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INTRODUCTION:
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Progress - What More
Needs to be Said?

 

A recent commentator, reflecting upon the post-historical mood of apathy evoked in Fukuyama's (1989) much discussed 'End of History', also depicts some of the contemporary negative orientation to 'Progress', to which this study is a critical response -

"Fukuyama does not stand alone.  Virtually the entire Western intelligentsia from left to right exudes a sense of despair.  The fashion of postmodernism is  illustrative of an era where terms such as progress and universalism are held in  contempt in the academic world.  The optimism of the Enlightenment is  nowadays referred to only to show the distance of the author from such 'naive' and 'outdated' concepts. A collection of articles by sociologists on 'Rethinking Progress' is introduced by an essay which  finds it difficult to accept the relevance of reason to the solution of social problems.   As for the concept of progress, it is  treated as just about equivalent to bubonic plague in terms of its desirability   
[ Furedi, 1992:11.]

And -

"The intense scepticism regarding the desirability of change is strongly reflected in  the general disenchantment with progress.  There is no perceptible difference in   political attitude towards the question of progress: the traditional model of left  wing enthusiasm and right-wing suspicion no longer has relevance.  As we move   into the new millennium it is difficult to find any systematic intellectual defence of   the idea of progress."     
                                                                             [ Ibid:252.]   
What follows has developed from a wish to supply that missing defence. 

Admittedly, it would be a reasonable reaction to coming across another analysis of 'Progress' and/or 'Utopia' : what more is there to be said about them ?  (The existing literature is dauntingly large.)  Or, what more needs to be said ?  The beginning of a justification for the present discussion, might follow from noting the difference between these opening questions.  The first is a simple question addressed to the realm of fact; the second a slightly less simple question, which requires an answer in terms of value.  With regard to the first of our two momentous concepts, it would be a rash claim indeed, to confidently promise to have 'more' to say about Progress, in the sense of saying something truly new about such a mature and much-discussed concept.  However, in the other sense of having 'more' to say, that of continuing to discuss something, there is at least a possibility of responding convincingly to both of the opening questions.  So long as talk about Progress continues - or in the current context, re-opens - there is always the possibility of saying something anew, in which something becomes newly true, if not truly new.  But the equally important possibility for the present discussion, is that talking some more about Progress, would be the satisfaction of the need in 'what more needs to be said ?'  In what follows, I offer a number of articulations of this need, including the propositions that P/progress (and its idea) has long been, and continues to be, both unavoidable (materially, historically), and indispensable (spiritually) for modern humans.  (Believing that the 'modern' remains the overwhelmingly formative ingredient in the putative modern-postmodern sequence.)   

One cause of the need for more talk of - even the rediscovery of - Progress, is the unmissable extent of the silence about the idea of Progress in so much contemporary theorising.  (As noted by Furedi.)  I argue that such a need is real and important, because, without a continuing debate around the meaning, value, and future of the idea of Progress, theoretic intellectuals of all kinds are freer than the public morality of their position should allow; an excess of freedom to continue to be productive relatively untroubled by questions of the social purpose, the political meaning, or the moral value of their work.  If 'Progress' was truly and terminally a foolish myth, then cultural producers of many kinds would perhaps find it a surprisingly difficult task, if they were pressed to give good reasons for their apparent achievements.  As for simple indications of this evasion, it would not be difficult to compile a long list of important works of an historical social-theoretic, political, or political-philosophical kind, in which neither the idea of Progress, the assumption of progress, or even a stated desire for progress, are present.   Moreover, a phenomenon of particular interest for my discussion, is the complete absence of 'Progress' from most works on 'Utopia', and vice versa.  Since the centre of my analytical framework consists of the arguments that, simply expressed, Progress and Utopia have been historically confused, identified, or conflated, and that they both remain invaluable human impulses and forms of understanding - but only if they are firmly understood as related but different, then it follows that works which deal exclusively with only one of the two historically linked monumental concepts, must fail to explain the fullest power of either in human experience and history.  If my discussion is at all distinctive, then it might be because it attempts to speak more or less equally of both Progress and Utopia, within one framework.

 

Progress:  If not a definition, at least some initial indications of meaning.

