Jacob Levy’s beginnings-of-a-response to Linda Hirshman’s piece on Rawlsianism as the root of all evil seems to me to be a fair bit off-target (this, from Matt Yglesias, is much better).
I recommend and second Marty Peretz’ reflections on the replacement of the word “liberal” with the word “progressive” over at The Spine. … At a somewhat different level of abstraction: “progressive” as a concept is tied up with a partly-inchoate philosophy of history that I’d have thought long since discredited. It doesn’t share in Marxism’s rigid determinism; but it does always tell a story in which one’s own side in political disputes happens to be the side of the future and the march of events. That tied together the racist imperialism of the Progressive Era, its anti-constitutionalism, and its technocracy: we enlightened white Americans with university degrees and a sense of good order and planning will drag non-white people, the uneducated, the messy chaos of the economy, and an archaic governing structure based on archaic ideas on the limits of state action into the future. Liberalism as such doesn’t believe it will necessarily win. Liberalism a la Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar, and behind them figures like Montesquieu and Tocqueville, is deeply inflected with a sense that freedom might be precarious, and the humane and human accomplishments of liberal politics might be precarious. The liberal sense of history is not necessarily pessimistic, but it shares none of progressivism’s certainty.
Jacob’s jibes about racist imperialism aside (it wouldn’t exactly take much effort to drag up some of the more sordid bits from the history of classical liberalism), his argument seems to me to rest on a false comparison. When Jacob talks about progressivism, he talks about it as a political movement; when he talks about liberalism, he talks about it as a tradition within political theory. This rather predetermines his conclusions; if your political ideals are thoughtfulness, recognition of limits etc, it’s … unsurprising that political theorists are going to come out looking better than politicians and political commentators. If you set up a fairer comparison, say by contrasting whatever tendencies there are towards overweening triumphalism among progressive political commentators with whatever tendencies there are among soi-disant liberal commentators, I suspect you’d arrive at a quite different set of conclusions (there seemed to me to be rather a lot of liberal triumphalism about the march of history and dragging non-white people and archaic governing structures into the future going around a few years ago; I’m not hearing so much of it now for all the obvious reasons).
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I thought progressivism was another way to say American Hegelianism with a liberal/leftist spine and was/is Modern American Liberalism.
And then there is Classical Liberalism which has morphed into Libertarianism.
And they were all racist and essentially imperial since wealthy powerful white Americans thought that their views of the world must be embraced by the world…or kill trying.
Hmm. My initial reaction was just the opposite: sure, progressivism as grand philosophy may tend toward a certain triumphalism or sense of inevitable progress, but actual contemporary soi-disant “progressives” are well aware “that freedom might be precarious, and the humane and human accomplishments of liberal politics might be precarious.” But I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.
Goodness, I just read the Hirshman piece. Well Jacob deserves some credit just for beginning to respond, because I wouldn’t have known where to start. Of course, the empirical claim she makes is absurd, but worse is the suggestion that the function of liberal political philosophy is to promote the electoral success of the US Democratic Party. She held a tenured position at Brandeis? Jesus!
I don’t know that much about the Progressives as a historical movement in US politics, but I agree with Jacob that “progressive” considered as a political label is meaningless triumphalism.
It was the very first in my long-abandoned Word for Wednesday series for that reason. To save the trouble of clicking on a link, I said
What Levy objects to seems to be suggested by the word “progressive” itself. What does it mean to advocate progressive positions if not to believe that your positions constitute “progress”? Meaning A) they are an improvement over competing positions and B) it is in the nature of things that they will, or at least are most likely to, triumph eventually. A is, of course, part and bparcel of any normative claim, and so useless for characterizing a specific political philosophy, but its wedding to B is quite problematic. It is hard to avoid applying B retrospectively, for example, to proclaim the current situation an improvement over all previous; a claim that the current power structure will tend to warmly endorse. A in isolation is devoid of content, and B, absent a much clearer conception of the future than anyone has, is false.
John’s comment hadn’t shown up yet when I wrote mine. I think we’re on the same page here.
Who was it that said that siding with the political force that you believed was of the future was the ultimate form of kissing the ass of power? Was it Milosz?
When Jacob talks about progressivism, he talks about it as a political movement; when he talks about liberalism, he talks about it as a tradition within political theory.
This seems right enough. The difficulty, however, is that it is not clear that progressivism has much coherence as tradition within political philosophy, or even as an ideology. As John points out to be simply in favor of “progress” doesn’t have much content, other than (perhaps) assuming that the arrow of time just necessarily points towards goodness.
My (doomed) proposal would be to reclaim “progressive” as a label for a general pro-orientation towards change, a kind of antonym for Oakeshott’s “conservative temperament.”
Chris – fair enough – when I first began to write the post I had a bit about how, disagreements aside, there isn’t any comparison between Jacob’s response and the downright weirdness of the Hirshman essay, but it got lost when my post disappeared (and I forgot to put it back in when I rewrote).
Part of the reason ‘progressive’ is a murky and not entirely useful self-description is that we don’t really have conservatives in the conventional sense in America. There isn’t this big constituency for custom and tradition, at least not among the political intelligentsia; nor for that matter can the Moral Majority movement be accurately characterized in Burkean terms. Mostly everyone is for progress, opinions merely differ on what constitutes progress.
Also, ‘progressive’ connotes strength more than ‘liberal’ does (regarding the surprisingly sane Peretz post that Levy cites). To be a progressive is to advocate marshalling the power of the state, not against foreign enemies so much as against the supposed failures of the market. Whereas to be a liberal mostly means (especially to non-liberals) letting people do whatever they want, not using corporal punishment on your kids, not believing in eternal damnation, believing in rehabilitating criminal offenders rather than punishing them, etc.
I share Jacob’s aversion to the ‘progressive’ label, for three reasons:
1) As John Quiggin and Martin Bento, as well as Jacob, point out, the word itself suggests that one is in favour, or indeed on the side of or represents, ‘progress’; and I find this dubious (that’s a great quote possible from Milosz, by the way; thanks Martin). There’s no such connotation to liberalism, the name of which invokes commitment to liberty, and a spirit of generosity—which seem much better things to affiliate oneself with than progress.
2) Historically, the Progressive Movement, as Jacob notes, was associated with all sorts of nasty things. Now, Henry’s right that Progressivism isn’t directly analogous to liberalism as a strain of political thought; but I do think one can speak of Progressive political theory, or the political thought of the Progressive movement, as a distinct strain within political thought—albeit one which was quite varied, and never constituted a coherent political system (but then, neither has liberalism), and one which was propounded over a briefer period of time by a narrower range of thinkers, most of whom are much less often read than the ‘classic’ liberal theorists. I don’t think that all that Jacob says about ‘Progressivism’ as a tendency in political thought accurately fits all Progressive theorists—charges of racism and imperialism don’t seem fair to, say, Dewey—but he does identify one feature which I do think central to Progressivism: a fondness for technocratic rule, a tendency to regard politics as consisting of ‘problem-solving’—and, in many cases, the assumption that such problems could best be solved by intellectual elites wielding social-scientific knowledge and techniques of social control. I certainly don’t think this is the worst approach to politics in the world; but I think one should be wary of it.
3) As if the term ‘progressive’ didn’t have enough against it, it then got appropriated in the ‘90s by vaguely centrist, Clintonian Democrats. If the word’s earlier political connotations hadn’t been enough to put me off it, that settled things.
John, Martin, I think that is a bit beside the point I am making here. You can certainly argue against the term ‘progressive’ – but I don’t think that the specific comparison that Jacob is making here is on-target, given that it involves apples and oranges, and liberals such as Thomas Friedman (and indeed conservatives! c.f. Fukuyama) have their versions of the same trope. As I read it, ‘progressive’ in US parlance is usually a code word for ‘maybe kinda sorta faintly social democratic.’ That Hillary Clinton feels the need to describe herself as one says interesting things about a shift (maybe only rhetorical) in the center of gravity of the Democratic party.
