THE IDEA OF PROGRESS AND THE AGONISTIC ETHOS OF WESTERN MAN
by
Clare Ellis
B.A. in Philosophy (Honours) and Sociology, UNB, 2008
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies
in the Graduate Academic Unit of Interdisciplinary Studies
Supervisors: Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Sociology Dr. David Flagel, PhD, Philosophy
Examining Board: Dr. Daniel Downes, PhD, Information Communication Studies, Chair Dr. Janet Bums, PhD, Sociology
This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK
August, 2011
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' This is a wood engraving with the caption: “A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet...” and is found in Camille Flammarion’s L'Atmosphere: M&dorologie Pomilaire. (Paris: 1888), 163. DEDICATION
For R and G
Mentors and friends Ellis iv
ABSTRACT
The idea of progress is found in the ancient Greeks in the form of individual and social- cultural cyclical developmentalism and metaphor. The Christians modified this ancient developmentalism such that it acquired a sacred linearity and emphasised progress in knowledge and spiritual perfection, ideas which were then secularised by Enlightenment thinkers. These latter thinkers also transformed the idea of progress into a theory applicable to the evolution of humanity as a whole. The efficient cause of progress has historically been conceived as a dialectical interplay of contesting entities. Modem liberalism seeks to do away with conflict, aggression, inequality, and suffering in order to create a global progressive order. My thesis is that creative progress requires conflict and modem liberalism is in denial of the agonistic nature of life. Ellis v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation to my supervisory committee: Dr. Ricardo
Duchesne and Dr. David Flagel. Thanks for giving time, thought, and guidance to my questions, ambitions, and research. Special thanks to Dr. Duchesne for your patience, understanding, and support, and for being a most excellent adviser. Dr. Flagel, it has been an honour to work with you.
I would also like to thank Dr. Don Desserud, Dr. Chris Doran, Dr. Hugh
Williams, and Dr. Bob Whitney for the many discussions and different points of view that aided in my seeing and managing obstacles to my research, as well as suggesting reading materials that have been undoubtedly important in the process of my work.
Thanks to Marilyn MacLeod for happily giving the amazing help and skills to provide all the important details of writing, defending, and publishing my thesis and easing the process of bringing it all together. It could have been mayhem without you!
Big gratitude goes to Sam, Glen, David, and my mum, for listening and believing in me throughout my research. I thank you for your love and support, for always being open to discuss and share experiences and knowledge and never afraid to express your opinions and disagreements. Ellis vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION...... iii ABSTRACT...... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... v TABLE OF CONTENTS...... vi INTRODUCTION...... 7 I: Methodologies...... 11 II: A Critical Evaluation of Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Progress in the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Christians...... 16 1. The Greeks and Romans...... 16 2. The Christians...... 26 III: Setbacks and Developments in the Idea of Progress during the Renaissance and The Age of Modem Science...... 34 VI: The Development of the Modem Theory of Progress...... 41 1. The Re-evaluation of Human Nature...... 47 V: Nineteenth Century Developments in the Theory of Progress...... 64 VI: Twentieth Century Developments in the Theory of Progress...... 80 VII: Criticisms of Progress...... 87 VIII: Leo Strauss and the Distinctions betweenNomos and Physis and Classical and Vulgar Conventionalism...... 99 IX: Leo Strauss and Alasdair MacIntyre on Liberalism versus Conservatism...... 105 X: Conflict...... 117 1. Conflict as Necessary to Progress: Saint Augustine to John Maynard Keynes...... 139 CONCLUSION...... 154 APPENDIX A: Some Identifiable Dualisms in History...... 160 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 162 CURRICULUM VITAE Ellis 7
INTRODUCTION
Are we immortal as a species as Kant once postulated? Is human progress intrinsic to the nature of things and human history? Or will we, at some point, through natural or man- made causes, wither, decay, and become extinct? Who are we? Where are we going?2
Are there timeless truths about human beings, our origins, our condition, and our destiny, or are there only illusions to the truth? There have been different answers to these kinds of perennial questions at different times in the course of Western history. Greeks,
Romans, Christians, modems, post-modernists, conservatives, liberals, and socialists have given out explanations and answers to the human condition, involving cyclical, linear, evolutionary, and multi-evolutionaiy conceptions of change in history. These explanations are associated with notions of teleology, meaning and purpose, with standards of justice, morality, politics, human nature, and actual historical events; and of course, a sense of uncertainty of the way things really are, or a sense of profound meaninglessness amongst glimmerings of hope as captured by Lucretius in his myth of
Sisyphus:
Here, too, is Sisyphus - the man who pants For public honours, and the giddy crowd Caresses ever, ever but in vain. For thus to toil for power, itself at best A bubble, and that bubble ne’er to boast, Yet still toil on - is doubtless to roll back Up the high hill, the huge, stem, struggling stone; That which, the steep peak once urged up, rebounds Rapid, resistless, over all the plain3
2 These are also questions of the 19th century French painter and writer Paul Gauguin, who wrote these as the title on his most famous and brilliant piece of work ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’ Of course, these questions have been asked by many throughout history, but my point is that just over 100 years ago we find the questions still being asked by a man who, according to Robert Wright, “suffered acutely from cosmological vertigo induced by the work of Darwin and other Victorian scientists” - Robert Wright, A Short History of Progress. (Toronto; House of Anansi Press, 2004), 1. 3 Titus Lucretius Cams On the Nature of Things: A Philosophical Poem, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson, (London; H.G. Bohn, 1861), 386. Ellis 8
After a short first chapter clarifying some methodological questions and differences, chapter two to six examine some of the ways in which the “great” thinkers in the Western tradition answered the above questions. Given the enormity of this subject, I have relied on Robert Nisbet’s work on the idea of progress as an organizing and discursive framework. These chapters are both expository and critical. Drawing on other sources, including primary works, they provide a close textual evaluation of Robert
Nisbet’s understanding of the history of the idea of progress from the basic elements of the Greeks to the full theory of progress in the 1700’s up into the 20th century. I identify the ancient Greek doctrine of developmentalism and which elements of this notion of change are retained through Western history regarding theories of historical change and development. I also reveal that the Christians and the Secularists modified some of these ancient elements as well as adding new features that culminated in the modem enlightenment theory of progress.