Kumar's (1988:7) compressed characterisation of Modernism: 'Latest is best'.
Thus, the idea of Progress, not needing the superlative: 'Latest is better'.
'P/progress' here, not requiring a teleological end: ‘Better'.
‘Better' = more of the 'Good'.  (The most important simple statement for this analysis.)
'The Good' = an expression of spatially, temporally, and socially situated                     collective values, informed by a number of more or less anthropologically continuous, or inherited, fundamental assumptions, as in : 'Life is sacred'; 'Pain is undesirable'; 'Peace is better than war', and so on.

This sequence of ideas typically ends in the conclusion: relativity.  Monotonously, insistently, it is stated: progress is merely relative, (or just personal, a matter of temperament - Bierstedt, 1981), implying, progress does not exist.  I will examine this important transition from an epistemic to an ontic formulation, and the collapsing of the latter into the former.  Or, it is said: progress ? - there is no such thing; which simply short-circuits the movement from the epistemic failure to entirely determine the identity of progress, to the deduction of its non-existence. (Non sequitur.)  By appreciating that the judgement: relative (merely relative), itself comes from utopian absolutist origins (epistemology), the acknowledgement of the relativity of the contingent evaluation, 'Progress', should carry no sense of lack , or of inferiority.  Indeed, my ideal preference now, would be to avoid the grammar of Absolute-and-Relative altogether, and not to feel compelled to defend P/progress in spite of, as it were, its 'relativity'.  If Latour's 'actor-network' theory has managed to extract factual reality and scientific truths from the clutches of dualism, by negotiating a sociological path between rationalist utopianism and relativist nihilism (Ward, 1994: 84), then it is difficult to see why a parallel project cannot revive 'P/progress', which is a more obviously dialogic and consensual acknowledgement than 'truth' or 'reality'.

 

Progress may be relative, but the world still produces happenings available to 'Progress'.

Since method here is principally analytical, or conceptual, (metatheoretic) and concerned to situate theories of Progress and Utopia, and other theorising in terms of those two concepts, I am not concerned here to make the case for belief in Progress by offering examples - as 'proof' - that Progress has, in fact, happened.  Nevertheless, it is important for my theme - perhaps an absolute requirement, that the world does actually present instances that are at least suitable for consideration as moments of Progress.  Indeed, it is most unlikely that any analytical case could persuade a reader who found it impossible to look to at least one happening in the world, and say: yes, in spite of everything, that is progress.  Thus, from the decision to focus upon the 'empty' logical structure of the idea of Progress, it should not be deduced that it would not be possible to list innumerable empirical details of perceivably progressive occurrences.  There are many developments which, since they partly or completely fulfill the visions of long-established agendas for beneficial social or technical change, are presumably eligible to be called 'progress'.  (the fact that such an historical accounting process, is not invariably seen to be necessary or appropriate prior to judgements of the 'End of Progress', is significant.)  However, the obvious problem with such an evidential approach, is that it is equally available and viable for those who would wish to compile a list of regressive happenings.  The offering of a list of 'good' developments would be promptly challenged by a list of the 'bad'.  There would of course be no possible way to adjudicate between the claims and evidences of the two lists, which would consist of incommensurable criteria of evaluation, and of non-comparable kinds of occurrences.  Any attempt to settle a contest between progressivist and regressivist (or 'eternally recurrent') list-makers, would therefore be a literally interminable, futile project.

It is in relation to such would-be definitive judgements of history, that the value of the analytical approach is revealed, since it is only analysis which can support the holding to a perception of progress, in spite of everything which surrounds and threatens to negate it.  This is because analysis reaches well beyond the tendency towards positivistic, static determinations of happenings as progress or regress, and provides for the perception of a phenomenon to be potentially progressive.  A pertinent example: the huge increase in university-student numbers ('mass' has been used), raises important questions about standards, quality, and purpose.  The non-dialectical judgement is everywhere: more must mean worse; thereby denying progressive potential that is on hand in more people experiencing the university, a potential which of course requires an equivalent increase in the material provision for its realisation.  Someone convinced of the fundamental open-endedness of 'Progress' (see later sections), would therefore concentrate their attention upon that need for increased resources, not upon final judgements which withdraw from history and from possibility.  Thus a belief in Progress is both a personal and a public, social matter with significant practical consequences.  Far from being a matter of (mere) idividual temperament, the decision to acknowledge progressive potential, follows upon a recognition of the logic and history of the singular concept of Progress, which is ultimately an entirely humanly-grounded logic, that of the unavoidability of our evaluative reaction to our own (modern) history.  Though it is a logic in which nothing is of pre-determinable value, and in which no judgement can be assumed to be either forever correct or meaningful everywhere, 'That's P/progress' is not simply something we are free to say without a meaningful limit.  Here I would draw upon Gadamer's sense of 'solidarity' which exists outside of intellectual determination -