A central problem here is that American English doesn’t have a word for ‘social democrat’.
The comments are running slow today – I hadn’t seen Henry’s when I posted mine.
I think the criticism is a bit unfair.
He is comparing apples and oranges, but I don’t get the sense he really has a choice. Ideally he’d like to talk about progressivism as a political theory as opposed to liberalism as a political theory. But he can’t, because as far as political theory is concerned progressivism doesn’t exist.
You can talk about “liberalism a la Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar, and behind them figures like Montesquieu and Tocqueville”, but you couldn’t put together a similar sentence regarding progressivism. Maybe you could mention Condorcet, but progressivism isn’t so much a political theory as a loose grouping of inchoate ideas. You can’t really discuss it on the same terms as liberalism, and dumbing the discussion down to comparing progressivist commentators with liberal commentators doesn’t really get us anywhere in terms of understanding the merits of the two positions.
From Hirshman, to Levy and Yglesias, to several of the posters here, there seem to be a lot people confused about what “progressive” actually denotes in the American political context today.
“Progressive” wasn’t invented to describe some historico-political systematic philosophy—there never was one. It wasn’t invented to distinguish Clinton’s policies from those advocated by other Democrats—Clinton was a practical fellow who didn’t waste time giving names to ideas. It wasn’t invented to recall the progressive era—whether one regards that era as a triumph or a tragedy, the voting public has no memory of it. It was invented for one simple reason: “liberal,” the adjective previously applied to Democrats, had become an epithet, so Democrats needed a new one.
I for one am quite glad Democrats have abandoned “liberal” because it was really a mis-appropriation of a long-standing term for a real, coherent world view that deserves more visibility in America. Americans have no idea what “classical liberal” means, “libertarian” conjures of pictures of gun-nuts, and “the ideas advocated by the editors of ‘The Economist’ magazine” is too much of a mouthfull. I’ll be happy when we can have “liberal” back.
What a strange set of responses. I certainly don’t have a native speakers grasp of the confusing ways in which Americans use political language but while I agree with Henry’s post and subseqent comments I am baffled by people saying that (i) the term “progressive” is meaningless (surely it’s basically just the opposite of “conservative”) (ii) belief in progress is obviously mistaken (iii) claiming to be on the side of progress (or ‘progress’) is somehow sinister (iv) progressives have dangerous tendencies towards technocratic elitism (and liberals don’t???) Very, very odd (to me at least).
Btw I wouldn’t call myself a “progressive”. It seems like one of those funny pieces of American politesse, like calling the toilet the “rest room”. But I thought it was harmless enough.
The idea that embracing Rawls has hurt the Democratic Party politically is hardly a new idea of Hirshman’s. It was proposed (I believe) by Galston and then by Sam Scheffler, with specific reference to claims about desert. Ordinary voters believe that people deserve income if they work hard and contribute to others and don’t deserve it if they don’t. Rawls denied that claims about desert play any foundational role in distributive justice; in so far as Democrats accepted his ideas—an empirical question on which I have no firm opinion—they were cutting themselves off from many voters’ core ideas about justice. As I say, it’s not a new idea and it doesn’t sound crazy to me. (In this temple of Rawlsolatry I can’t help adding that Rawls’s arguments against economic desert are especially feeble.)
“Conservative” is nearly as problematic as progressive. As an example, how many US conservatives are keen to conserve unions, the legislative heritage of the New Deal or even the US Constitution (except for one amendment)?
Of course, the Canadians had the problem fixed in the old days with the Progressive-Conservative party which seemed to cover all bases.
I just spent a long time last night on a post describing why I found Hillary Clinton’s self-appellation as progressive to be both wrong and irritating—someone who is as terrible as she is on campaign finance reform is emphatically not a progressive. So forgive me if I just steal from something I wrote a long time ago on the differences between progressivism and liberalism:
To borrow from Michael Sandel and Alan Brinkley, modern liberalism (not classical “don’t tread on me” liberalism, which we now call libertarianism) is rooted in the experience of the government-business partnership of WWII and is primarily concerned with a value-neutral federal government ensuring the equal distribution of rights. Meaning that Washington doesn’t take much of a stake in fostering any particular value in the people as a whole. Instead, it is committed to ensuring equal justice to each segment of American society, be they by gender, race, ethnicity, or occupation. In other words, the concept of the public interest is subsumed by variety of competing interests, and it’s the government’s job to act as a honest “broker state” ensuring fairness for all. Modern liberalism’s greatest success, of course, was the great and still unfinished civil rights revolutions of the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s.
Progressivism, on the other hand, is rooted in the Progressive Era of TR and Woodrow Wilson, and is primarily concerned with fostering some kind of virtue in the electorate and in preserving the prerequisites of citizenship. What’s the difference? When liberals talk of competing interests, progressives speak of the public interest. When liberals talk about the rights of individuals and the concerns of groups, progressives talk about the obligations of citizens and the needs of communities. While liberalism as a philosophy is value-neutral with respect to corporate power (it serves the needs of consumer-Americans), progressives want to know how this corporate power adversely affects citizenship. In the liberal view, government mediates betwen groups of people, while, in the progressive view, the people are the government. In the progressive view, carmakers, farmers, breadbakers, and gun owners; Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, we are all citizens.
It’s always struck me as one of those names, you know, for things you can’t define but you know them when you see them.
I’m certainly puzzled when sections of the American right who favour turning the established social and legal order upside down call themselves “conservatives” (and when those who favour bigger government call themselves “liberals”). As I said, I’m not a native speaker of the language. I’d even agree that the term is in danger of losing its meaning. Nevertheless, the word “conservative” does have a straightforward definition (as Ben A pointed out above) as someone who is sceptical of change. I’d assumed “progressive” was its complement.
There’s a difficulty with “progressive” that doesn’t really arise with “conservative”. Scepticism about change makes sense. Support for change per se, regardless of direction, no doubt describes a sort of temperament, but not one that has much appeal in political terms. Or maybe it just doesn’t have much appeal to me.
Having not yet read Hirshman’s piece, what seems crazy to me is that the Democrats have adopted Rawlsian notions of desert in any way. If you’re going to tie welfare state provisions to Rawls’ rejection of desert, which strikes me as wholly unnecessary (many desert-based theories of justice can certainly justify it), but even if we did it the timing is all wrong. By the time Rawls is on the scene American Democrats were moving in the other direction.
Scepticism about change makes sense. Support for change per se, regardless of direction, no doubt describes a sort of temperament, but not one that has much appeal in political terms.
The opposite of “skepticism about change” isn’t credulity about change, but skepticism about tradition or the status quo.
‘When liberals talk of competing interests, progressives speak of the public interest. When liberals talk about the rights of individuals and the concerns of groups, progressives talk about the obligations of citizens and the needs of communities. While liberalism as a philosophy is value-neutral with respect to corporate power (it serves the needs of consumer-Americans), progressives want to know how this corporate power adversely affects citizenship.’
If that’s right, then it looks like ‘progressivism’ is a form of civic republicanism.
(as decribed by Philip Pettit, Quentin Skinner, Michael Sandel etc)
I’m fine with that, as someone strongly sympathetic to CR. It certainly seems to describe one very prominent strand in the so-called progressive blogosphere. I’m not so sure it describes Hillary Clinton though.
“One who calls himself a liberal is nowadays diversely called by others a traitor, coward, parlor-pink, eclectic, jelly-fish, a selfish or muddy thinker who wants both to have his cake and eat it, rationalist, skeptic, conservative, radical…. But there is unanimity of opinion on one thing, namely, that liberalism is essentially negative, paralytic, and disintegrative. It’s boasted open-mindedness is nothing more than axiological anemia.”
Leslie Page, “Liberalism, Dogmatism and Negativism”, “Journal of Social Philosophy”, 5 (1940), p. 346.
