatic assumption that a lack of progress in fiscal or industrial terms spells doom for humaanity is absurd. The tri-state progress has zero growth as a possibility which right now seems more sustainable than rampant unchecked consumerism.
These articles are appearing around the world for a reason, that being, the individuals are pausing for thought, concidering the world and its numerous views. Media organisations all over are asking the individual to concider these concepts in a way that has never been managed before, a universal philosophical discourse.
Beware the pedagogues for they are vested. The only world view is the one from your own eyes.