In chapters seven to nine I explore some of the major criticisms towards the enlightenment theory of progress as well as the consequences of the persistent focus on material development, utopia and globalisation. I explore notions of degradation, decline, the denial of final ends,telos, human nature, and dystopia as well as the split of the cycle as represented by both theories of progress and of decline (golden past age), and the cleft between liberalism and conservatism. I critically examine the emphasis on the utopian, conflict-free, and relativistic (clashes between ideas with no rational common ground) yet universal liberal perspective of modem progress. When I refer to liberalism in this work, unless otherwise stated as ancient liberalism, I mean the modem, progressive, utopian, and conflict-free ideology regarding the social engineering of a universal, perfect Ellis 9 individual and a perfect unified global society that arose in the Enlightenment with the ideas of people such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant and their notions of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and a future condition in a perfect world federation of states.
In chapters eight and nine, I offer additional philosophical reflections on these issues through a careful analysis of Leo Strauss’s distinctions betweenNomos andPhysis, and between ‘classical’ and ‘vulgar’ conventionalism, and Strauss’s and Alasdair
McIntyre’s critique of liberal relativism. Strauss, MacIntyre, and also Friedrich
Nietzsche, are used as guiding minds to address the issues of moral relativism and natural rights, such as through their revivals and criticisms of the works of Plato, Socrates, and
Aristotle.
In chapter ten, “Conflict”, I try to offer some new insights or new ways to think about the idea of progress. I examine the notion of the agonistic dialectic as the efficient cause of development as found in many works of the great thinkers in Western history from the ancient Greeks to 20th century Keynesianism and ideas of the Club of Rome and especially described by Nietzsche in his understanding of the dual nature of human beings and Nature. I emphasise the dualistic engine of change as an overarching theme in theories of progress and explore the mechanism of conflict, the spirited, restless, passionate drives, vices, and self-interested ambitions and how they relate to the creative development of both the individual and society, in the Greeks, Christians, and
Enlightenment thinkers up until the present.
My essential claim of this work is that there are certain timeless truths in Western civilization associated with human nature and conflict, which are also inseparable from Ellis 10 each other. In this way, human beings have not necessarily progressedin themselves as a species; our knowledge and material environment have developed, but our basic predispositions have not. Conflict is a definitive trait of the creative development of human beings, of our potentials, and also of the progress of civilization. Strife, turmoil, and binary oppositions are integral for the processes of development, change, and creative existence. The reality of human nature is often denied in liberal theories of utopian progress with their focus on getting rid of ethnic, religious and ideological differences and conflicts so to create a harmonious global community. Human desires, sins, cravings, vanity, greed, lust for power, and egoism, are cast as immoral, retrogressive, as things that need to be eradicated so to realise an ideal “progressive” society. Yet these aspects of human nature, if they are regulated, channelled socially, and in balance, are necessary for the natural developmentphysis ( ) of both the individual and society. The development of modem progressive ideologies and their focus on eradicating conflict entirely in the name of a peaceful and global unity may, in the end, be the cause of our decline. Ellis 11
CHAPTER ONE
Methodologies
There are two main methods or procedures or disparate systems of truth for understanding and explaining history and historical change. One can think of them in terms of the Oxford versus Cambridge approaches to understanding history4. The first involves a philosophical-developmental understanding of history as well as the study of historical and classical texts. Robert Nisbet identifies developmentalism with the ancient
Greeks and their notions ofphysis andtelos, ideas that will be explored in depth in the body of this work. This first method is either cyclical or lineal in its understanding of history, with the former associated with developmentalism, and the latter with classical historical analysis and textual study. This second type of first method holds that there are timeless, universal truths, political and moral ideas embedded in history. It sees history as a total process of events and processes. It is speculative and meta-historical and seeks to reveal large patterns and directions in the unfolding of history. A main perception of this method is that history exhibits or possesses directionality - a large organising theme. It claims that there are certain meanings, values, ideals in texts which are timeless and represent ongoing 2000+ yr old debates such as between the ancients and the modems, between conservatives (or traditionalists) and liberals, and between nature and nurture. It holds that human nature and human issues remain the same throughout history and any changes are merely surface modifications represented by civility, external expressions, and variations within different cultural contexts. For example, vice may be cast in other
4 See the conversation convened by Quentin Skinner documented in “Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge”, The Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no.l (2002): 1-19, and also his work “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”, History and Theory 8, no.l, (1969): 3-53. Ellis 12 terms, such as unsocial qualities, animalistic tendencies, the irrational, human flaws and weaknesses, the passions, hedonistic impulses, the vile, non-political correct action, behaviour taboos and so on, but these expressions are still addressing the same phenomena of human nature. It understands that there is a chain of ideas, associated and linked with each other in history. This method includes thinkers (mostly modem) who view history in more “progressive” terms, in terms of the unfolding or teleological coming-to-be of potentialities inherent in the nature of things, in human nature. Thus, in this sense, it sees history as the actualization of freedom and the rational potentialities of humans. This perspective tends to be more “historical”, directional, and lineal, and less cyclical.
Developmentalism and classical historical analysis employ metanarratives, metaphor, analogy, myth and symbol, to describe experience because it is believed that certain phenomena of existence can not be got at directly. Metanarratives are abstract ideas and are thought to be comprehensive explanations of historical experience and knowledge. To want to make things intelligible, sensible, comprehensible, and predictable is what characterises metanarratives. Considered as a transcendent universal truth, it is a totalising cultural narrative schema that orders and explains knowledge and experience. The theological and scientific metanarratives decipher historical change as continuous, developmental, even progressive, sometimes relying on a singular causal force, a single origin in the past leading to an ultimate destiny in the future. There is a beginning and an end to history. They supply guidance to life through a body of ethics, a code to life, meaning, purpose, and attempts to provide certainty, either metaphysical or scientific. Examples are: classical developmentalism; the notion of the good life; Ellis 13
Christian ideas of universal rules and a telos of Final Judgment; absolutes and fixed essences; universal history; enlightenment theories of progress; Marxism and socialism; definitive stages of history; and the scientific quest for grand unified theories5.
