Seemingly, we always run out of time and we never seem to have enough time. Sometimes, we can even see it pass us by. We make arrangements to meet people at a given time and we measure how much time it takes to accomplish certain tasks.Sometimes, we even defer activities to another time. We schedule activities to occur at different times and we modify activities to take up less time. Sometimes, time is interrupted even by unexpected activities. We live in time, and yet, we can never capture time. We know about time, and yet we find it almost impossible to define time. Time seems at once immanent, and yet far away.
Our awareness of time passing confirms in us a sense of the past. Our anticipation that time will pass again creates in us a sense of the future. We sense that the present is an instant, caught somehow between the future that is not, and the past that was. We can not go to the past. We can not go to the future. We can not change what has happened. We call the body of knowledge about the past history, and into it, we place our memories.
Yet in the west, we also see our selves as separate to our history, and removed from our past; for it is behind us. We face the future and what will be, and look back on history and what it was. A belief that the future will be better than the past creates a belief in the idea of progress.
The idea of progress then, is contingent upon our beliefs about the nature of time and history, and the notions of time and history, are in some way connected to the very possibility of progress.
Elliot Jacques asserts that ‘the enigma of time is the enigma of life’ (Jacques 1982, p.3), Jeremy Rifkin states that time is ‘our window on the world’ (Rifkin 1987, p.1) and Immanuel Kant believed that time ‘is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state’ (Kant 1929, p.77). Time, and indeed the awareness of time, is essential to the human condition. What then is the evidence for a notion which seems so patently obvious?
Perhaps the first evidence of time is what might be called eco-time, or that time evidenced by solar and lunar cycles and environmental changes. The sun rises then falls. Animals migrate and return. The rains come and go. These are the natural rhythms of nature. To know time is to combine an observation of the stars with an observation of nature.
Then, there is social or cultural time. Rifkin notes that ‘while all livings things can be characterised by the biological rhythms they inherit, only human beings impose a social sense of time on top of the biological clocks with which we are born’ (Rifkin 1987, p.43). He posits ‘the six temporal dimensions of sequence, duration, planning, rhythm, synchronisation, and time perspective have been constructed and assembled in myriad ways by various cultures, providing a rich diversity of anthropological time zones for the human family to dwell in’ (Rifkin 1987, p.66).
Then, there is psychological time, or our awareness of past, present and future. Le Goff notes that ‘the distinction between past and present is an essential component of the concept of time’ (Le Goff 1992, p.1). He also adds that the future is central to our perception and awareness of time. As Jaques notes, ‘it can only be that the mind, which regulates this process, performs three functions, those of expectation, attention and memory. The future, which it expects, passes through the present, to which it attends, into the past, which it remembers’ (Jacques 1982, p.5).
Then there is clock time. As Lewis Mumford asserts, ‘the clock moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences’ (Mumford 1963, p.15). Commenting from the perspective of technology, Weizenbaum asserts that because the clock is an autonomous machine, running by itself on the basis of an internalised model of some aspect of the real world, it transforms man’s perception of the universe and creates a new reality.
The invention of the clock created the notion of autonomous time, of something that could be measured and subsequently managed. As Boorstin notes, ‘so long as man marked his life only by the cycles of nature-the changing seasons, the waxing or waning moon-he remained a prisoner of nature. If he was to go his own way and fill his world with human novelties, he would have to make his own measures of time’ (Boorstin 1985, p.12). The clock was invented during the latter part of the middle ages, during the rising tide of the temporalistic mentality that would characterise western culture. Lewis Mumford has asserted that ‘the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age’ (Mumford 1963, p.14).
Another important conception of time is that provided by the Greek notions of kairos and chronos. The Greeks used the term kairos to refer to seasonal or episodic time; a phase of time not positioned within a temporal or objective context, but a personal and subjective context. The notion of kairos also encapsulated the idea of the right time; of the fullness of time. In contrast, chronos, was used to denote a specific chronological quantum of time, an objectively defined moment or interval within a temporal context.
Jacques draws a distinction between clock time and living time, and further asserts that ‘living time extends into the feelings for the past and desires for the future which no physical object can possible experience’ (Jacques 1982, p.4). For Jacques, time is either flux, the fused past, present and future, or a chronological set of points on a string.
Time, or the awareness of time, is situated differently within different cultures. The time of traditional cultures, is cyclical, rhythmical, and personally meaningful. The time of modern western culture is linear, mechanical and objectively measurable. The subject of time is also the building block of history.
