Introduction to the Science of Sociology Part 138

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Popular Conceptions of Progress

It seems incredible that there should have been a time when mankind had no conception of progress. Ever since men first consciously united their common efforts to improve and conserve their common life, it would seem there must have been some recognition that life had not always been as they found it and that it could not be in the future what it then was.

Nevertheless, it has been said that the notion of progress was unknown in the oriental world, that the opposite conception of deterioration pervaded all ancient Asiatic thought. In India the prevailing notion was that of vast cycles of time "through which the universe and its inhabitants must pa.s.s from perfection to destruction, from strength and innocence to weakness and depravity until a new maha-yuga begins."[322]

The Greeks conceived the course of history in various ways, as progress and as deterioration, but in general they thought of it as a cycle. The first clear description of the history of mankind as a progression by various stages, from a condition of primitive savagery to civilization, is in Lucretius' great poem _De Rerum Natura_. But Lucretius does not conceive this progress will continue. On the contrary he recognizes that the world has grown old and already shows signs of decrepitude which foreshadow its ultimate destruction.

It is only in comparatively recent times that the world has sought to define progress philosophically, as part of the cosmic process, and has thought of it abstractly as something to be desired for its own sake.

Today the word progress is in everyone's mouth; still there is no general agreement as to what progress is, and particularly in recent years, with all the commonly accepted evidences of progress about them, skeptics have appeared, who, like the farmer who saw for the first time a camel with two humps, insisted "there's no such animal."

The reason there is no general understanding in regard to the meaning of progress, as it has been defined by the philosophers, is not because there is no progress in detail, but because the conception of progress in general involves a balancing of the goods against the ills of life.

It raises the question whether the gains which society makes as a whole are compensation for the individual defeats and losses which progress inevitably involves. One reason why we believe in progress, perhaps, is that history is invariably written by the survivors.

In certain aspects and with people of a certain temperament, what we ordinarily call progress, considering what it costs, will always seem a very dubious matter. William Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, seems to be the most eminent modern example of the skeptic.

Human nature has not been changed by civilization. It has neither been leveled up nor leveled down, to an average mediocrity. Beneath the dingy uniformity of international fas.h.i.+ons in dress, man remains what he has always been--a splendid fighting animal, a self-sacrificing hero, and a bloodthirsty savage. Human nature is at once sublime and horrible, holy and satanic. Apart from the acc.u.mulation of knowledge and experience, which are external and precarious acquisitions, there is no proof that we have changed much since the first stone age.[323]

It must be remembered in this connection that progress, in so far as it makes the world more comfortable, makes it more complicated. Every new mechanical device, every advance in business organization or in science, which makes the world more tolerable for most of us, makes it impossible for others. Not all the world is able to keep pace with the general progress of the world. Most of the primitive races have been exterminated by the advance of civilization, and it is still uncertain where, and upon what terms, the civilized man will let the remnant of the primitive peoples live.

It has been estimated that, in the complicated life of modern cities, at least one-tenth of the population is not competent to maintain an independent, economic existence, but requires an increasing amount of care and a.s.sistance from the other nine-tenths.[324] To the inferior, incompetent, and unfortunate, unable to keep pace with progress, the more rapid advance of the world means disease, despair, and death. In medicine and surgery alone does progress seem wholly beneficent, but the eugenists are even now warning us that our indiscriminate efforts to protect the weak and preserve the incompetent are increasing the burdens of the superior and competent, who are alone fit to live.

On the other hand, every new invention is a response to some specific need. Every new form of social control is intended to correct some existing evil. So far as they are successful they represent progress.

Progress in the concrete has reference to recognized social values.

Values, as Cooley points out, have no meaning except with reference to an organism.

"The organism is necessary to give meaning to the idea [value]; there must be worth _to_ something. It need not be a person; a group, an inst.i.tution, a doctrine, any organized form of life will do; and that it be conscious of the values that motivates it is not at all essential."[325]

Any change or adaptation to an existing environment that makes it easier for a person, group, inst.i.tution, or other "organized form of life" to live may be said to represent progress.

Whether the invention is a new plow or a new six-inch gun we accept it as an evidence of progress if it does the work for which it is intended more efficiently than any previous device.

