Examining progress

The central thesis of modern western philosophy is the idea of progress. It is the belief in a trajectory of movement from primitive to advanced states in our material, vocational, personal, familial, cultural, spiritual, moral, social, and political realms. This movement was assumed to be both positive and inevitable. 

This (broadly) linear idea of progress is at variance with the eastern philosophy which views things in cyclical terms. 

John Gray, one of the critics of the dominant western view, talks about two different dimensions to the evolution of human societies over time. His central thesis is that the fundamental idea of progress is applicable only to the material realm of science and technology, and not to ethics and politics.

One, at a scientific level, human societies progress in a monotonic manner, moving further up the chain of scientific development over time. This knowledge is never unlearnt but is accretive or monotonically increasing. Two, at an ethical or political level, human societies adapt to the emerging contexts and manifest as the prevailing norms and culture. But this is not accretive, and there is nothing called progress. What was repugnant a few generations back can become acceptable and then relapse back to being repugnant, and then back as acceptable over time. So there is nothing permanent about socio-political or socio-economic organisations like liberal democracy or free market system.

The gains in science and technology are a cumulative advance. These realised gains are not lost, and they are the basis for further gains. We often see accelerating and exponential gains. However, in ethics and politics, what is gained is very quickly, often invisibly, lost. The upward arc that is a feature of science and technology does not exist for ethics and politics.

Technology hits a ceiling when faced with issues like making human beings more rational or more civilised. Both civilisation and barbarism are natural to human beings.

Mirroring John Gray, EO Wilson had written much earlier,

‘The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.’

Another critic of the progress view is German Oswald Spengler, who proposed a cyclical view of history and also rejected the west-centric focus of world history. Robert W Merry has a very good essay about Spengler here.

Spengler saw all "great cultures as essentially organic entities whose phases of emergence, development and decline are remarkably similar from culture to culture". Accordingly, he viewed "history as the story of various discrete civilizations, each with its own distinct culture, that emerged, developed, flowered and then declined". Merry writes,

First, since civilizations and cultures are distinct, there can be no universal culture. No body of thought emanating from one culture can be imposed upon another, either peacefully or through force. And civilizational decline is an immutable rule that applies to all civilizations, including the West. The second noteworthy element of Spengler’s thought is his view, based on his study of eight great civilizations, that the process of decline carries with it a surge of imperial fervor and a flight toward Caesarism. Hegemonic impulses come to the fore along with forms of dictatorship. As Charles and Mary Beard wrote in The American Spirit, “Spengler’s judgment of history certainly conveyed to American readers the notion that ‘Western civilization’ was doomed and that another Caesar, the conquering man of blood and iron, would bring it to an end.”

Spengler's analysis of history differs with the scientific method and is grounded on destiny and historical analogy, the natural order of life and phenomena. In fact, his argument that understanding of history is "unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the Critique of Pure Reason investigates" has remarkable similarity with the subjective appreciation of revealed knowledge (smriti) in Hinduism.

For Spengler the driving force behind the decline is "deterioration of folk traditions and innocent enthusiasms of the culture". Robert Merry writes,

Its cultural essence, once of the soil and spread throughout the “mother-region” in town, village and city, now becomes the domain of a few rich and powerful “world-cities,” which twist and distort the concepts of old and replace them with cynicism, cosmopolitanism, irony and a money culture. Thus, Spengler draws a sharp distinction between culture and civilization. The former is the phase of creative energy, the “soul” of the countryside; the latter is a time of material preoccupation, the “intellect” of the city. As Hughes elaborates, “So long as the culture phase lasts, the leading figures in a society manifest a sure sense of artistic ‘style’ and personal ‘form.’ Indeed, the breakdown of style and form most clearly marks the transition from culture to civilization.”... But what most clearly marks the civilizational phase is what he considered the inevitable gravitation toward Caesarism and empire. Spengler’s historical analogies taught him that the transition from culture to civilization unleashes a kind of Will to Power, manifest internally in a drive to consolidate power within the civilization, and externally in a drive to assert dominance over other peoples. “Imperialism,” writes Spengler, “is Civilization unadulterated.”...

Spengler predicted with uncanny foresight a number of Western developments of the past century, including the rise of world-cities and the money culture, the emergence of a powerful feminism focused on the yearnings of the Ibsen woman, the force of money in politics, declining birthrates and the popular embrace of avant-garde cultural sensibilities, awash in cynicism and cosmopolitanism and bent on destroying the cultural verities of old.