The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto eloquently states that ‘time is history’s subject, and history is the diet of time – they are made for each other’ (Fernández-Armesto 1999, p.246). The centrality of time to history is also exemplified by the historian Daniel Boorstin who states that ‘the first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience’ (Boorstin 1985, p.1). However, the emergence and separation of history from myth required a specific and western development of the notion if time.
In contrast to earlier conceptions of time, ‘the nineteenth-century modernization of history rested on a new conception of time drawn from Newtonian science’ (Appleby, Hunt et al. 1994, p.53). Historians made time universal and evolutionary, placing people and institutions in a linear path of development towards the modern world. As Appleby states, ‘the modern idea of historical time was linear as opposed to cyclical, secular as opposed to religious, universal rather than particular to any epoch, nation or faith’ (Appleby, Hunt et al. 1994, p.55). The establishment of the modern, required the establishment of the ancient. The modern meant accumulated knowledge, better living standards and a general improvement in the human situation. History was the account of this development and proof of human progress. As Henry George said, ‘human progress goes on as the advances made by one generation are in this way secured as the common property of the next, and made the starting point for new advances’(George 1917, p.48).
Although contested, it is generally accepted that the idea of progress stems from the European Enlightenment. Progress, understood as human betterment, was the key tenet of the unfolding new world. Whether it was understood as a moving away from primitivism, or a moving toward perfectionism, the notion of progress was a powerful and extensive context for the emerging western worldview.
The Enlightenment gave people the confidence that if human beings could develop science and understand the laws of nature, then they could also remake society, politics, and the whole context for human life. Progress was possible because of an innate capacity for human betterment.
Philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have all posited progressive models of historical and cultural development. Turgot’s successive advances of the human mind, Condorcet’s ten stages of development of the human mind, Comte’s three stage view of human history, Marx’s economic evolution, and Spencer’s four stages of differentiation. The entire cannon of western pedagogy prescribes that the idea of progress rests on a fundamentally linear conception of time, directed through successive events from the past, through the present to the future.
However, more than fundamentally just change, progress is change for the better.
This twofold adumbration of progress is important. Progress contains two elements, one descriptive and the other axiological.
Progress requires that directional change must have occurred and that the change is considered an improvement. Thus the notion of progress is at once interpretative insofar as it is based on a factual change, as well as evaluative, insofar as it requires a value judgement about the desirability or goodness of the change. It is my contention that a probative approach to the analysis of progress based on empirically based value judgments is circulus vitiosus. What is needed (although only touched on in this essay) is an investigation on the fundamental epistemological context and logical structure of the idea.
Anyway, however evidential proponents argue progress is, for many others, it is ‘the bastard child of an optimistic anthropology and Christian eschatology’(Emil Brunner cited in Sklair 1970, p.94). The palaeontologist Stephen J Gould even dismisses progress as ‘a noxious, culturally embedded, un-testable, non-operational, intractable lead that must be replaced’(Gould 1988, p.319). Historians like Arthur Herman argue that ‘the notion of progress stands largely discredited today among intellectuals, and especially among historians’(Herman 1997, p.13). Clearly, the notion of progress is disputed.
It is purposive to note at this point in this analysis, that ‘there is not one true, monolithic gold plated Idea of Progress’(Warren Wager cited in Sklair 1970, p.94), but differing notions and interpretations. Some understand progress primarily in terms of economic or material progress, others in terms of scientific and technical progress, whilst others understand progress in terms of moral or cultural progress. As Regis Debray states ‘whether the idea of progress is an elaborate figment of the imagination or a conventional but illusory representation of reality, it is eminently emblematic of what used to be called “ideology”’(Debray 1993, p.9). As such for the purposes of this essay, we will treat each of the various notions of progress as one ideology, namely change for the better.
Christianity introduced the notion of linear time into Greco-Roman world, based on Hebrew antecedents. As Appleby notes, ‘the Judeo-Christian notion of time literally began at one moment and would end at another, and it revealed God’s purposes’(Appleby, Hunt et al. 1994, p.57). As the theologian Niebuhr noted, ‘eternity stands at the end of time in the sense that the temporal process cannot be conceived without a finis; and eternity cannot be conceived as having a finis’(Niebuhr 1943, p.310).