Metaphor is useful with generalisations, and for describing the diversity in history; it is associated particularly with developmentalism. Speculation and philosophising about abstractions, wholes, such as “Civilization, Destiny, Purpose” is vital for perception and understanding6. Growth and Progress are used in terms of a total picture, a whole, and not concrete specifics, or parts. The metaphor of growth is timeless because of our capacity to abstract and to wonder about the past and future. It synthesises, integrates, and “serves what might well be called a dogmatic or prophetic function in man’s life”7.The unfolding of a nation over time, its purpose and destiny, is something that unites those who make this nation and endows it “with a degree of majesty it could not have otherwise”8.
The second method of historical analysis is historiography or genealogical analysis conducted through contextual study. Genealogical analysis is a reaction to classical historical analysis. It argues that the latter disregards local and particular contexts. Genealogists focus on what has happened, who wrote historical texts, where these were written, and what the authority, class, and gender of the person was in question. It is all about social context and how to understand utterance in different historical ages. They argue that an idea may be called the same thing throughout history
5 Examples of people who have employed classical historical analysis in their works are Leo Strauss, Harvey Mansfield, and Allan Bloom. See Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing”, Social Research 8,1/4 (1941): 488-504, and Thomas L. Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to his Thought and Intellectual Legacy. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 6 Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 241. 7 Ibid, 246 8 Ibid, 250 Ellis 14 but it is not necessarily expressing the same thought or idea. They think there is no finality to the singularity of events, of history, there are no universals or absolutes, and challenge the metaphysical pursuits of origins. It is a critical discourse regarding the formations of reality for they argue that classical historical analysis centralises power relations by producing particular religious or scientific discourses on truth (such as God,
Science, History, Self). They also accuse classical analysts as unifying history and objectifying the individual. It is a study of discourse formation, truth-knowledge production, and dominant power relations. It argues that there are militaristic and philosophical roots of truth discourse and dominant power relations and it sees knowledge as an effect from the production/convergence of power and not as metaphysical insights into the nature of things; there is no essential secret, no essence, for as all is fabricated, constructed. The movement of history is the play of dominations, from one interpretation to another9.
A criticism I have against this second method is that metaphor is a problem when it is applied to the concrete, to empirical issues of changes i.e. in social sciences, as it deals with particularities10. Metaphor and metanarratives are useful when applied to abstract entities, to macrocosmic phenomena but not to the particular, the concrete or the microcosmic. This is why this work will employ both methods. The first method will be used to convey an understanding of the narrative of the history of the idea of progress,
9 A few examples of the main proponents of the genealogical method of historical analysis are Friedrich Nietzsche, Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and Michel Foucault. See: J.G.A. Pocock “Verbalising a Political Act: Towards a Politics of Speech”, Political Theory 1, no.l, (Feb 1973): 27-45, Wesleyan University, “Skinner and Pocock in Context: Early Modem Political Thought Today”, History and Theory 48, (Feb 2009): 113-121, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rainbow, Michel Foucault: Bevond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault”, Parrhesia 2. (20071: 44-65. 10 This is something that Nisbet discusses in his Social Change and History. Ellis 15 which starts with the ancient Greeks. It will also be used to show that human nature is a timeless truth which remains the same throughout Western history and has been utilised by many thinkers in history in the same way. The second method will be used to show the different approaches to understanding development, change, history, and progress and how the method was used to transform society into a liberal democratic progressive civilization. It will also be used to show that it is a different approach to understanding human nature, compared to the first method, which is an inaccurate perception and has led to relativism, threatening the existence of Western society itself. Ellis 16
CHAPTER TWO
A Critical Evaluation of Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Progress in the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Christians
Two major historians of the idea of progress, John Bagnell Bury and Robert Nisbet, differ over whether a notion of progress was present in the ancient Greeks. Bury argues that it was only there ‘germinally’ and focuses on Greek theories of natural dissolution such that he claims that the general view of the times was “inevitable degeneration and decay” n .
Whereas Nisbet disagrees, arguing that the Greeks had notions of development and many of the elements found in the modem theory of progress were present in the philosophy and thought of this ancient age. Nisbet does argue that there are two types of notions of primal beginnings: a simple, crude age i.e. Hesiod’s fear and misery in a state of nature, his silver age versus a golden age. Both of these notions are found in ancient Greek and
Roman and later European modem thought. Even still, Nisbet evidently emphasises
Greek understandings of the state of nature as the first stage of social organisation, of society. I support this view and will briefly show what these elements were according to
Nisbet and what ancient Greek philosophy and thought reveals about ancient notions of progressive development.
2.1 The Greeks and Romans
There has been a conscious distinction of development, otherwise known as a natural,
“self-contained process of change” and history, or “a record of the unique, fortuitous, and
" John Bagnell Bury, The Idea of Progress. (Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004 [1920]), 10. Ellis 17 the external”, since Aristotle12. According to Nisbet, Aristotle “gave systematic expression to the distinction between developmentnatural or history.. .and history in the sense of narrative of the unique or accidental”. Greek and Roman historiography was documentation and explanation of concrete events, political figures, and contingent occurrences, such as the history of the Peloponnesian war encapsulated by Thucydides
(460-399BC),whereas developmentalism was about cycles of growth and decay,physis, telos, stages, and necessary change. The ancient Greek cycle of change of an entity is associated withphysis , with growth and development.Physis can be understood as the
“inherent pattern of growth, its fixed succession of stages, its purpose”; it is the normal course of development of each entity. It is “the manifestation or actualisation of conditions that are regarded as inherent, as potential”. The cycle of change also involved decay and degeneration such that it can be understood as the life cycle; “all living things manifestly undergo cycles of genesis and decay, of life and death”. This is the ancient metaphor of genesis and decay which is integral, in its modifications, to notions of progress. This cyclical developmentalism, this growth and degeneration, is “a doctrine of development of things rather than an infinitesimal repetition of persons and events”13. It is a metaphor of abstraction that can only be applied to wholes rather than concrete specifics.