Cited in John Gunnell, “The Descent of Political Theory”, Chicago, 1993, p. 136.
“It seems like one of those funny pieces of American politesse, like calling the toilet the “rest room”.”
But we don’t; We call the room the toilet is found in the ‘rest room’; The ‘toilet’ is a plumbing fixture.
BTW, in the Philippines the same room is called the ‘comfort room’, so this politesse is scarcely limited to America.
If you are going to define “conservative”, reasonably enough, as “sceptical of change”, rather than something transparently unreasonable like “rejects all change”, then you ought to extend the same courtesy to “progressive” and rather than defining it as “supports change per se” (which is certainly not an appealing position) define it as something like “optimistic about the possibility of positive change”. I don’t think this is meaningless, or stupid, nor does it seem to implicate one in the imperio-heteronormative assumptions, or whatever, some people are denouncing.
I think Bill in Turkey got it about right. American liberalism is a kind of hybrid justifying government action in terminology borrowed from classical individual-freedom liberalism, which was often anti-government. Progressivism seems more activist and pro-government, and proposes a positive program rather than simply a neutral sphere of freedom and tolerance.
I think that today’s progressivism should be called Progressivism 3.0—Teddy Roosevelt would be 1.0 and Henry Wallace (bad precedent) 2.0. (Left, socialist-inclined Democrats I met in the Sixties might be 2.5). It’s just a new appropriation of a floating word and isn’t illuminated by a close examination of earlier historical uses of the word.
The regressive image of the Republican party (an accurate image) makes the term “progressive” attractive, and “liberal” has been smirched with a reputation for laxity, indulgence, relativism, and weakness. Partly this is just smears and slogans, but it does derive partly from actual liberal mistakes and from the liberal decision to try to ground everything on individual-freedom arguments.
The label ‘progressive’ has undergone a revival in Britain of late. Gordon Brown talks about building a ‘progressive consensus’. The centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research recently published a book, in collaboration with the Liberals, called ‘Beyond Liberty: Is the Future of Liberalism Progressive?’ (Full disclosure: I wrote a piece for it.) Indeed, the term is all over the place in the centre-left literature. Its interesting to wonder why it has undergone this revival. Partly because the old language of socialism is seen, rightly or wrongly, as carrying too much of the wrong kind of baggage. But why not then use a term like ‘social democracy’? Perhaps because social democracy is sometimes taken to be in opposition to something called ‘liberalism’, and the self-styled ‘progressives’ are interested in some sort of creative bridging of liberalism and social democracy?
While I’m all for that creative synthesis of liberalism and social democracy, I have my reservations about the language of progressivism. If somebody defines themselves as a progressive, I want to know what type of ‘progressive’ they are.
I wonder if someone could explain something to me. How and when was the idea “discredited” that history has a discernible direction, as Levy said and as John Quiggin (comment #4) and others here seem to agree? It seems pretty clear that it has, broadly speaking and with many local exceptions, trended broadly “upward,” away from priestcraft toward science, away from absolute rule toward democracy, away from aristocratic systems of titled privilege toward systems of legal equality based on personhood, not noble birth, and so on. Just during the course of U.S. history, the franchise has expanded, not contracted, and legal rights have been recognized where they weren’t previously for one group after another: women, Catholics, ethnic/racial minorities, gays. We didn’t start out with everyone having those rights, then move to a situation today where no one does, but the other way around (if, again, not smoothly but in fits and starts).
If you don’t think that all this is in fact a trend, and one for which the word “progress” is apt, then how would you describe it? Or what do you think actually is happening—that history just churns around randomly, with democracy switching places every so often with theories of divine kingship; science developing for a while and then being forgotten in favor of Scripture-based dogma; broad rights being granted, then taken away, then fought for and granted again, then taken away again, etc.? I mean, what do you call the phenomenon that makes the world of today different from the world of a thousand years ago, which was different from the world of a thousand years earlier, which was different from a thousand years before that? What do you call the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment—just illusions of some kind? Do you think that those movements are just going to reverse, and in a few hundred years the leading countries in the world will be burning witches again? Are we just in a lucky upward swing of a big ferris wheel that keeps dipping back down again from one epoch to the next? Seriously, I’m just very unclear on how anyone can look at what’s happened in history in the medium-to-long term and not see it as (a) directional and (b) progressive.
Just to be clear, I’m not condoning the use of the word “progressive” here in the UK, which would sound awfully NuLab to me (and anyway what’s wrong with “social democrat”?); I’m defending its use in the more impoverished linguistic environment of modern American political discourse—a kind of Appropriate Technology for a politically developing nation.
And another thing, it seems that most of today’s “conservatives” are actually “reactionaries.”
Many faux-libertarians within assorted “reactionary” activists groups use the rhetoric of libertarianism, i.e., anti-stateists and statists. However their actions reveal themselves to be right-wing statists, while the fancy themselves to be anti-statists.
j smith – Careful, you’ll be giving postmodernists fits of apoplexy. Less facetiously: yes, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise and consolidation of the New Right, the intellectual consensus does seem to be that history is just a big butter churn or ferris wheel and there isn’t a natural, evolutionary tendency towards freedom and enlightenment written into history. In certain circles you will be savaged as a ‘Whig’, ‘enlightenment fetishist’ or an imperialist for suggesting there is any kind of progress in history, be it science, politics or culture. Certainly this position has some merit, its not hard to find embarassingly naive utopian rubbish written by 20th century ‘progressives’.
In my view ‘progressive’ does denote something important related to the content of left-liberal political ideology. Different ideologies are grounded by their social imagery. Central to fascism is the notion of national rebirth, hence the obsession with ancient myth. Conservatives dream of a recently passed golden age before society’s morals went to hell. Radical greens dream of anything-but-now, either the distant arcadian past or the far future when human beings are again one with gaia.
‘Progressives’ (both liberal and socialist) on the other hand saw the near future as being the promised land. Through reform in the here-and-now, a world of peace and plenty could be acheived in the foreseable future. The march of history was on their side and centuries of superstition, despotism and foolishness were ready to be swept away by modernity. This grounded and orientated the rhetoric and thinking of those on the left until the 1980s/1990s when this vision hit the rocks of reality. Those on the left are now more circumspect and so the word now seems to be primarily used by centrist politicians as a codeword for ‘social democratic’.
Still, progress and human improvement are still important tropes in ordinary political conversation between people of a left-wing and centrist leaning. Conservative initiatives are constantly described as a ‘step backwards’ or similar.
A tangent, but what the hell, I’ll bite …
tom hurka: “Rawls denied that claims about desert play any foundational role in distributive justice … in this temple of Rawlsolatry I can’t help adding that Rawls’s arguments against economic desert are especially feeble.”
I wonder if what frustrates some moral philosophers about Rawls and his legacy to date is not the feebleness of his arguments when he’s read as a muddleheaded luck egalitarian. What pisses them off, I suspect, is the conceit (more prominent in later work but lurking in Theory) that political philosophy is importantly distinct from moral philosophy.
We can, within the Rawlsian framework, have constructive arguments about legitimate expectations and the demands of justice without pulling our hair out over, say, the latest fascinating ethereal nuance in perfectionism or action theory (“but what if the streetcar is yellow, the switch has nine vague states, the switch puller provisionally accepts a bayesian dynamic coherence account of rationality, but has a diffuse prior about effectiveness over the space of vague switch states, and one of the passengers is a neuroscientist researching the neurological basis of moral reasoning? what then?”)
So yes, if U.S. democrats were seriously seduced by (the van Parijs take on ) Rawls on desert, then there is a clash between that view and at least some (but not all) of the intuitions many voters harbour about economic desert (e.g. the fascinating experimental findings by Frohlich and Oppenheimer and Scott et. al.). But even granting that empirical claim and accentuating the point of conflict between luck egalitarian claims and voter intuitions, I’d hang the blame on the likes of van Parijs, Cohen, and Dworkin rather than Rawls.