"I only intend to remind the theoreticians that this is what it all hinges on in the final analysis. ... if it were the case that there were no single locus of solidarity remaining among human beings, whatever the society or culture or class or race they might belong to, then common interests could be constituted only by social engineers or tyrants... through anonymous or direct force.  But have we reached this point ?  Will we ever ?  I believe that we would then be at the brink of unavoidable mutual destruction."
 [ Gadamer, in a letter reproduced in Bernstein, 1983:264.]

It follows that any announcement of the 'Death of Progress'  is required to be highly specific.  There are many surviving icons of Progress conducive to common assent, irrespective of the contemporary fate of the Utopia of Progress which excited the intellectual dream of Control.

It might appear that any project which seeks to rescue the idea of Progress from the related corrosives of twentieth-century history, and the contemporary dominance of (nihilistic) 'relativism', 'indeterminacy' / 'uncertainty' (Heisenberg), 'fallibilism', 'deconstructionism', 'incommensurability',  'post-foundationalism'... is at one with Habermas's sustained attempt to rescure Rationality from the same negative milieu.  After all, it is probably impossible to identify a more monumental pair of historically linked concepts, than Reason and Progress.  They respectively speak of the presumed course and effect of modernity itself.  And indeed, Habermas's more nuanced analysis has valuably opposed the (Weberian/Frankfurt School) closure which over-inclusively identified modernity entirely with instrumental reason. (Rasmussen, 1985:141.)  As Harvey (1990:14) has observed, there is a choice to be made between the 'dialectic of enlightenment' and its postmodernist extension, and Habermas's claim that the Enlightenment project is yet, if possible, to be completed -
"Which position we take depends on how we explain the 'dark side' of our recent history and the degree to which we attribute it to the defects of Enlightenment reason rather than to a lack of its proper application."
 [ Ibid., emphasis added.]

It is this idea of lack of progressive reason rather than its surfeit, that informs my analysis, along with the suggestion that it is Modern Utopianism (and Utopian-Progress) to which we should look in the attempt to explain the 'dark side'.  One consequence of this preference, is that all attributions of twentieth-century calamities to the 'sins of modernity', are seen as over-confident enclosures of events and myths within an evaluative framework overly-based upon temporal coincidence.  The damage done in and to modernity by the survival of pre-modern sentiments and obsessions tends thereby to be overlooked.

However, as the direction of my attempt to rescue the singularity of 'progress' shows at several points, I would align unquestionably only with Habermas's sense and critique of 'the opposition', and the basically purposeful ('progressive') and ethical thrust of his aims.  While it may be philosophically possible to rescue Rationality by defining it in a persistently transcendental manner - as the expectant-negotiable character of illocutionary linguistic inter-subjectivity - the concept of Progress, being value-saturated, permits no such escape from the reality of relativity.  Thus, such a project to recover an orientation to P/progress, is even more difficult than that which believes it has countered the negative, 'irrational' intellectual culture in the name of Reason.  It has to find a way to depart from the postmodernist conclusion, that 'progress' ended with the collapse of its master-narrative vehicles and legitimators, while accepting the force of the hermeneutic entrapment of  moral judgement in time and place.  The basic cause of both the greater difficulty of the re-recommendation of Progress, and the irresistibility of the reality of relativity, is the value-saturated character of  the idea of Progress, and the historicity of judgements of the Good upon which it depends.  Indeed, a case can be made for the fundamental priority of discussion of the Good - including the claimed good of Rationality - without which, the good of any project tends to be evoked merely by its expertise, scale, persistence, or institutionalised prestige.