Cyclical development starts proper with the social developmentalism of Aristotle but there are elements of this in notions of growth going back since at least the time of
Hesiod. There is ancient acknowledgement and understanding of the movement of humanity through time involving an awareness of a long and ascending past, a past
12 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 213. 13 Ibid, 32,36,41,45,71. Ellis 18 considered inferior to the present conditions, and visions of an improved future. As explained by the Athenian Aeschylus(525-456BC) in his play Prometheus Bound, in his myths Hesiod (8th BC) conceived the original condition of man as terrible suffering and wanting, a savage and primitive state. This changed when Prometheus, a lesser god in rebellion against the highest and only free god Zeus, gave man the gifts of fire and reason that led to knowledge, comforts, pleasures, and plenty i.e. development. What
Prometheus did for human beings was in defiance of Zeus, for the gods, according to
Hesiod in hisWorks and Days “keep the means of life concealed from humans” and for this Prometheus was punished and chained to a rock, forever subject to have his liver eaten by a giant eagle, only to have it grow back again the next day, to be eaten again14.
He can be understood as arrogant, defiant, in rebellion of ultimate commands, and acting on his own free will. His actions, especially his act of freedom, can be understood as the personification of humanity. Humanity can be understood as transgressive, challenging orthodoxy, and having the ability to reason, unlike animals. Yet, with the knowledge from Prometheus “lies the beginning of the fall from felicity” i.e. Pandora’s Box of secrets15. The myth of Pandora’s Box addressed the darker side of life, the ideas and the realities of degeneration, decay, and corruption by depicting a woman who opened the box of human evils, afflictions, and torments, and inevitably letting them into the world16.
In his Theogony Hesiod presented the developmental history of man from his original condition through time as a succession of metallic ages, and in Workshis and
14 Hesiod, “Works and Days”, in A Loeb Classical Library Reader. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 13. Prometheus is also known as Forethought and Pandora as All-gift. 15 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 50. 16 Sophocles (497-406BC) suggests in his thought that capacities to learn require rebellion and defiance. Rebellion may lead to Pandora’s Box, stirring the previous calm into mayhem, but before it was warlike and ignorant, now corruption, greed, as well as war, characterised his age but these were compensated for by the development of reason and knowledge. Ellis 19
Days he set this up as races rather than ages, such as the golden race of the gods down to the iron race of his own time, which was characterised by wickedness, misery, and a fondness for war. This notion of decline from a golden age was also coupled with the notion that culture had advanced, though it was cast in the context that it had “caused the diminution of human justice, goodness, and felicity”17. But the story is not just about misery and fall but also about education, the “beginnings of human knowledge and culture” i.e. Prometheus18.
According to W.K.C. Guthrie’s interpretation, Hesiod was describing the
“technical revolution” that had actually occurred through “human ingenuity”; it was developments of new technologies and inventions from growth in knowledge that had led to improvements, new reliefs and luxuries, and were acknowledged as the creations and culminations of human inventiveness over long periods of time19. He revealed, according to Nisbet, a vision of a future age that heralded the good life, a time of common respect for justice and rectitude that could come about through the “progressive reform” of the
Iron Age and involved men committed to hard work and honesty20. Escaping from degradation, fear and misery, the state of nature, and ascending to a higher and more peaceful state of existence also required the use of reason. Knowledge was seen as that which triggered human beings to develop thepolis, a place in which, for the first time, people came together in ancient Greece as members of a city state bound by laws.
17 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 48. 18 Ibid, 50. Taken together these two myths of Prometheus and Pandora, or ‘Forethought’ and ‘All-gift’ can be seen to capture the dynamic relation between two forces of life, that which is creative and that which is destructive, both of which framed life for the Greeks. This duality of knowledge and misery can be understood as the acknowledgement of both the creative and destructive aspects of human beings and social development, and is a theme that is played out time and again throughout the history of Western thought, which I discuss in depth in the chapter on conflict. 19 Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 20 citing W.K.C. Guthrie. 20 Ibid, 16. Ellis 20
For Plato (424-348BC)the state of nature lacked arts, civilized things, it was a primitive egalitarian communism in which small groups lived in proverbial simplicity. He cast this state of nature with purity and innocence; it was without the complex differentiation and suspect morality of civil society. Plato argued that “with the rise of knowledge innocence suffers” such that with the coming of civil society, with cultural progress, there was an associated moral degeneration21. Happiness and goodness were in decline from a previous golden age, much like Hesiod saw it, yet Plato cast it in terms of cycles or “anakuklosis”22. For him, “the cycle is a model of change”23. He thought there were great cosmic cycles with smaller ones within them. His notion of cultural progress can be found in hisAllegory o f the Cave in which he described the struggle with ignorance to become enlightened, the upward movement (ascension) from the cave of representations to the realm of pure ideas.
For Plato, the soul was part rational and part irrational; the passions and appetites associated with the body, natural forces that could be destructive, were irrational and associated with femaleness, requiring restraint and limitation by the mind of order and form for the sake of the pursuit of rational knowledge. The rational soul was seen to require cultivating and ought to rule over the irrational, slave-like body. This Platonic ruling of the passions and appetites by reason is aptly explained by Bruce Thornton who writes: “The beasts [barbarians] are the passions and appetites; if they gain the upper hand over the ‘man’ (reason), and corrupt the ‘lion’ (the non-rational part of the soul amenable to reason), they will ‘bite and struggle and devour one another,’ ultimately
21 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 51. 22 Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History. (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 15. Many Greeks of his time thought that past, present, and future time, were eternally recurring revolutionary cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth, of generation, decline, and regeneration. 23 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 37. Ellis 21 destroying the soul”24. The idea was that the passions, or barbarians, had to be controlled
(applied to both the micro and macro aspects of human existence, the individual and the society) for left unrestrained they could lead to the downfall of the person and the social order itself.
Ascension was also a theme in Plato’sThe Laws for he explains that in the beginning people were primitive, morally innocent and simple in culture, and civilization, the sciences, and the arts were absent and that over time, “little by little” communities underwent successive change and the city-state appeared25. And according to his dialogue
Protagoras the ground on which man moved from this “cultureless primitivism” to
a / cultural, intellectual, creative, and scientific progress, was justice . This was an echo of
Hesiod’s notion of progressive reform through justice. This ascension of man through time towards a more perfect state is captured by his notion of plenitude, an idea that is vital to the idea of progress. The idea of plenitude “in the world of becoming” means that
“everything necessary to perfection is either present or exists in potentia” and “is necessary to the goodness and the capacity for the perfection of mankind”27. In other words, the world is an arena of latent and actualised potentials that exist for the singular goal of human perfection. In his other works, particularly Timaeus, and his notion of
Atlantis, andThe Republic, he laid down a regulated and well-thought out utopian-like vision of human existence, a situation in which man could achieve perfection through the right government.