Rawls, after all, came to believe that accounts of desert are bound up with comprehensive moral worldviews, making them controversial as authoritative accounts of legitimate expectations within a fair system of social cooperation. Thus, in Rawls’s mature view, his earlier argument against economic desert (such as it was) seems feeble, but he was really making no such argument.
Personally, I think both democrats and Republicans in the U.S. would do well to ponder the fleeting but pregnant remarks in Theory about campaign finance, which seem far more relevant to the sorry state of American democracy than abstract theoretical worries about who really deserves precisely what, and how much, in the marketplace.
And Hirshman? She’d do well simply to read the book.
stuart white: “If somebody defines themselves as a progressive, I want to know what type of ‘progressive’ they are.”
That seems right to me. ‘Progress along which dimensions? at what costs, for whom? why these dimensions? why those costs?’ seems to get at some of the reservations expressed so far about the dark side of Progress. But that garbled mouthful doesn’t have ‘ummph’-factor of, say, “Equality of What?”, I readily admit.
Isn’t this a complete non sequitur? The fact that some soi disant progressives may have written “naive utopian rubbish” does not show that the thesis that “history is just a big butter churn or ferris wheel” has any merit, does it? And are you sure that this is “the intellectual consensus”?
Thanks, nick l, I think those are useful ways of looking at the different basic philosophies. As to the po-mo, ferris-wheel / butter-churn view of history, it seems to me that it can be tested empirically (albeit retrospectively) against what it would predict. If there’s no particular direction to history, then we should expect, looking back, to see different political systems and epochs appearing and giving way to each other either randomly, or in some kind of cyclical way with the backslides as big as the rises that preceded them. So, for instance, the 20th century B.C., the 2nd century B.C., the 12th century C.E. and the 20th century C.E. should be all be equally likely to be democratic, or equally likely to be ruled by pharoahs, or equally likely to foster Enlightenment-style science, or equally likely to believe the earth is flat. But that’s not what we see; we see the more democratic, rational and enlightened centuries grouped toward recent times, the priests having lost power rather than gained (or re-gained) it, and the pharoahs long dead. So, the butter-churn theory’s prediction is falsified.
Hence there’s a need for another theory, some way of explaining this grouping of eras—this way in which their dominant social and intellectual systems are not randomly distributed over the 5,000 or so years of recorded history. What is that theory? It seems to me the “Whig interpretation” coherently explains the observed facts, as does some modified Marxian theory, although perhaps both are wrong (fundamentally and/or in details). At any rate, some theory is needed to which the word “progress” would seem to apply. Of course it would be fallacy to assume from the facts I’ve outlined that progress is inevitable—but it would also be a fallacy to assume that if it isn’t inevitable, it therefore isn’t happening at all. Short of some cataclysm that wipes out the Enlightenment (and granted, some of our conservative friends are working on this), I just don’t see how the idea that there’s NO progress, let alone no direction at all, can possibly be rescued at this point, however fashionable it may currently be.
Bill, I couldn’t agree more. That’s what irritated me so much about Hillary’s claim. She’s emphatically NOT a progressive, as one can most easily make plain by referencing her cavalier attitude toward campaign finance reform. Robert La Follette and other progressives of the real Progressive era would roll in their graves. (Only in the 1920s, after the Red Scare, did progressives really begin to move toward a defense of “individual rights and freedoms” that Clinton said in her debate answer was central to Progressivism.)
I am with j smith. Progress happens. It isn’t foolish to consider universal health care or gay rights as part of that progress.
I still prefer the word liberal. If someone is going to attack you, you have to attack them back, not change what you call yourself.
engels – sorry, although I said otherwise, I realise that was still being facetious in that section. I don’t agree with the ‘butter churn’ approach (for similar reasons that j smith proposes), but it does seem to be very powerful, if not dominant, within the academy right now. I’ve just been teaching a section of a university course on culture and international relations and I’ve had to wade through a great deal of material that regards notions of ‘progress’ or ‘enlightenment’ with scorn if not outright contempt.
To respond to j smith, I agree with most of what you say, but those who attack the notion of progress tend to follow Foucault in order to argue that, yes, although presidents have replaced pharaohs, modern society is no less oppressive because it institutionalises new forms of social control which turn violence ‘inward’. Or else they highlight the (very real) atrocities enacted in the name of reason and progress. But in the main it isn’t a rational argument that can be falsified, it simply seems to be a revulsion to the notion of progress itself and an adulation of unreason and ‘radical alterity’.
There is a difference between regarding history as having a trajectory that is visible in hindsight and having one that is visible in foresight, and the latter is necessary if one is to align oneself with the “direction” of history. For a good while, movement towards greater government control of the economy was regarded as “progress”, as soon as the trend changed, those lessening government control could and did claim the mantle of “progress”, as Blair claiming to modernize the Labor Party. Which one is right? One can construct a theory to pretend to know, but the track record is not good. And the answer could be different even with complete knowledge of the future, depending on which time scale of the future you choose to reference. Trying simply to side with what currently looks like the future makes one an intellectual Yes Man. Since humans are given to faddishness anyway, this is probably not useful.
As for theories of historical progress, Whig history is probably the classic example of theories of progress leading logically, as I had suggested, to glorification of the present (or possibly constructed for that purpose, but to the same effect). Marxism is a little more complicated.
I think it’s clear that a modern definition of “progressive” is still under construction. To me it’s seemed a matter of style: scrappy activists I knew in college in the late 90s used it, and then some Democrats took it up to be more cutting-edge.
When Rick Santorum first ran for Congress in 1990, he described himself as a “progressive conservative.” Again, I think this was a matter of seeming up-to-date.
But if the goal is to avoid the taint of the word “liberal,” after 20 years of Arthur Finkelstein politics, that’s just going to fail. Bill O’Reilly has been promoting his definition of “progressive” as “Marxist” (e.g., claiming that the progressive tax is straight out of the “Marxist handbook”!), especially in his non-stop use of the “secular-progressive” or “S-P” bogeyman.
John E.
I don’t think liberals have been much grounding everything on individual freedom. Why do they not, by and large, favor drug legalization? The Libertarians have long since stolen their thunder on this. Liberal intellectuals like Dworkin explicitly argued that freedom is not a right in itself, save to the extent that it follows from equality. Personally, I’m not much a Libertarian, but I’m more of one than that.
As for the usefulness of the term “progressive”, the fact the Hillary can co-opt it even before the “true progressives” can get it well-established shows one problem with the term. It is so vague, it can be stolen without recourse.
Nick based on your responses to j smith and engels I don’t understand your original statement “Careful, you’ll be giving postmodernists fits of apoplexy.”
Why should we be careful to not aggressively contradict what postmodernists recite?
j smith,
Here’s my problem with history-as-progress.
I will agree that there is general progress in knowledge of the physical world. Newton knew important things that Galileo didn’t; Oppenheimer knew important things that Newton didn’t. The blast furnace makes more steel more cheaply than did the Toledo swordsmiths. Radio carries messages more efficiently than signal fires.
What I don’t see is progress in any overall sense in social organization or “rightness”. I don’t see a good argument that the 20th century (with Communism, Nazi-ism, the eugenics movement, easily available abortion, all the various mass slaughters in the de-colonializing world, etc) was in some moral or organizational way more advanced than, say, the 1st century.
Martin, I was mostly speaking about the period 1932-1968. “Liberalism” was a way of shoehorning Democratic Socialist or Labor politics into the individualistic American environment.
ACLU liberals are often as good as libertarians on the drug wars and related issues, but the Democratic Party isn’t liberal any more.
To repeat Martin Bento, even if you regard the first half of C20 as an aberration, and conclude that, in a lot of ways the world has been getting better morally or organizationally, that doesn’t help in terms of the use we are discussing, in which “progressive” refers to one side of political debates in modern democratic countries.