Judeo-Christian eschatology posited and conceived fulfilment at the end of history as a literal point in time. That sense of fulfilment impinged on the present by creating the feeling of anticipation and transmuted itself ‘into a “proximate futurism”, into the feeling that the fulfilment of history is chronologically imminent’ (Niebuhr 1943, p.52). The historian Löwith maintains that it was this ‘Jewish-Christian futurism which opened the future as the dynamic horizon of all modern striving and thinking. Within a cyclic Weltanschauung and order of the universe, where every moment of advance is, at the same time, a movement of return, there is no place for progress’ (Löwith 1949, p.111).
However, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of a divinely bounded time gave way to a secular and periodised notion of time, reflecting ancient, medieval and modern epochs. Subtly, ‘progress in this world replaced salvation in the next as the goal of human participation in time’ (Appleby, Hunt et al. 1994, p.59).
It is within the context of a changing notion of time and the development of history, that the idea of progress emerged, with its attended presuppositions. Clearly, ‘the conception of history as a process of perpetual advancement toward a final end presupposes that the structure of time is open and continuous’ (Rotenstreich 1971, p.201).
Moreover, as Rotenstreich further states, the open and continuous nature of time, actually produces the possibility of progress insofar as it facilitates the increased absorption of content into the experience of life. So, not only progress elevate what is later in time, it elevates what is greater in content. As Rotenstreich states ‘the flow of the temporal continuum from past to future is more than a formal structure. It is an index of advancement’(Rotenstreich 1971 ,p.201).
Interestingly, Schmookler posits that the conflation of past, present and future into a system, where the present is a function of the past and the future a function of the present interacts in such a way as to create a power imbalance. For him, in the unidirectional character of the interaction ‘the present does all the speaking while the future cannot be but mute’, and ‘people spend the goods of the system –topsoil, aquifer water, minerals, forests –as if there were no tomorrow, because for themselves as individuals there is not’ (Schmookler 1984, p.244).
The Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, after undertaking a panoramic survey of human history, believed that the path of human society was directly determined by the dominant cultural view of reality. According to Sorokin, there are three distinct types of societies, or premises for understanding reality. First, there are those societies that understand reality entirely in terms of what is able to be directly experienced through the senses, and they are called sensate cultures. Knowledge and truth are able to be tested and determined by practical experiments. Second there are those cultures that ‘distrust the experience of the senses as illusory, believing that reality is immaterial, transcendental, eternal and unchanging’ (Glyn-Jones 1996, p.7). Sorokin calls these cultures ideational. Third, other societies fuse or synthesise these views into a dialectic balance or paradox of extremes. Sorokin calls these idealistic cultures.
Within this system of study, Sorokin proffers a clear empirical association between the fluctuations of time orientation, historical consciousness and societal orientation towards reality. He posits three distinct categories, namely eternalistic, temporalistic and mixed mentalities. An eternalistic orientation stresses timelessness and is evidenced by the category of being. A temporalistic orientation stresses continuous change and is evidenced by the category of becoming. A mixed orientation stresses a dialectic mix of both. He then demonstrates a strong correlation between an eternalistic time orientation and ideational cultures, between temporalistic time orientation and sensate cultures and between mixed time mentalities and idealistic cultures.
Moreover, he asserts that history plays an informing role in sensate-temporal cultures and only a minor role in ideational-eternalistic cultures. In eternalistic oriented cultures, with no real historical sense, the difference between reality and mythology becomes blurred, and history becomes mythologised. In contrast, history in temporalistic oriented cultures, becomes a sequential chronicle of events.
Critiquing civilization's fixation with time, Rifkin asserts that ‘time is a victim of humanity’s need to repress the becoming process’ and that ‘time is the ever-present reminder of the futility of our quest for immortality. The passage of time diminishes us; and because, above all else, we seek perpetuity and permanence, the human mind has conceived of myriad ways to downgrade the status of the most fundamental reality’ (Rifkin 1983, p.178).
Rifkin positions time as the central element in the dialectic created by the concepts of being and becoming. He argues that the notion of being is a spatial concept, bounded by permanence, and that the notion of becoming is a temporal concept bounded by change. He asserts that until the nineteenth century, in virtually every cosmology, becoming was integrated within being, and that change was bounded by permanence. Although the Jews were the first to introduce a cosmology with a history moving in linear fashion from a fixed beginning towards a definite end, the Darwinian concept of life being subject to development and the passage of time raised the spectre that time might be ‘as important as, or even more important than, space in the conceptualisation of nature’ (Rifkin 1983, p.180). For Rifkin, the expansion of human control over nature represents increased control over the becoming process. Gradually time has become subordinated to human control and no longer viewed as a threat to human permanence but a force people can use to secure their future.