24 Bruce Thornton, Greek Wavs: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 17. 25 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 29. 26 Ibid, 22. 27 Ibid, 91. Ellis 22
Aristotle (384-322BC) thought that man was eternal although he understood, as exemplified in hisGeneration and Decay, that the natural order of things was circular change, a cycle of progress and regress. He developed a theory of continuity, another vital aspect to the idea of progress, in which “each condition or state of whatever it is we are interested in contains within it the seeds of the next and higher state or condition” meaning that everything is connected, from the lowest to the highest in a “great chain of being”28. He also perceived civilization to be a cooperation of men that tended to improve upon established traditions and laws, thus highlighting the importance of social cohesion for improvement, and also the tendency of each generation to renovate what their predecessors had achieved.
Aristotle held that early customs were simple and barbaric and that there had been improvements in the arts. In comparison to Greek high culture most of the rest of world were seen as barbaric, especially the Persians. The Persian people, including the wealthy and noble, were politically enslaved, subject to the absolute power of their king, and thus
“to the Greeks, the Persians were ‘barbarian’, characterized by tyranny rather than democracy”29. Freedom to the Greeks was considered as “so essential to human happiness as to be worth suffering and dying for” for choosing death over life, a virtue of the free, was done in the Greek world (and still today, such as the United States) in the name of freedom30. The military success of the Greeks can be said to be due to their unique love of freedom, something that defined their ethnicity as Greeks.
Aristotle also thought that human beings have a specific nature with certain aims and goals that govern how they act. Human beings were cast as imperfect and that
21 Ibid, 91 citing Arthur Lovejoy. 29 Jack Goody, The Theft of History. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27. 30 Thornton, 8. Ellis 23 perfection or human development towards completeness required the fulfillment of potentials that make one fully human. In the words of Strauss, natural beings have a natural end, a destiny that “determines what kind of operation is good for them”3'.The actualisation or perfection of what one potentially is, one’s nature, is the proper end or goal of being human. Aristotelian natural-end ethics was a philosophy of manifesting an internal teleology - a valuable potential that ought to be realised as an end in-itself. The proper function, indeed the natural right of a being, is to pursue their natural end and in this way human nature can be said to be the guide to the conduct of human life. His natural-end ethics held that the fulfillment of proper function was a virtuous action and that happiness stemmed from this action. Man is a political animal in communal life according to Aristotle, and this is required for the development and implementation of virtues that enable the transition (from is to ought). Our good is sorted out with others via the use of reason, in rational (political) debate, in an unconditional commitment to rules of reason, the precepts of natural law, not conventional notions of ‘might is right’, coercion, or other modes of non-rational persuasion.
Aristotle thought that four causes make an object: material, formal, efficient, and final. The latter two are intimately associated with development, while the formal cause can be understood as the form the object is madeinto, in other words it is the structure or blueprint of an object, the potential of a thing. The efficient or motor cause is associated with the mechanisms that continue the process of development, or social growth. It is that by which a thing is made. It is the means to a final end, the final cause, or “the indwelling, persisting, cause that activates. ..the whole process by whichphysis manifests
31 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), 7. Ellis 24 itself in time”32. The final cause is thatfor which a thing is made. It is simultaneously telos, goal, order, final end, design, perfection, and purpose and it causes the other three causes33. All nature is to be understood in terms of final causes. In this way potential is an inherent teleology and coming to be is determinedphysis. by Aristotle’s teleological ethics had as the highest good or end for human beings, eudemonia or happiness. This is not a feeling but an activity in accordance with virtue. And virtuous action is that which is in accord with one’s inherent nature, one’stelos. As Aristotle held that we are social and political animals, fulfilling one’s telos was not an anti-social or non-social endeavour. It was in the rational interaction with others in polisthe that one’s telos came to fruition.
The Roman rationalist Lucretius (99-55BC), writing in the Hellenistic age, painted in hisOn the Nature o f Things, a “self-propelling character of development”, “an unfolding of capacities that lay inherent in man from the beginning”34. He thought that the state of nature was one in which there was no community, bonding, family relations, or society and that his age was superior to this past. But he also writes about regression, for the “topmost pinnacle” is also the “beginning of decline”35:
And so the race of men toils fruitlessly and in vain for ever, and wastes its life in idle cares, because, we may be sure, it has not learned what are the limits of possession, not at all how far true pleasure can increase. And this, little by little, has advanced life to its high plane, and has stirred up from the lowest depths the great seething tide of war36.
In this work Lucretius also writes about the emergence of higher species, of succession in terms of complexity, of developments and hierarchy, and of the dynamic nature of propagation and the struggle for survival. He argued that man makes himself without
32 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 185. 33 The word teleology can be broken down into Greektelos (end) andlogos (discourse or doctrine). 34 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 57. This is the notion of plenitude. 35 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 61. 36 Ibid, 60, citing Lucretius. Ellis 25 divine intervention and that is was not design but chance that created the world and it required a very long period of time. In Lucretius, we can see a definite notion of a gradual, slow, “step-by-step” advancement orpedetemtim progredientis in nature which he calls a natural law37.
Seneca (4-65 AD), a member of the Roman Empire before the expansion and flourishing of Christianity, was a primitivist, in the sense that he believed in a previous golden age as a reaction to the destructive effects on human life that he saw in his time and that he saw as stemming from the growth in militaristic knowledge and from new technologies of war. Yet, overall his thought was progressive, for he believed in the indefinite progress in scientific knowledge, he saw change as the unfolding of potentialities into actualities and thought that human “ingenuity, not his wisdom” was behind the greatest of historical achievements38. He developed a famous analogy
(constantly used by theorists of progress in the future) of the “growth of knowledge and the growth of a single human being” that saw the world as an immanent teleological movement, the unfolding of inherent potential, of both soul and body39.