The following analysis is informed by concerns which are related to a wide range of issues in philosophy, history, political theory and practice, and cultural analysis.  Since each chapter approaches a different theme related to the tension between Progress and Utopia, and may be read independently, it may be useful to offer a comprehensive outline describing what each chapter sets out to do, and indicating how each relates to the others.  With regard to the order of the chapters, Chapter Two may seem to be out of sequence.  Its specialised argument could have perhaps been beneficially placed after the less idiosyncratic arguments of the present Chapters Three and Four.  It appears early, precisely because it seeks to be provocative, and to stimulate thinking about Progress and Utopia in a comparatively unorthodox direction:  the relationship between attitudes towards Progress and Utopia, and styles of intellectual practice.

 

Chapter 1.                        Progress and Utopia Analytically Distinguished. 

I argue that in the extensive relevant literature concerned with either Progress or Utopia, insufficient attention has been directed at the question of whether a progressive impulse, and a utopian impulse, are actually compatible.  However, in a valuable paper which offers a detailed typology of 'ideal societies' (Davis,1984) the fundamental difference between the dynamism of Progress and the fixity of Utopia is noted -

"...Turgot and Condorcet offered to rescue the republic from 'fortuna', by   flattening her wheel and unveiling the prospect of progress.  But progress and   utopia are not  compatible.  The dynamic utopia is a myth."                               
[ Davis, 1984:13.]

As Davis notes, the tension between the convergent perfectabilism of Utopia and the 'restless and relentless innovations of science', is central to the incompatibility of utopianism and progressiveness.  Walsh (1962), expressed the tension starkly -

"...you can't have it both ways.  You can have a society aquiver with creativity in the arts, sciences, technological breakthroughs... or you can have a safe and stable society.  You can't choose both."                                             
                                                     [ Walsh, 1962:148.]
 
The historical - transformative power of Science, is the dominant assumption in my argument (in Chapter 4) for the 'inescapability/ indispensability' of the acceptance of the possibility of Progress.  Also related to the incompatibility of Progress and Utopia, is the challenge it poses to any thesis of the utopian directability of history, as attempts to enact such narratives of control have demonstrated.  However, since such a thesis is now most unlikely to arise in our post-political, 'end-of-history' era, there is now a different challenge: how to integrate critical-utopian thought with a historical orientation that is progressive in the wake of failed political Utopias.  The vital distinction between the concepts of Progress and Utopia is variously formulated, but it is basically argued that 'Progress' is open-ended, dynamic, continuously self-reforming; and that 'Utopia' signifies an end-state, a perfected stasis, a finally and positively determined closure against further (unnecessary) transformations.   As Kumar says of the crucial relationship between Utopia and Science -

"... Baconian science broke through the static character of all ideal societies up to and including More's ... just as utopia's egalitarianism warred on occasion with its rationalism, so too did the dynamism of science threaten to press beyond the boundaries of utopia ... This was problematic.  Pure science knows no end.  It has no point of rest or stability. ... Utopia, however ... must in principle be bounded.  It is the perfect society and its organization is the embodiment of perfection."
[ Kumar, 1991:54.]

Perfectionism  is the source of anxiety here, and in thinking about the fateful question of the proper relationship of, as Kumar puts it - 'utopian thought and utopian practice' (political practice), differences tend to arise on the basis of the strength of that anxiety.  Kumar simply states that 'they share certainly the ideal of perfection'.  Thought and practice are said to 'follow different principles of different spheres of human activity', and he afirms that, 'Utopias are not written to be realised...'  Apparently relatively untroubled by the (psychological) dark side of perfectionism, (similarly Ricoeur,1986), and its worldly extension via repressive political practices, Kumar appears to be overly-attached to the purely beneficial literary-imaginative modes of utopian thought.  Even the great anti-utopian dystopian works (Zamyatin, Huxley, Koestler, Orwell), are described as 'paying tribute to utopia', on the puzzling basis that they possess a similarity of form, thereby stripping 'Utopia' of all its definitive substantive association with the Good, (p.99) and thereby of its seductive and dangerous power.  This is congruent with a tendency to state that the relationship between utopian thought and utopian practice is safely indirect and always one of non-equivalence.  I would argue that it should be, and henceforth of course must be an indirect relationship achieved by vigilance.  Our century offers too many examples of the inherent consequences of the perfectionism of Utopias being taken as evidence of the possibility, that a perfect destination might actually be a place in history.  (Utopias are, of course, a safe commodity in the hands of any liberal intellectual.)

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