I like the clarification. Progressive = leftist, and I oppose leftism, which is an ideology, not a temperament.
Now, can I have my liberals back? Some of them were OK.
Samchevre,
“What I don’t see is progress in any overall sense in social organization”
“I don’t see a good argument that the 20th century…was in some moral or organizational way more advanced than, say, the 1st century.”
Well the idea that one baby is not born as inherently more morally valuable than another is an idea that has really been gaining some ground recently.
Many societies now reject the idea that boy’s are so much more inherently valuable than girls that it is morally justifiable for the former to own a wife/wives for the services she can provide (i.e. as we own non-human animals today).
The same goes for the idea that this or that race is not owed equal moral concern by virtue of their skin color. No state today legally enforces the status of some humans as property of others (which was common practice in legal orders all over the world until recently). And some of these states actually mean it.
Even the idea that killing people in other countries for money is OK because they are not Americans, or Brits, or Japanese, or Spanish, or whatever is starting to be questioned.
Protection of individuals’ property rights,
Democratic political rights,
Decriminalization of homosexuality,
etc…
Of course justice as a project is far from finished business. Yet all the moves noted above are in the right direction if we are committed to the idea that there are “no common inherent or circumstantial differences between people that could justify viewing some as valuable individuals that are owed our respect and concern but that could also justify treating others as things or as if they had no value at all.” (aaron_m, 2007 forthcoming)
Sorry I didn’t have time to reply either here or at TNR today. This has been instructive reading. At first I said to myself, “Hm. I think Henry’s right.” Then I read John, Martin, and leederick’s various comments, and decided, “No, they’re expressing the thoughs I had better than I did, and broadly they’re right.”
Henry’s clearly onto something that I’m comparing unlikes at some level; but a decision to switch from the word “liberal” to the word “progressive” calls for comparing those categories as they’ve come to us. “Liberal” is a category in political theory and political discourse but not the name of some one movement in American political history. (There’s no proper noun Liberal or Liberalism in American political history the way there is in British.) “Progressive” is precisely the name of such a movement—a movement Clinton draped around her shoulders in her comments.
While I don’t think I gave an unfair characterization of Progressivism, Henry’s certainly right that I pretty ungenerously failed to give any accounting of liberalism’s debits. I’ll probably still hold off on doing so while working through a response to Hirschman—because I think Rawlsian liberalism is liberal not progressive, and I want to defend Rawlsian liberalism. But writing the liberal-progressive post while thinking about how to respond to her meant that I gave an unbalanced view of the two traditions.
On the big question of progress: I believe in secular material progress, and there are moral benefits to material progress. But controlling for material progress I don’t think there’s secular moral progress. I just can’t look at a century that permitted Hitler, Stalin, and Mao and think that it represented a moral pinnacle of humanity up until that time.
The half-century that followed 1914 was a morally worse time than the half-century that preceded it, and was morally at least as bad as most of the worst times in human history until then. The 16th and first half of the 17th centuries—genocide in the western hemisphere, the birth of Atlantic slavery, and wars of religion in Europe—were probably morally worse than most of human history up until then.
The world’s been getting better for the last few decades, even controlling for material progress, and I’m hopeful about that continuing, but I don’t place inherently greater stock in “make things get better” than in “prevent them from getting worse.”
Professor Levy’s right, this has all been instructive reading. (I’m sorry he’s so focused on the comparatively minor issue of defining liberalism vs. progressivism that he doesn’t have time to explain how and when the theory—no, the obvious fact—that histoy has a trend line was “discredited.”) As to the objection that the 20th century was no picnic, and therefore suggests that there’s been no moral or political progress since the 1st century, that was answered in a Stephen Pinker article in TNR a few months ago. I highly recommend it:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070319&s=pinker031907
Here’s the “money quote”:
“…..perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga [is this:] Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.”
If you don’t believe it, read the evidence he cites.
“I believe in secular material progress, and there are moral benefits to material progress. But controlling for material progress I don’t think there’s secular moral progress.”
Uhh,
All the evil stuff you note is intimately bound up with material progress. Would it have been better not to have material progress at all if those types of events were not avoidable given such progress?
Ah, OK, Prof. Levy posted his explanation simultaneously with my post. “The half-century that followed 1914 was a morally worse time than the half-century that preceded it,” etc. The fallacy here is plain—it’s focusing on overt violence at the expense of structural “violence” or its functional equivalents. The half-century that followed 1914 (i.e. 1914-1964) was horrendously violent, but it also saw the overthrow of the ancien regimes, the effective disappearance in the West of titled nobility (the House of Lords losing its power in the UK, for instance), the further spread of religious toleration as disabilities for Catholics and Jews were lifted, the granting of women’s suffrage, the New Deal (and its equivalents abroad), the end of the colonial empires, the Civil Rights Movement, and the beginnings of modern feminism and gay rights. In other words, many structures of oppression fell, and many alternative structures of tolerance and equality were either built or impressively started. NONE of those developments occurred in any earlier century, either, nor had the way been prepared for them yet. Again, if that’s not progress….. Well, what do we call it?
All the evil stuff you note is intimately bound up with material progress. Would it have been better not to have material progress at all if those types of events were not avoidable given such progress?
I don’t know. No, if the baseline is the material condition of humanity c. 1400; but surely there’s some level of prosperity that would have been worth trading off to avoid the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution and so on. On the other hand, “prosperity” means, among other things, “relief from misery, disease, and starvation,” and it makes possible moral improvements beyond that level.
But “I don’t know” is part of my point—I don’t know how one can look at human history and see a clear trend-line other than the material-technological one, other than by cherry-picking. (The western capitalist democracies c. 2007 are better than the Spanish Inquisition—true enough, and yet…)
Oh, and I might add that before 1914, overt racism, fascism and anti-Semitism were respectable opinions, as they had been for centuries, and they even claimed “scientific” grounding (in theories of racial superiority, etc.). Since 1964, in the West, they have not been respectable opinions even if the impulse to them hasn’t disappeared completely. Also over that time period, religious obscurantism lost further ground: In the 1920s, a teacher could be criminally prosecuted for teaching evolution in an American classroom; by the 1960s, creationists had basically lost that battle and were reduced to bleating for “equal time.” Does anyone think that’s going to reverse, and we’re going to see modern biology surrender the field back to the Bible-thumpers? Or that blacks, women and gays are going to go back to accepting legal disabilities of the Jim Crow variety? To suggest that the world has been “better for the last few decades” only, as opposed to fundamentally better (as the result of an ongoing trend), you’d have to answer “yes” to those questions.
Levy and I are posting simultaneously. OK, before we go any further, Professor, you need to read the Pinker article. He cites hard evidence against your position, which you should at least have some kind of answer for. Plus, it appeared in the same magazine that’s been publishing you.
“I don’t know how one can look at human history and see a clear trend-line other than the material-technological one, other than by cherry-picking. (The western capitalist democracies c. 2007 better than…”
I am not too sure what you are getting at but I worry that it is an example of the ultimate expression of modern cultural arrogance. Justice, we can do it but there is no good reason to think that others can or want to.
As for the problem of cherry-picking, j_smith’s point is exactly that you are cherry-picking and ignoring evidence of trends.
j smith,
I have two problems with your responses.
1) You are way over-focused on the US and Western Europe. Since 1945, the US and Western Europe have been peaceful, and have made some changes that can reasonably be considered “progress.” It is harder to see that there has been progress in any kind of universal sense; the de-colonialization process in Africa and India/Pakistan has featured extremely high levels of violance and brutality.
2) You consider a several things progress that I consider not-progress. Loss of stabilizing social institutions isn’t necessarily a good thing, even when those institutions aren’t ideal in some theoretical way. Eliminating aristocratic vetoes, and traditional religious influences, enabled Stalin, Mao, and Hitler to do more damage than they could have done in a more constrained envronment.