The ancient Greek and Roman impulse to improve, whether in warfare, philosophy, or government, the idea of the movement of humanity from a primitive to a civilized state over a long past, the idea that history is about slow gradual and cumulative change (especially in knowledge) towards greater human perfection, the idea of justice and reform in lieu of greater improvement at some future time, and the ideas of continuity and plenitude, and also the necessity of struggle and conflict for the growth and revelation of talents and knowledge, are all basic themes that repeatedly crop up over the
37 Cams, 121,213,244,314. 38 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 44. 39 Ibid, 45. Ellis 26 course of western history and lay down the foundations for the modem theory of progress. Further developments of these elements and additional fundamentals of the modem theory of progress come from the advance of Christianity. To reiterate, the classical elements associated with the modem theory of progress are: plenitude, excellence/perfection, continuity, change, step-by-step slow, gradual development, primitive origins, efficient cause,physis, final cause or telos, metaphor and analogy.
2.2 The Christians
There are two main sources of Christianity, Judaism and Greek philosophy, which were fused, a mixture especially influenced by the synthesis of Hebraic and Hellenic thought by Philo of Alexandria40, but further developed by Saint Augustine, into an argument of design, into a teleological argument. What stemmed from Hebrew thought was their historiography of a divine pattern of purpose, of divine guidance of people’s histories in an inevitable way. All that happens to the human race is according to God’s decision. It is sacred history and a progress not of this world. This was coupled with the Greek idea of
“becoming, of realisation of design” in this world. It was “a compound of the idea of divine necessity [sacred history], as found in the Old Testament, and of the kind of internal, self-perfecting necessity that is to be found in the Greeks, especially Aristotle” i.e. physis. This synthesis begot the first idea in the West of historical necessity, which is the notion that God designed social life with a goal in mind at the very beginning of human history, and history is an inevitable actualisation of this inherent structure, an
40 The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Philo of Alexandria”
Christian historical necessity is more than “a natural (and hence necessary) order of change in an entity” because the “history of events, acts, and motives, has been necessary, which is not found in the Greeks or Romans41.
Christian thought implies that humanity as a whole is “a super entity”42. All human beings including the lower classes (a new ethic of compassion had arose) have a commonality in being the children of Adam who was a creation of God, and the purpose of history can only be fulfilled in humanity as a whole rather than the individual. The first roman emperor to convert to Christianity was Constantine who strived to pacify and unify the Roman Christian Empire to create stability. This was an ecumenical idea, a promise of universal and perpetual peace and was a socialistic idealism that required social reform. In this way Christianity can be understood as a striving to overcome the rise and fall, the birth and death of the life cycle purported by the Greeks; it was a
41 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 71,78,79,80. Nisbet thinks that Augustine’s treatment of classical recurrence is not accurate as it was not applicable to recurring people and events, to concrete events. Instead, it was about the development of “institutions, cultures, nations, worlds” (75), of entities for which cyclical genesis and decay could be asserted, over long periods and in ways that referred to general patterns” (76). 42 Ibid, 77. Ellis 28 transcendental and immortal ideation, a utopian teleological metanarrative of the
Christian empire culminating in a perfect and eternal future state of humankind. For
Christianity, the present was understood as connecting the past with the future through what is termed ‘teleological succession’, or the purposeful progression towards a final cause directed by providence rather than the Greek idea of fate. History was presented as being the unfolding of the design of God, of a slow linear disclosure of pre-determined events, a gradual, cumulative, and immanent process of spiritual perfection and salvation towards eternal life, rather than a cyclical oscillation between misery and happiness, between life, death, and rebirth43.
According to Nisbet, the unity of humanity can be said to begin with Saint
Augustine of Hippo. Yet this assertion is not quite right as the Stoics had notions of the unity of humanity, of being in a common brotherhood and being worldly citizens in a
‘great city of gods and men’ hundreds of years before the existence of Augustine. Also, as discussed above, Constantine initiated a mission to establish a universal Christian empire that would be an eternal global harmony and would come about by the practice of the art of peace, the Pax Romana, all done for the second coming of Christ. Nisbet also argues that Augustine ushered into Western thought the beginning “of the conflict between good and evil, concord and discord, justice and injustice that would ... seem the inherent, inalienable conflict in the human condition” with his division of the City of God and the City of Man44. This declaration is also problematic as many hundreds of years previous to Augustine there were notions of a duality and a conflict between good and bad in the ancient Greek myths of Prometheus and Pandora, and of the Dionysian and
43 Karl Lowith, Meaning in History. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1949/1964), 187. 44 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 92. Apollonian dual nature of human nature and nature itself. I will discuss these ancient dualisms, Augustinian conflict, and many other dialectical interplays found throughout
Western thought in depth in the chapter on conflict below.
Saint Augustine refuted the Greek notion of cyclical time, the idea of recurrent cycles, in his City o f God because he considered the classical pagan theory of eternal recurrence as lacking hope. For him the idea of Christ, his suffering and redemption of mankind, can’t happen repetitively. He retains the idea of advance and degeneration, the metaphor of genesis and decay in coexistence, yet he modifies it so that it is without cyclical return, instead it has a final end. There may be material, intellectual, and cultural progress in his philosophy, it is developmental, “immanent, cumulative, and necessary” yet his cycle of genesis and decay is single, unique, and never repeated. This Christian cycle began with Adam and will end in the distant future, an eternal state of Death. There will be eternal renewal for the elect few, the virtuous at the end of time, but it is not a time of renewal in the sense of a beginning because it is an eternal state of the City of
God. The wicked that had knowingly chosen the opposite of right, will also be in an eternal state, an everlasting place of torture and pain.
