The Truth in Progress

Even among soi-disant “progressives,” the idea of progress is out of vogue these days, either written off as a relic of the Enlightenment or denounced as a canard of Western imperialism. For a bygone older generation, the myth of progress perished with Hiroshima: It symbolized the advent of a world in which our scientific intelligence had become tragically commensurate to our most vicious appetites.

In the age of relativism, progress itself has come to seem a perniciously elitist and Eurocentric concept, a useful ideological tool for advancing a global capitalist agenda at the expense of what is condescendingly referred to as the “developing world.” And the neo-conservatives, who have portrayed themselves as the paladins of “end of history” Hegelian progressivism, are routinely demonized for leading the United States into a mistaken war in Iraq. All told, progress and the talk thereof have become nothing short of a pariah.

But it would be a mistake to abandon the idea of progress because history does not follow a linear path to social harmony or because most progress—though certainly not all—has an embarrassingly Western origin. As logical positivists like Wittgenstein showed, it is a “pseudo-problem” to argue over which value system or civilization is objectively superior, but in empirical terms of human happiness, progress is a fact, one that it would be a disservice to human history and the future to deny.

From the plush vantage of 21st century suburbia, it is easy to forget how much real, substantive progress has been made in relatively little time. Due to advances in sanitation, medicine, and education, life expectancy worldwide has dramatically increased in the past two centuries from 30 years in 1800 to 67 years today, while infant mortality rates have plummeted from 21.7 percent to 0.6 percent in 2000. Diseases like small pox, tuberculosis, and syphilis that once ravaged the Western world have virtually disappeared here. And the development of scientific farming methods, factories, electricity, mass transportation, and even computers has increased the material well-being of whole populations while dramatically reducing the pool of disenfranchised laborers. The result is that reading and writing, once the perquisite of a choice aristocratic class, have been democratized: In 1870, only two percent of American adults had earned a high school diploma, compared to 80 percent today.

Although the lion’s share of recent progress has been the boon of non-western countries, the developing world still lags appallingly behind in basic health, economic development, and education. An estimated 39.5 million people were living with AIDS in 2006, while 2.7 million people die of malaria each year, 75 percent of them African children.

Due to corruption, mismanagement, and endemic warfare, nearly three billion people—half of the world—live on less than $2 per day, and nearly a billion people cannot read or write. The temptation is to assign blame to the legacy of Western colonialism, but work such as that of Dartmouth economists James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote complicates the picture. Their research, examining 77 islands in the Atlantic, Pacific, and elsewhere, found that longer time spent as a colony translates into a better current standard-of-living and a lower infant mortality rate. Obviously, the abuses and depredations of colonialism were deplorable, but the overall influence of the West on the developing world is surely not the bete noire many would have us believe it to be.

No one can look at the empirical data and deny the existence of material progress, but many contend that there has not been concomitant moral progress—a sublimation of our intrinsic greed, cruelty, and penchant for violence into more a humane social ethos. Once again, as much as it may please us to romanticize the Rousseauian savage and see civilization as the source of all moral and spiritual malaise, an honest account of our ethical development cannot bear out our prelapsarian fantasies.

The liberal, pluralistic ideal of a society where everyone is free to participate equally, regardless of race or religion or creed, has advanced admirably in the West, while in certain areas of the world homosexuals are still hanged, rape victims stoned, and women forbidden to drive a car or receive an education. It would be a mistake, in this précis of progress, to omit the cultural accomplishments that bestowed our civilization its sublimity. From Einstein’s almost mystical insights into the four-dimensional structure of space and time to the discovery of the universal template of organic life in the elegant double helix of the DNA molecule, Western science has illuminated the vastest contours and the most infinitesimal particles of the universe. The arts, surely, are more subjective, but Saul Bellow puts it well when he quips, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

Bellow himself was a great advocate of progress, and he challenged its enemies in passages such as this one from his novel, Herzog: “As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor…The beautiful super-machinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot.”

This rant was addressed to the right, but today it applies even more to the left: Would you ask the developing world to labor and go hungry so you yourself can enjoy your resentment of suburbia and shopping malls, already having attained the prosperity that progress affords you? If so, “an ingrate, dilettante, idiot.”

David L. Golding ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English and American literature and language concentrator in Dunster House.