Let us not forget why the second half of the 20th century was less violent than the first: the key conflict of the period, the Cold War, could not escalate to unconstrained violence without destroying both societies. Is that moral progress? There is no way to say, but I think there’s a fair chance that previous eras would also have chosen not to be destroyed; they were fortunate enough not to have the choice, at least in such stark form, and therefore had the luxory of unrestrained warfare. Had Hitler and FDR both had nukes in 34, it’s hard to see how WW2 would have happened (possibly the Republicans would have come to power and sided with Hitler against Stalin).
While this seems a good thing, we will never really know how close we came to paying a cost that would have dwarfed all concievable benefit. I don’t think this is moral progress per se, it is changing constraints imposed by technology.
The Levyian fallacy is the assumption that people don’t learn anything from historical experience. But it’s precisely because of the Holocaust, among other things, that there will never again—short of some catastrophic civilization-level collapse—be a Western nation that’s taken over by a political party that claims that everyone’s problems are caused by “die Juden,” and that this cancer on the body politic must be removed. That will no more happen than the Mayo Clinic will suddenly announce that real cancer is actually caused by demon spells after all.
And samchevre, of COURSE I’m focused on the U.S. and Western Europe. That’s where the trends are furthest advanced. Some of them either haven’t taken hold yet, or got started later, in the Middle and Far East. But, first, is there a serious chance that (say) the Sunni-Shiite warfare now roiling Iraq is going to ignite new Protestant-Catholic wars in the West, plunging us back into something resembling the 16th century? (Again, barring the collapse of Western civilization, and therefore the end of its history, after the big asteroid hits or something.) And second, are there no lessons at all to be drawn from the enormously rapid progress—first materially, and now politically (albeit in fits and starts, as it happened in the West)—we see having been made in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and several other “Asian Tigers”? Isn’t that a trend? Or are those countries, having seen what modern life is like, just going to lapse back into warlordism any day now?
Also, samchevre, I disagree with one word in this sentence: “Loss of stabilizing social institutions isn’t necessarily a good thing, even when those institutions aren’t ideal in some theoretical way.” That word is “theoretical.” In fact those institutions weren’t ideal in highly practical ways—notably the way they severely restricted opportunities for women, treating them like property to be handed off from fathers to husbands. Considering that women are half the population, just how much human potential was squandered for how many centuries in the name of one allegedly “stabilizing institution”? (Which, by the way, if it were really so “stabilizing,” would not have been vulnerable to the demands for expanded rights and autonomy that eventually forced it to change.)
Sam, most of the events you are citing – the decline of religion and the aristocracy, the increased availability of safe, legal abortion, the end of imperialism – are actually morally good things. Just so you know.
Also, you are repeating your previous BS about how the aristocracy resisted the Nazis: they didn’t.
So can we have a show of hands for turning the clock back to, ooh, let’s say 1500 AD?
Pinker: “Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.”
Pinker says that the years since 1989 are better than what came immediately before (true), that the last fifty years have been better than what came before (true), and that humanity is proportionately less violent than it was during prehistoric tribal times (which he has evidence for so I believe.)
But the comparison at the level of centuries in historic (rather than prehistoric) time seems tougher to me. True, Parisians no longer engage in cat-torturing as a public sport. But if we compare the 20th c in aggregate to most of what came before, we’ll find that a significant corner of humanity (western Europe and its offshoots) had less day-to-day coarse enjoyment of brute violence but an emotional deadening to large-scale, long-distance bureaucratic violence. Very refined Germans in the 20th c, and Americans, Belgians, and others in the 19th c., who would never have tortured a cat for fun sanctioned far-away genocidal or mass-murder level violence that I don’t think the refinement in personal sensibilities does much to compensate for.
And anyway, Pinker’s point of reference is always “now.” To see a trend-line, I’d want to know that we could stand at most points in the historical past and tell the same story: Life at time T consistently tends to be morally better than at time T-50, T-100, T-500 years. I don’t see it. We might be at a local peak, which can be very misleading about the shape of the overall curve…
Humanity seems to have learned some stuff since then. But the eighteenth century even more filled with the conviction that humanity had learned so much and made so much moral progress. So was humanity c. 1910. I don’t know how to be sanguine that lessons learned will stay learned, or that they won’t be rendered obsolete by new forms of horror.
OK, well, we’ve gone from “The half-century that followed 1914 was a morally worse time than the half-century that preceded it” to “the last fifty years have been better than what came before” (i.e. the opposite claim) in just 14 posts. If I may, Professor, you seem to be making—oh, what shall I call it—progress, maybe? :-)
??
1860s-1910s > 1910s-1960s
whoops—stupid html.
1860s-1910s better than the next 50 years which were worse than the following 50 years—a V-shape, not a straight line, and no contradictory claim that I can see.
A V-shape, perhaps, but with the “near” side of the V “higher” than the far side, correct? Or are you saying that there’s nothing to be said for the 1950s-2000s as compared with the 1860s-1910s, a period of intense and overt racism and sexism, not to mention imperial competition and arms races even among the nations of Europe? I mean, if the interventing period (1910s-1960s) was so awful, wasn’t it in consequence of those problems? And don’t the past 50 years reflect the lessons learned, or is it now basically 1867 again?
If we go back to where I originally proposed my own view of progress, I said it happens in fits and starts. But that doesn’t mean there’s no overall trend. To the contrary, because I think the gaining of historical experience is the engine driving the progress, I would expect there to be violent upheavals based on earlier problems, with those upheavals themselves then inspiring new and better arrangements. That isn’t precisely what we saw in the 20th century?
I see in some of these recent posts both the promise and peril of arguments for moral progress in history.
The promise: many of the goods outlined so far really are good: surely a great many thoughtful people would, upon reflection and after discussion, agree that fewer random killings and rapacious emperors, and more meaningful opportunities in life, are good things?
The peril: a temptation to castigate those sceptical of certain elements of your worldview (or even those who merely wish to complicate the picture somewhat) as dullards mired in fallacious reasoning and blind reverence of tradition.
The relevant cautionary tale seems almost too obvious to mention, but I’ll quote from it anyway, in case J. Smith has moved this important little volume to the back of the shelf …
“…’By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ …”
Any takers for restoring the feudal system? Burning heretics and stoning adulterers? Replacing surgery with blood-letting? Shortening the life expectancy to around 30? Abolishing voting and the legal system? Scrapping universal education? Forgetting the theory of evolution and the position of the Earth in the solar system? Disenfranchising women? Bringing back slavery? Re-introducing colonialism?
Engels, is there someone here you think you’re arguing with?
The shorter engels: THE FUTURE IS NOW!
Well, Loren, I’m certainly not arguing with you. How can one argue with pat formulas about “the promises and perils of arguments for moral progress”, cryptic mutterings about “the dark side of progress” and melodramatic allusions to Kurtz’ descent into racist murder which possess no discernible logical connection to any arguments anybody has here advanced?
I am arguing with anyone who doubts whether we have seen progress in the last thousand years. Unlike Jacob I don’t think you can neatly divide (or factor out) “moral progress” from progress tout court. However, you can also take most of the examples I gave as examples of “moral progress”, in the narrow sense that Jacob seems to want to understand it. (Incidentally, I’m not sure why a discussion which is supposedly about “progressivism” as a political movement, has to focus exclusively on “moral progress”, since one would expect such a movement to be concerned with living standards and the state of scientific knowledge amongst other issues.) I would also suggest that many of the positive developments I listed can be seen, pace Jacob, as part of discernible trends eg. towards (at least the principle of) human equality or towards a reliance on the fruits of rational enquiry rather than religious dogma.
j smith wrote:
“Oh, and I might add that before 1914, overt racism, fascism and anti-Semitism were respectable opinions, as they had been for centuries, and they even claimed “scientific” grounding (in theories of racial superiority, etc.).”