Saint Augustine’s Christian philosophy has both a pessimistic and optimistic view of human nature for “the entire diversity and fullness of the subsequent human race was embraced in the nature of the first man”. This notion of completeness is contained in
Adam, the first man, whom enclosed “the whole plenitude of the human race” and reveals the idea of the pessimistic and optimistic dual nature of man, which manifested in the forms of the City of God and the City of Man45. The senses, the base desires and drives of human beings are cast as negative, as an inherent flaw that stemmed from the original sin
49 This notion of plenitude is found in the Greeks. Ellis 30 of Adam. Yet the movement of the flow of time requires these negative, unsocial, and irrational bodily needs and desires for it is only by the conflict between these unsocial aspects of human beings and their social features (the goodness of man as associated with being the creation of God), only by “some aboriginal but continuing flaw [i.e. original sin] in mankind [that] these marvellous achievements in time commence to wither, to decay, to face extinction in final dissolution”46. Progress for Augustine requires decay and disintegration and in this way, the imperfection of man, the flawed nature of humanity, is necessary for the progressive lineal direction of mankind towards a final and perfect end. This progress is stimulated by optimism, by the hope of achieving spiritual perfection in this world at a future state via the education of the human race.
For Augustine the development of humanity was the same as the development of the individual, in fixed stages so that “it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things”47. He divided and measured history into eight fixed, unfolding, successive stages, and also three types of epochs, and cast “each specific episode, act, and idea as also necessary; necessary to time and to place”; for nothing was by chance or by accident48.
Each of the epochs were ordained, at the beginning of time, by God, and were associated with the steps in humanity’s self-realisation, the realisation of spiritual essence. He presented history as having a twofold division of before Christ, or B.C., andanno domini, the year of our lord, or A.D., and also a three-fold division of youth, manhood, and old age that represented “the conditions of nature, law, and grace”49. He also stressed a six fold division of epochs, where the first was represented as existing from Adam to Noah
46 Ibid, 81,91,94. 47 Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Citv of God, trans. Marcus Dods, (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), 243. 41 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 84. 49 Ibid, 82. Ellis 31 and involved material satisfaction. The second was from Noah to Abraham and involved the division and proliferation of languages and the writing of history. These two epochs represented the youth of mankind. The next three epochs ran from Abraham to Christ, representing manhood, maturity, purpose, fulfillment, and triumph of historical purpose and the furtherance of human education. The last epoch ran from Christ to Augustine and represented old age, the end of the world, a waning of energy yet an achievement of wisdom. For him at his time the world was old, “full of complaints”50 and in decline -
“the inevitable prelude to imminent destruction of the world”51. He portrayed the seventh stage of history as being an intensification of conflict, a cleansing and a last judgment, and the eighth and final stage as a time of continuous delight, where there would be no suffering, sin, time, or history. It would be the end of time; a state of eternal repose.
Augustine’s disciple Orosius (375-418) thought that man was miserable because man was a sinner and questioned the validity of happiness that came from the increased wealth of a city, begotten through “the wretched destruction and downfall of mighty realms, of numerous civilized peoples”52. He viewed history as having been in existence for about 5,600 years since the fall; it was a history of salvation, “a story of a sinful race”, an historical process that God had created so to bring man back to god in eternal glory.
This interpretation of human existence and history, of god governing “the course of human history through suffering”, to him was “more reasonable to bear” than pagan
“worldly fame” and fortune53. The idea of fortune came under increasing attack as the
50 Ibid, 69, citing Augustine. 51 Ibid, 69. 52 Lowith, 179. 53 Lowith, 176. Ellis 32
Christian Biblical doctrine and virtues were evermore propounded into the medieval age and came to be viewed as sinful and associated with corruption and the devil.
The Christian middle ages were a time of self-discovery and individuality, an acknowledgment of the “value, dignity, and perpetuity of the human body” as Jean
Gimpel thought54. “Life”, according to Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and echoing many voices of his time “should be prolonged as much as necessary”55. It was an age characterised by reform that aimed to improve the quality of life. The ideas of plenitude
(Plato) and continuity (Aristotle) were also revivified, which contributed to the medieval idea of progress by being combined to produce a totalising picture of the design and plan of the universe, linking all things successively in a hierarchical order, such that Aquinas
(1225-1274) argued that organisms developed from the simple to the complex and tend toward perfection, “to that which is best”56. People saw progress in material and secular arenas, such as in the development of iron tools in agriculture that increased mans power over nature and in the cumulative progress of secular knowledge, and had such respect for knowledge that they saw themselves as “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”57.
In the high middle ages there was much advancement in technology, art, sciences, learning, and literature. New conceptions of time from the development of mechanical clocks altered daily life with an emphasis on precision, value and control, and the organisation of the day with schedules and plans. At the same time as this prosperity and
54 Nisbet, The History of the Idea of Progress. 80. 55 Ibid, 88. 56 Ibid, 92/93. 57 Ibid,86. Ellis 33 creativity many had a dogmatic belief in the slow decay and degeneration of the world. A view emphasised by the 15th century humanists. Ellis 34
CHAPTER THREE
Setbacks and Developments with the Idea of Progress during the Renaissance and the Age of Modern Science
In the 15th century, a group of humanists disturbed the neat vision of the world and history as linearly progressing towards a future eschaton by embracing the past, by regarding the Greeks and Romans highly and considering their medieval contemporary age as belonging to a thousand years of misery, ignorance, superstition and unrelenting clerical and aristocratic tyranny since the collapse of Rome. They rejected external religion in the forms of doctrine and dogma, and advocated an internal religious consciousness, a spiritual reality of the human mind that was a moral humanism - nonrational, emotional and passionate. Overall the humanistic thinkers were dissident towards the medieval tradition, pessimistic towards the corporeal world, and aspired for a counterculture that focused on the works of the ancients that would renew civilization. In this way they could be seen as progressive in their aspirations by embracing the past and attempting to revitalise the present towards a better state of affairs. For example, in hisIn
Praise o f Folly Erasmus (1466-1536) argued that his age was inferior to the ancients and there had only been regress and degeneration since the Greeks and Romans. He advocated self-liberation and inner grace, seeing the individual as the producer of the good and not dependent on external authority for liberation. There was also a return to the cyclical recurrence of the Greeks via Machiavelli.