Any inquiry into the idea of progress, necessarily leads to an encounter with the notions of primitivism, savagery, barbarism and civilisation; upon which the very idea, although antagonistic, is contingent. The idea of progress requires that the passage of time, through history, is one from primitivism to civilisation. Primitivism is the antithetical evidence of progress.
The historian Gibbon asserted that ‘the savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilised society’(cited in Black and Porter 1994, p.187) and took comfort in the belief that ‘it may safely be assumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism’(cited in Nisbett 1994, p.187). Henry George, in his Law of Human Progress asserted that ‘men improve as they become civilised’ and ‘the civilised man of today is vastly superior to the uncivilised’(George 1917, p.7,20). Charles Darwin contended that ‘the evidence that all civilised nations are the descendents of barbarians , consists, on the one side, of clear traces of their former low condition in still-existing customers, beliefs, language, etc.; and on the other side, of proofs that savages are independently able to raise themselves a few steps in the scale of civilisation, and have actually thus risen’(Darwin 1949, p.453).
The eminent Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer asserted that ‘the various stages of savagery and barbarism, on which many tribes and peoples now stand represent, broadly speaking, so many degrees of retarded social and intellectual development’(Frazer 1927, p.198), and that ‘the savages of today are primitive only in a relative , not in an absolute sense. They are primitive by comparison with us’(Frazer 1927, p.39). Even Karl Marx relied upon the assumptions of primitivism in asserting that the bourgeoisie had ‘made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeoisie, the East on the West’(Feuer 1969, p.53).
The idea of progress necessarily requires primitivism. As Appleby states, ‘progress aided by science and technology meant leaving the past behind like out-growing an unhappy childhood’(Appleby, Hunt et al. 1994, p.63). The civilised world needed an uncivilised world from which to progress.
Interestingly, as Schmookler proffers, ‘the idea of progress has relied in another way on the lack of a clear vision of the distant past. The life of primitive peoples is widely assumed to have been nasty, brutish, and short’(Schmookler 1984, p.8). He goes further to contend that the ‘surprisingly humane existences of modern primitive cultures’ should make our commonsense view of progress difficult to sustain ‘if we lift our vision of primitive life out of the degradation to which civilised mythology has consigned it’(Schmookler 1984, p.9). Or as Le Goff remarks ‘the vicissitudes of our time has made us more sensitive to differences, to plurality, and to the Other’(Le Goff 1992, p.xii).
Following on from the antagonistic relationship between progress and ‘primitivism’, is the claim that ‘for many the idea of progress has become labelled as a European idea, and hence has come under the attack on Eurocentrism’(Wallerstein 1997).
Young asserts that ‘however universal its diffusion, the idea of progress is a recent arrival in the third world. The concept of ameliorative change was as foreign to the great cosmologies of the non-western world as it was to the medieval west’(Young 1982, p.85). Since the fifteenth century the Western idea of progress have been foisted upon traditional cultures by either colonial or economic imperialism. The unquestioned notions of western superiority informed colonial expansion, and ‘in return for the new markets, raw materials, and national aggrandisement presumed to accrue to colonisers, the conqueror offered the blessings of progress in the form of what was usually termed “civilisation”’(Young 1982, p.91). Clearly, the idea of progress is essentially European and modernist, and as such is in essence non traditional.
Mazrui asserts that the choice of the West as the role model for progress is ethnocentric, and that the idea that all societies are evolving toward the same destination is universalist. This leads him to define progress as ‘a dialectic between the universalism of process and the ethnocentrism of destination’(Mazrui 1998, p.153). He then quickly postulates that the close link between racism and ethnocentric anthropology led to assumptions about white leadership in the historical process. There is a symbiotic relationship between the dual notions of ethnological superiority and anthropological primitivism.
It is worth noting the contention that ‘discourse concerning the state of our world and the meaning of progress among those who control much of the power of the world has become so constricted, so rigidly narrow as to destroy imagination’ (Aristide 1997, p.6) and that a ‘linear conception of development inherently places some societies ahead and some behind’ (Goldsmith, Khor et al. 1995, p.20).