In no region of human life have we made greater progress than in the manufacture of weapons of destruction.

Not everyone would be willing to admit that progress in weapons of warfare represents "real" progress. That is because some people do not admit the necessity of war. Once admit that necessity, then every improvement is an evidence of progress, at least in that particular field. It is more easy to recognize progress in those matters where there is no conflict in regard to the social values. The following excerpt from Charles Zueblin's preface to his book on American progress is a concrete indication of what students of society usually recognize as progress.

Already this century has witnessed the first munic.i.p.alized street railways and telephones in American cities; a national epidemic of street paving and cleaning; the quadrupling of electric lighting service and the national appropriation of display lighting; a successful crusade against dirt of all kinds--smoke, flies, germs,--and the diffusion of constructive provisions for health like baths, laundries, comfort stations, milk stations, school nurses and open air schools; fire prevention; the humanizing of the police and the advent of the policewomen; the transforming of some munic.i.p.al courts into inst.i.tutions for the prevention of crime and the cure of offenders; the elaboration of the school curriculum to give every child a complete education from the kindergarten to the vocational course in school or university or shop; munic.i.p.al reference libraries; the completion of park systems in most large cities and the acceptance of the principle that the smallest city without a park and playground is not quite civilized; the modern playground movement giving organized and directed play to young and old; the social center; the democratic art museum; munic.i.p.al theaters; the commission form of government; the city manager; home rule for cities; direct legislation--a greater advance than the whole nineteenth century compa.s.sed.[326]

2. The Problem of Progress

Sociology inherited its conception of progress from the philosophy of history. That problem seems to have had its origin in the paradox that progress at retail does not insure progress at wholesale. The progress of the community as individuals or in specific directions may, for example, bring about conditions which mean the eventual destruction of the community as a whole. This is what we mean by saying that civilizations are born, grow, and decay. We may see the phenomenon in its simplest form in the plant community, where the very growth of the community creates a soil in which the community is no longer able to exist. But the decay and death of one community creates a soil in which another community will live and grow. This gives us the interesting phenomenon of what the ecologists call "succession." So individuals build their homes, communities are formed, and eventually there comes into existence a great city. But the very existence of a great city creates problems of health, of family life, and social control which did not exist when men lived in the open, or in villages. Just as the human body generates the poisons that eventually destroy it, so the communal life, in the very process of growth and as a result of its efforts to meet the changes that its growth involves, creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community. This raises the problem in another form. Communities may and do grow old and die, but new communities profiting by the experience of their predecessors are enabled to create social organizations, more adequate and better able to resist social diseases and corrupting vices. But in order to do this, succeeding communities have had to acc.u.mulate more experience, exercise more forethought, employ more special knowledge and a greater division of labor. In the meantime, life is becoming constantly more complex. In place of the simple spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower animals to live without education and without anxiety, men are compelled to supplement original nature with special training and with more and more elaborate machinery, until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in danger of losing all its joy.

Knowledge acc.u.mulates apace and its applications threaten the very existence of civilized man. The production of the flying machine represented a considerable advance in mechanical knowledge; but I am unaware of any respect in which human welfare has been increased by its existence; whereas it has not only intensified enormously the horrors of war, and, by furnis.h.i.+ng criminal and other undesirable characters with a convenient means of rapid and secret movement, markedly diminished social security, but it threatens, by its inevitable advance in construction, to make any future conflict virtually equivalent to the extermination of civilized man. And the maleficent change in the conditions of human life which the flying machine has produced from the air, the submarine parallels from the depths of the sea; indeed, the perception of this truth has led to the very doubtfully practicable suggestion that the building of submarines be made illegal....

Moreover if life itself is more secure, there is at the present moment a distinct tendency towards a diminution of personal liberty. The increasing control by the state over the conduct and activities of the individual; the management of his children, the details of his diet and the conduct of his ordinary affairs; tend more and more to limit his personal freedom. But the restriction of his liberty amounts to a reduction of his available life just as complete loss of liberty differs little from complete loss of life.[327]

It is this condition which, in spite of progress in details, has raised in men's minds a question whether there is progress in general, and if there is, whether the ma.s.s of mankind is better or worse because of it.