You might not. Certain bad ideas from the 19th and early 20th centuries seem to be getting projected backwards to infinity. Fascism did not exist before 1914. Eugenics was invented in 1865 by Galston, a cousin of Darwin. Its basis was explicitly Darwinian, and I know of no set of ideas more specifically modern than Darwinism. While Plato also wanted elitist breeding, the idea of using such to transform the race itself required a notion of evolution to be coherent. “Scientific” racism is also a child of the 19th century. The bad ideas that animated Nazism had not been around for centuries. Arendt lays them out pretty well, and little predates the 19th century.
Engels,
We are, both of us, raised in this society in this time and inculcated with its values. Would I prefer to live in the classical age, or in ancient China, or in the Amazon prior to colonization? It is easy to give a glib answer, but impossible to know, as I would be a different person if I came from such an environment with different values and preferences. The Middle Ages thought they were quite an improvement over decadent pagan Rome, and by their standards they were. Today, we can agree or disagree with this assessment.
Nonetheless, since I cannot know, I accept the values that I have and do regard the world I live in as having “progressed” in many respects from those of the past. I realize this conclusion must be regarded skeptically, however, and would be quite wary of the self-righteous stridency with which you seem to be insisting on the superiority of our world. It could well be true, but it is a bias we will inevitably have, so we should be willing to kick its tires a little.
Right, as engels say, moral progress can’t be separated from scientific / material progress, for this simple reason: Scientific progress doesn’t just happen, it comes about as old dogmas and old authorities are abandoned and conservative opposition to it overcome. Those are political and moral achievements too, and are therefore part and parcel of the progressive project.
And apropos of loren’s comment, yes, it’s important not to imagine that “overcoming opposition” means killing your opponents and the like. But what I’ve been talking about—and where I disagree with Prof. Levy, apparently—is the way in which we learn collectively from historical experience. The radical-messianic political movements of the past century or two have been proven not to work and to cause immense amounts of suffering. Therefore we know that those approaches don’t represent progress, and, therefore, no serious progressive will have anything to do with them.
That said, it’s important to point out the error in the butter-churn and “V-shape” theories of history we’ve been hearing. To summarize: the butter-churn theory would predict a random distribution of the things we value (equal rights, etc.) and the things we don’t (religious obscurantism, etc.) over the centuries of human history. But the distribution we actually see isn’t random but sequential, so the butter-churn view fails. Prof. Levy’s V-shape fails if he means by it that we come out of bad patches no better off than we went in, but I can’t believe he really thinks on reflection that that’s what happened between the late 19th and the late 20th centuries. The real “shape” isn’t a V but a kind of checkmark, with the bad stuff inspiring new reforms and new knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, so the later rise is higher than the earlier fall.
Finally, why does one’s view or interpretation of history matter? Because it goes to the question of what’s possible to achieve and of how and where to invest one’s political energies. There is, let’s remember, conservative opposition to everything good, socially, scientifially, morally, intellectually and politically. Do we fight that opposition expecting to beat it eventually and actually make things better, or grimly hoping just to prevent disaster from heaping upon disaster? Do we fight it in the name of progressive goals, i.e. substantively better lives for most people, or only “liberal” goals like Prof. Levy’s—preserving the rule of law, intellectual freedom and the like? They’re both important, but it’s a question of one’s priorities, of how one frames arguments, and of whether one believes that somehow the substantive outcomes take care of themselves once the liberal goals have been secured.
Sorry for the shorthand, martin. You probably know more about it than I do, but I’m aware that fascism is a modern development. Anti-semitism, though, which it fed on and radicalized, isn’t, nor was the broader idea that some groups of people aren’t really people at all, let alone part of our body politic, but instead a godless source of uncleanness against which no measures are too severe. I mean, that idea is plenty apparent in the Old Testament, so it goes back at least to the 1st millennium BC. And the treating of women like (at best) property appears to be as old as time, yes? (Which is an argument advanced in its favor by conservatives, BTW.) The point is, big progress against those ideas were made in the 20th century—they weren’t eliminated (no idea ever is), but they certainly ceased to be respectable, and Prof. Levy is therefore just being facile when he suggests that the late 19th century was as good and/or enlightened and/or non-violent a time as the late 20th.
Has not Socialism been the dominant progressive political philosophy of the last 200 years or so? It may have been the Progressives who took on the label in the US, but they did so at a time when Socialist ferment was much in the air, and were influenced, I believe, by the Bellamy clubs and the Fabians. It was Socialism that held that society was moving in a certain direction, and that that direction was good.
The utopian socialists began by deciding what kind of society they wanted. This gave them a basis for regarding changes as moving to or away from that ideal, and thus a basis for normative claims regarding progress. However, their basis for arguing that their desired outcome was the natural trajectory of history was fairly weak. It just appeared so to them. Utopian socialism was a vision, and it was realized through narrative. Their normative claims were ultimately justified on the basis that what they valued was genuinely better in a sense they were prepared to defend on its own terms. Many of the positive social changes praised here originated with the utopians.
Marxism claimed to be a scientific theory of history. It also had normative claims, but it was possible to accept the theory and reject the normative claims (the formula became “I am Marxist in my analysis, but not in my prescriptions“); the normative claims were not the foundation. This became ethically problematic. If one’s premise is a set of normative claims, one can be held to normative, e.g., ethical, objections. But if one’s premise is simply that what one does is the inevitable direction of “history”, what point is there is raising ethical objections to the natural progress of history? Are not ethics themselves a product of the same historical process? I think Marx was correct in regarding his thought as anti-utopian. He was, however, the ultimate progressive. Marxism was a theory, and it was realized through method.
I think progressivism in the utopian sense is desirable: state your ideals and goals and justify them. Ask people if the world you envision is one they want. Constructing an argument that they are the inevitable, or even naturally prevailing, destination of history absolves you of moral responsibility for what you advocate, as no one need take responsibility for what is inevitable.
Thanks to j smith (especially) and engels for putting in the effort in this thread to reject some pretty poorly argued for claims, i.e. 1) we can’t make sensible arguments about what would count as ‘things getting better’ and 2) that there is no substantive evidence for improvements. I can imagine good arguments for 1) and then in correlation 2), but this would require some much more committed relativism than has been demonstrated here. People usually want to be half-assed relativists, e.g. be relativists and claim that there cannot be any such thing as progress one way or the other, and then become truthies and claim that things are/have been bad because of X,Y,Z. As for those that either knowingly or inadvertently (i.e. the half-assed relativists) reject 1) but argue for 2), engels’ sarcasm is well placed.
Martin says this
“We are, both of us, raised in this society in this time and inculcated with its values. Would I prefer to live in the classical age, or in ancient China, or in the Amazon prior to colonization? It is easy to give a glib answer, but impossible to know, as I would be a different person if I came from such an environment with different values and preferences.”
This kind of sounds like a reasonable thing to say as long as we completely abstract from any specific description of what we are talking about. But once I point out that I would in all likelihood have been a slave who lived a short life characterised by sickness and violence it becomes more than silly to suggest that it is impossible to know if current conditions are better. It becomes an incredibly dickish comment by someone who pictures themselves as one of the few in the “chosen class/race” (I must assume this if I am to be generous to the commenter and not conclude from the outset that they are completely irrational) in some fantasy past they are imagining.
Along the lines of what martin said, I like Franklin Roosevelt’s formulation, from his second inaugural: the point isn’t to substitute the ideal for the practical, but to wipe out the line that divides the two.
As to the danger that believing in an inevitable direction of history absolves one of ethical responsibility, I think it’s important not to see positive reform as inevitable, but rather as “logically favored over the alternatives.” Not only is that actually the case, I believe, but seeing things this way encourages one to keep up the struggle, since it promises a good chance of success while still requiring effort on our part.