It is important at this point to draw attention to the fundamentally dialectical nature of the idea of progress. Raymond Aron addresses the dialectic of progress and disillusion, asserting that idea of progress creates expectation which leads to disillusionment. William Blake is quoted as stating that ‘without contraries there is no progression’ (Cohen 1998, p.431). This leads me to the inevitable conclusion that the idea of progress actually requires the idea of decline or regress. In other words, decline is a necessary precondition for progress. Similarly, desirable change actually requires a less desirable precursor, and a better thing necessarily supersedes a worse thing. This is also reflected in the antagonism between civilised and uncivilised.
Furthermore Young contends that ‘the process of transmission of the idea of progress to the Third World was affected by gradually altering perceptions in the Western world’(Young 1982, p.90). Clearly, insofar as the idea of progress requires either ignorance of the past, or a particularly “primitivist” view, so too does it require ignorance or a “primitivist” view of other cultures.
Clearly it is evidential that the idea of progress is universalist, that it places some people ahead of others, and that the backward elements of society, being subject to the higher elements, can improve and better themselves. This leads Phillips to assert that ‘the ideal of a perfectible human future is thus reduced to a vulgar ideology of the “chosen”: the notion that the especial genius of the colonizing “race” - for knowledge and power, technics and empire--makes it the authentic bearer of enlightened universal values’(Phillips 1997).
However, in spite of the hegemony of ideology asserting that ‘the advancement of these peoples will be quicker and surer than ours, because they will receive from us what we have been obliged to discover for ourselves’(Condorcet 1949, p.340), this has not always been the case. LeGoff draws our attention to the conflict between traditional political structures and modern political structures in black Africa, and to what Christian Vieyra calls the vicious circle of modernisation, namely that ‘the transformation of these states into modern countries presupposes national unity, while the latter is based on structures tied to tradition and opposed to modernisation’(Le Goff 1992, p.45).
The notion of progress is so deep in our collective western psyche, that ‘with our sense of reality is bound up, further, the false confidence which we have in facts. We live in an atmosphere of optimism, as if the contradictions which show themselves in the world arranged themselves automatically so as to promote well thought out progress, and reconciled themselves in synthesis in which the valuable parts of the thesis and the antithesis coalesced’(Schweitzer 1955, p.56).
When considering the idea of progress, our first inclination is to consider the everyday experience of life from our own perspective. As Christof said in the Truman Show ‘we accept the reality of the world with which were presented’. Because the average person today is ‘probably surrounded by more comforts, conveniences and luxuries than most of the kings and queens or previous centuries’(Ashton and Laura 1998, p.x), we assume that progress self evident.
However, as Marx and Mazlish state ‘the idea of progress is a protean concept. It can be, at one and the same time, a philosophy of history, an ideology serving the interests of different social groups, and a millennial like faith. The idea of progress may be proposed either as a statement of evident fact, supported by evidence, or as a hypothesis, increasingly discredited by recent developments. It may serve as an obvious, almost unavoidable, way of ordering time, of lending meaning to events, or of projecting a deceptive vision that unrealistically throws an optimistic colouring over nefarious activities’(Marx and Mazlish 1996, p.6)
Although Medawar boasted that ‘to deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind’(Medawar 1927, p.127), the historian Toynbee asserted that ‘there is no warrant for supposing that, within historical times, there has been any progress in the evolution of human nature itself, either physical or spiritual’, and that ‘progress must have been progress in the improvement of our social heritage, and not progress in the improvement of our breed’(Toynbee 1949, p.261-262). Regis Debray also contends that ‘the notion of progress is without meaning in the symbolic, intellectual, emotional or psychological realms’(Debray 1993, p.9). The idea of progress would also appear to be insubstantial in respect of art and politics. However, as Stanislaw Lec’s once questioned, ‘is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?’(Lec 1962, p.78).
As Rotenstreich asserts, ‘the validity of the doctrine of progress depends upon the tenability of its assumptions. To criticize those assumptions one can either adduce empirical evidence which seems to contradict them or expose the fallacious conception of the structure of history by which they are controlled’(Rotenstreich 1971, p.211). Clearly, our notions of time and our constructions of history must challenge the foundations of our western commitment to progress.
An interesting question is derived from the historian Collingwood’s reminders that, ‘history is knowledge of the past, and the past consists of events that have finished happening. The past does not exist and cannot be perceived; our knowledge of it is not derived from observation, and cannot be verified by experiment... We come to know the past, not immediately, but by interpretation… the past is an aspect or function of the present’ (Debbins 1985, p.139). If history is a function of the present, and progress is the meaning of history, then is not progress actually a function of the present and not of the past?
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