3. History of the Concept of Progress

The great task of mankind has been to create an organization which would enable men to realize their wishes. This organization we call civilization. In achieving this result man has very slowly at first, but more rapidly in recent times, established his control over external nature and over himself. He has done this in order that he might remake the world as he found it more after his own heart.

But the world which man has thus remade has in turn reacted back upon man and in doing so has made him human. Men build houses to protect them from the weather and as places of refuge. In the end these houses have become homes, and man has become a domesticated animal, endowed with the sentiments, virtues, and lasting affections that the home inevitably cultivates and maintains.

Men made for themselves clothing for ornament and for comfort, and men's, and especially women's, clothes have become so much a part of their personalities that without them they cease to be persons and have no status in human society. Except under very exceptional circ.u.mstances a man who appeared without clothing would be treated as a madman, and hunted like a wild animal.

Men have built cities for security and for trade, and cities have made necessary and possible a division of labor and an economic organization.

This economic organization, on the other hand, has been the basis of a society and a social order which imposes standards of conduct and enforces minute regulations of the individual life. Out of the conditions of this common life there has grown a body of general and ruling ideas: liberty, equality, democracy, fate, providence, personal immortality, and progress.

J. B. Bury, who has written a history of the idea of progress, says that progress is "the animating and controlling idea of western civilization." But in defining progress he makes a distinction between ideas like progress, providence, and fate and ideas like liberty, toleration, and socialism. The latter are approved or condemned because they are good or bad. The former are not approved or condemned. They are matters of fact, they are true or false. He says:

When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these have been partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they are true or false. But there is another order of ideas that play a great part in determining and directing the course of man's conduct but do not depend on his will--ideas which bear upon the mystery of life, such as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas may operate in important ways on the forms of social action, but they involve a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because they are believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are believed to be true or false.

The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it is important to be quite clear on the point.[328]

All of the ideas mentioned are of such a general nature, embody so much of the hopes, the strivings, and the sentiments of the modern world, that they have, or did have until very recently, something of the sanct.i.ty and authority of religious dogmas. All are expressions of wishes, but there is this difference: ideas, like liberty, toleration, etc., reflect the will of the people who accept them; ideas like providence and progress, on the contrary, represent their hopes. The question of the progress of humanity like that of personal immortality is, as Bury points out, a question of fact. "It is true or false but it cannot be proved whether true or false. Belief in it is an act of faith." When we hypostatize our hopes and wishes and treat them as matters of fact, even though they cannot be proved to be either true or false, they a.s.sume a form which Sorel describes as myth. The progress of humanity, as Herbert Spencer and the other Victorians understood it, is such a myth. Dean Inge calls it a "superst.i.tion" and adds: "To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superst.i.tion to enslave a philosophy. The superst.i.tion of progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies--those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin."[329]

The conception of progress, if a superst.i.tion, is one of recent origin.

It was not until the eighteenth century that it gained general acceptance and became part of what Inge describes as the popular religion. The conception which it replaced was that of providence. But the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of providence. They were under the influence of another idea of a different character, the idea, namely, of nemesis and fate. And before them there were more primitive peoples who had no conception of man's destiny at all. In a paper, not yet published, Ellsworth Faris has sketched the natural history of the idea of progress and its predecessors and of a new conception, control, that is perhaps destined to take its place.

The idea of progress which has been so influential in modern times is not a very old conception. In its distinctive form it came into existence in the rationalistic period which accompanied the Renaissance. Progress, in this sense, means a theory as to the way in which the whole cosmic process is developing. It is the belief that the world as a whole is growing better through definite stages, and is moving "to one far-off divine event."

The stages preceding this idea may be thought of under several heads. The first may be called "cosmic anarchy," in which we find "primitive people" now living. It is a world of chaos, without meaning, and without purpose. There is no direction in which human life is thought of as developing. Death and misfortune are for the most part due to witchcraft and the evil designs of enemies; good luck and bad luck are the forces which make a rational existence hopeless.