I also agree with aaron about half-assed relativism, which I see a lot of in the academy. It’s all very easy to suspend judgment about which system is better, until you actually start talking in detail about what life has been like for most people in most other societies. (I guess we’re back to Rawls now.) Personally, I’m happy not to have been killed at age 31 by appendicitis, as would probably have happened in any other century. But the mechanisms that saved me weren’t just “scientific progress” in some abstract sense, important as that was; they were social reforms that freed researchers to pursue that progress, that made saving my life a matter of concern to strangers (including the French doctors who took care of it), and that organized society’s resources (through taxation and funding policies) to ensure that the means to save me were in place when they were needed. Give me all that over medieval China any day.
“What, finally, is the practical application of all this?… Listen and I’ll tell you. The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It’s only the homemade pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto…”
—-Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
As Foucault might say: Plus ça change…
Engels: “… and melodramatic allusions to Kurtz’ descent into racist murder …”
Melodrama, hmmm, let’s see …
Engels: “Any takers for restoring the feudal system? Burning heretics and stoning adulterers? Replacing surgery with blood-letting? Shortening the life expectancy to around 30? Abolishing voting and the legal system? Scrapping universal education? …”
(chuckle)
Engels: “… which possess no discernible logical connection to any arguments anybody has here advanced?”
The relevance, as I see it, has to do with the complex psychology of our moral motivations and the resultant fragility of goodness, not with the obvious evils of racism, brutal exploitation, and mass killings.
I confess to largely agreeing with the broad worldview lurking in yours and J. Smith’s posts: I believe in moral progress through history, however fitful and halting it has been. I think `the arc of the moral universe’ really ought to `bend toward justice’, and I think reason, properly applied, can help us pull that off, through scientific and institutional advances, and careful reflection on preferences and values.
But I don’t imagine that there is one true arc, one glorious path, blazing through history and on into the future, pushing aside wrongheaded ideas and mistaken practices. And while I think justice has to satisfy certain minimum moral conditions, beyond those I suspect there are probably a variety of just ways of life, some of which I’ll no doubt find to be ‘foolish, perverse, or wrong’.
The real challenge, to my mind, is how we act when we find these ways of life that agree with us on certain moral fundamentals, but then move off in directions we believe to be mistaken.
A lesson I take from Conrad (in addition to the obvious one about the evils of colonialism) is that even the most laudable motivations may belie considerable psychological conflict and moral ambiguity, and that’s a worry worth keeping in mind.
I worry that sarcastic talk of restoring feudalism and witch-burning obscure these less dramatic but perhaps more relevant worries about how we encounter other values and practices that are not obviously evil, but nonetheless strike us as controversial.
I also don’t think this concern is merely half-assed relativism: it’s obviously shaped by the later Rawls, and it’s closer is spirit to the liberalism of fear that Jacob takes from Sklar in his very interesting book from a few years back.
Of course, some might still think that, at the end of the day, a liberalism that allows for diverse and conflicting (but nonetheless legitimate) claims about justice and progress must collapse into muddleheaded relativism. That, I think, is ultimately an argument we’d have to have about (at least) the viability of political liberalism and the possibility of constructivism in ethics.
j smith: “It’s all very easy to suspend judgment about which system is better, until you actually start talking in detail about what life has been like for most people in most other societies. (I guess we’re back to Rawls now.)”
Personally, I have no problem saying that some systems are obviously better than others. When it comes to justifying coercion to enforce my favoured system, I get a bit queasy.
And that seems to me to be the unspoken difference here: pretty much everyone agrees that we’d rather live without widespread poverty, violence, and early disease-addled death, but we’re not all the same sort of liberal, and the progressive label perhaps hangs better on one sort of liberal than another.
Some liberals want to emphasize progress in realizing freedom in the world, and they are understandably sensitive to anything that even remotely smacks of cultural relativism. Thus mention of Foucault makes them bristle. This liberal rightly emphasizes the secular decreases in violence and mortality over history, advances of science and technology, and the spread of the rule of law. This liberal recognizes that the march hasn’t always been pretty, but thinks that, on the whole, things are getting better for more and more people, and this roughly tracks the rise of liberal values and practices.
Another sort of liberal is all for human development and personal flourishing, and accepts much of the evidence of progress in health, science, law, and the like. But this liberal worries perhaps somewhat more than her friend about the realities of power. This liberal is, to be clear, no friend of relativism, but she is more receptive to Foucault’s analysis of power, and she and her fellows are sceptical of any and all authoritative claims, even those dealing with liberal progress in history. This liberal worries a bit less about fostering personal growth and encouraging diverse ways of living, and a bit more about when the police can legitimately kick down your door and drag you screaming into the night.
Another take: the first sort of liberal pauses longer over Mill’s discussions of eccentricity, creativity and experiments in living. The second sort of liberal tends to dwell on the discussions of coercion and harm.
Loren,
You make it sound as if we have been advocating perfectionism. We have been advocating justice not perfectionism or cultural homogeneity.
You say that you believe in moral progress and that what is just is knowable, but then you say that there is not one true notion of what is just that pushes “aside wrongheaded ideas and mistaken practices.”
This seems to suggest that we can’t be sure enough about what justice is to reject contrary views. You need to make a choice. Either we can or we can’t make knowable moral progress. Either it is true that homosexuality is morally wrong and just societies make it illegal for this reason or criminalizing homosexuality is “wrongheaded,” based on a “mistaken” moral view. One of these views is correct or we just can never be confident one way or the other.
We were not suggesting that mistakes in moral assessment aren’t common or that we shouldn’t be skeptical about our own held beliefs. But when we offered ‘sarcastic talk of restoring feudalism’ it was because some people here seriously argued that there are no clear signs of moral progress.
You note only the peril of making assertions about what is moral or just and getting wrong. What about the risk of not asserting what is just?
This kind of sounds like a reasonable thing to say as long as we completely abstract from any specific description of what we are talking about. But once I point out that I would in all likelihood have been a slave who lived a short life characterised by sickness and violence it becomes more than silly to suggest that it is impossible to know if current conditions are better. It becomes an incredibly dickish comment by someone who pictures themselves as one of the few in the “chosen class/race” (I must assume this if I am to be generous to the commenter and not conclude from the outset that they are completely irrational) in some fantasy past they are imagining.
Posted by aaron_m • July 26th, 2007 at 8:44 am
I mean this with the utmost respect; however this is the sloppiest and self-centered thinking.
I suspect a wage-slave earner in present day China would give anything to be White Anglo-Protestant Slave owner of the Old South. Or perhaps a Roman Catholic Italian Prince during the Renaissance.
I suspect a wealthy Iraqi being shelled and/or raped by Americans or fellow Iraqis would rather be a working-class Iraqi during the 1950s.
An African-American (c. 1800) slave would have a much better chance at freedom were he an African Doctor in Augustan’s Rome.
A Darfur (c. 2000) refugee would rather be a Puritan in Massachusetts (c. 1600s).
someotherdude
Talk about sloppy
!
Your comparisons are certainly true. WTF is your point?
Picking somebody that has is bad today and comparing them to somebody that had it good then is not any kind of argument against the view that there is a trend of moral progress.
See all of what j smith said.
Note that my point if the quoted post and in previous posts was that not state today gives legal recognition to slave ownership and this is a moral improvement.
My point was not that bad things no longer happen.
By the way saying “I mean this with the utmost respect; however this is the sloppiest…” is much less respectful that just saying “This is the sloppiest…”
Someotherdude – Your comparisons actually support Aaron’s point which was that the question of whether one way of life is preferable to another is not radically indeterminate (or unknowable).
Now, what I said was that, although I do believe the modern world has made progress, the facts that a) I cannot recover the subjective experience of living in pre-modern societies, and b) I am socialized to this world and so tend to value the things it values mean that I hold this belief critically. It may well be true, but I have reasons to believe it other than its truth (b), and no real way