Another stage of thinking is that which was found among the Greeks, the conception of the cosmic process as proceeding in cycles. The golden age of the Greeks lay in the past, the universe was considered to be following a set course, and the whole round of human experience was governed and controlled by an inexorable fate that was totally indifferent to human wishes. The formula which finally arose to meet this situation was "conformity to nature," a submission to the iron laws of the world which it was vain to attempt to change.

This idea was succeeded in medieval Europe by the idea of providence, in which the world was thought of as a theater on which the drama of human redemption was enacted. G.o.d has created man free, but man was corrupted by the fall, given an opportunity to be redeemed by the gospel, and the world was soon to know the final triumph and happiness of the saved. Most of the early church fathers expected the end of the world very soon, many of them in their own lifetime. This is distinctly different from the preceding two ideas. All life had meaning to them, for the evil in the world was but G.o.d's way to accomplish his good purposes. It was man's duty to submit, but submission was to take the form of faith in an all-wise beneficent and perfect power, who was governing the world and who would make everything for the best.

The idea of progress arose on the ruins of this concept of providence. In the fourteenth century, progress did not mean merely the satisfaction of all human desires either individual or collective. The idea meant far more than that. It was the conviction that the world as a whole was proceeding onward indefinitely to greater and greater perfection. The atmosphere of progress was congenial to the construction of utopias and schemes of perfection which were believed to be in harmony with the nature of the world itself. The atmosphere of progress produced also optimists who were quite sure everything was in the long run to be for the best, and that every temporary evil was sure to be overcome by an ultimate good.

The difficulty in demonstrating the fact of progress has become very real as the problem has been presented to modern minds. It is possible to prove that the world has become more complex. It is hardly possible to prove that it has become better, and quite impossible to prove that it will continue to do so. From the standpoint of the Mohammedan Turks, the last two hundred years of the world's history have not been years of marked progress; from the standpoint of their enemies, the reverse statement is obviously true.

The conception which seems to be superseding the idea of progress in our day is that of control. Each problem whether personal or social is thought of as a separate enterprise.

Poverty, disease, crime, vice, intemperance, or war, these are definite situations which challenge human effort and human ingenuity. Many problems are unsolved; many failures are recorded. The future is a challenge to creative intelligence and collective heroism. The future is thought of as still to be made. And there is no a.s.surance that progress will take place.

On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that progress will not take place unless men are able by their skill and devotion to find solutions for their present problems, and for the newer ones that shall arise.

The modern man finds this idea quite as stimulating to him as the idea of progress was to his ancestor of the Renaissance or the idea of providence to his medieval forebears. For while he does not blindly believe nor feel optimistically certain things will come about all right, yet he is nerved to square his shoulders, to think, to contrive, and to exert himself to the utmost in his effort to conquer the difficulties ahead, and to control the forces of nature and man. The idea of providence was not merely a generalization on life, it was a force that inspired hope. The idea of progress was likewise not merely a concept, it was also an energizing influence in a time of great intellectual activity. The idea that the forces of nature can be controlled in the service of man, differs from the others, but is also a dynamic potency that seems to be equally well adapted to the twentieth century.

The conception that man's fate lies somehow in his own hands, if it gains general acceptance, will still be, so far as it inspires men to work and strive, an article of faith, and the image in which he pictures the future of mankind, toward which he directs his efforts, will still have the character of myth. That is the function of myths. It is this that lends an interest to those ideal states in which men at different times have sought to visualize the world of their hopes and dreams.

4. Cla.s.sification of the Materials

The purpose of the materials in this chapter is to exhibit the variety and diversity of men's thought with reference to the concept of progress. What they show is that there is as yet no general agreement in regard to the meaning of the term. In all the special fields of social reform there are relatively definite conceptions of what is desirable and what is not desirable. In the matter of _progress in general_ there is no such definition. Except for philosophical speculation there is no such thing as "progress in general." In practice, progress turns out to be a number of special tasks.

The "progress of civilization" is, to be sure, a concept in good standing in history. It is, however, a concept of appreciation rather than one of description. If history has to be rewritten for every new generation of men, it is due not merely to the discovery of new historical materials, but just to the fact that there is a new generation. Every generation has its own notion of the values of life, and every generation has to have its own interpretation of the facts of life.