Embracing the past in contradistinction to the Christian view of progress
Machiavelli (1469-1527) used the concept of Fortuna, a notion known as the “bitch- Ellis 35
# o goddess of unpredictability”, to discount law-like generalisations . The idea was that contingency influences individual actions and the events of life and thus renders their predictability as mostly impossible, even though improvements in knowledge can limit these contingencies. He viewed history as a “multiplicity of recurrences”, of alternating cycles, rather than a continuity of accumulation; history to him was “whirled about by the rim of a wheel”, in a fixed oscillation between good and bad, perfection and decline, constantly rising and falling and governed by chance59. A spin on this cyclical recurrence occurred with the thought of Jean Bodin (1530-1596) who maintained a positive and optimistic outlook during this period of critical examination of the doctrine of Christian progress. He rejected the idea of a final degeneration and interpreted history as involving spiral-like cycles of decline and geneses, meaning new and higher cycles were always emerging from the death of the old one. Progress was a spiral-like ascension: fall was followed “by rise; decay by fresh genesis. New cycles come into being. And each later cycle reflects a higher level of achievement than its predecessor”60. He respected all of the past yet saw the present as superior, for the origin of human life was primitive and ignorant and had eventually produced the kinship group which, in a gradual unfolding process guided by god’s will, had developed into the more humane and civilized society of his present day.
During the Renaissance there was a proliferation of vivid legendary tales about remote or future earthly and exotic paradises, much stimulated by the development of the
5* Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 89. Steven Pinker, when discussing human nature, addresses the notion of chance in his book The Blank Slate and factors it into the making of human personality, along with genes, upbringing, and environmental influences, yet he still retains the idea that human beings are biologically predisposed to their unique genes, and thus are partly determined and therefore partly predictable. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature. (New York and Toronto: Penguin Group, 2002). Nisbet. The History of the Idea of Progress. 106. 60 Ibid, 123. Ellis 36 printing press in 1450, the discovery of new lands by sea voyages, the arrival of
Columbus in America, and the Protestant Reformation initiated by the actions of Martin
Luther in 1509. This utopian literature greatly inspired the imagination and the spiritual fervour of the late Renaissance towards the possibility and attainment of a future heaven on earth. The etymology of the word ‘utopia’ stems from the Greek ou (not) andtopos (a place)61. Or alternatively Eu (good)topos (place). Both meanings, not-a-place and a good place, encapsulate the ideas of ideal social structures and their unrealisability. Utopia is the inversion of the romanticisation of a previous golden age, such as the Garden of
Eden, so that the golden age is projected into the future. It can also be a secularised version of Christian teleology. The most basic tenet of a utopia is an ideal society. Often these societies are portrayed as everlasting, sustainable, egalitarian, peaceful, perfect, blissful, without suffering, and where salvation can be attained, much like the Christian notion of a final and perfect end.Utopia (1516) written by Thomas More (1478-1535) is a combination of Plato’sRepublic, Epicureanism and Christian providence, and it paints a picture of an imaginary ideal nation. Frangois Rabelais (1494-1553) published in 1534
Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is a portrayal of humanistic values and an ideal society. Tommaso Campanella (1568 -1639) wrote The City o f the Sun (1602) described an ideal egalitarian theocratic society. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) described an ideal perfect society in a distant part of the world in hisThe New Atlantis (1627); it was a scientific utopia, governed by scientific laws and values62.
61 There is much utopian thought stemming from the ancient Greeks onwards such as found in Iliadthe by Homer, Works and Days by Hesiod, andUtopia andPlutus by Aristophanes. See Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man. trans. Thomas Wiedermann, (Cambridge: Harvard Uni. Press, 1975) and Bruce Thornton, Greek Wavs: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. 62 See J.W. Johnson, ed. Utopian Literature: A Selection. (New York: Random House, 1968). Ellis 37
By the mid-1500s there was also a renewal in the denial of the superiority of the past and there was a re-emphasis on lineal progress by the use of science. The period between 1560 and 1740 is known as the Great Renewal, a period of time influenced by the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Puritanism and was characterised by a fusion of science and Christianity. It was an era of the revitalization of Christian faith, a religious re-awakening. England in the 17th century was overflowing with religious faith and with reason. For many of the great thinkers and scientists of the Puritan age
“evolution, not revolution” was the key as it was believed that the endeavouring after the scientific, practical, and theoretical accumulation of knowledge could quicken the arrival of their “final earthly stage” of heaven, rather than violent clashes of rebellion, but it would still be a slow and gradual process63. The arts and sciences were given redemptive value and educational reform suggested a focus on the sciences and practical arts rather than on the humanities. Puritanism spread, fuelling the capitalist and materialist spirit, and there were major transformations in social, political, and intellectual spheres64.
Puritan faith in cumulative and unfolding providence, in the growth of knowledge in the arts and sciences, and a future golden millennium of spiritual bliss and unity in Christ saturated the times; it was intoxicating because it focused on a distant vision of a this- worldly material paradise.
The sacred developmentalism of Christianity, or the design of god in history, became secularised by the mid-1600s. What is known as the Age of Science (1470—
1600s) had heralded a revolution in cosmic values, a radical change in human thought about existence. The Copemican revolution, with its origin in Nicolaus Copernicus’
63 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 130. 64 Monism and the elements that contributed to capitalism: methodical aspects such as control, order, rationalism, discipline, and efficiency. Ellis 38 notion of heliocentrism65 in hisOn the Revolutions o f the Celestial Spheres (1543), the development of the Baconian or scientific method by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in his
Novum Organum (1620), which was further developed by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in his Discourse on Method (1637), and the notion of the state of nature in theLeviathan
(1651) by Thomas Hobbes, all contributed to the breakdown of the authority of the church. By the mid-1600s truth was pitted against dogmatism, superstitions, and the
Christian moral tradition, and new, rational, secular foundations for morality emerged.
Francis Bacon had completely denied the validity of past truth, including Greek and
Roman achievements in knowledge, seeing history as merely a “storehouse of usable anecdotes” because history had so far lacked the empirical method of science, namely observation and experiment66. Bacon had seen the self as being falsely enslaved to “idols of the mind” (tribe, cave, marketplace, and theatre) from which man must liberate himself through science, mastery of nature, and progress in knowledge67.
Utopian thought was not the only outcome stemming from the discovery of new lands and peoples. Throughout the late Renaissance Europe colonized indigenous peoples
(in the Americas and in Africa) and created the Atlantic slave trade, all of which stimulated thought on the state of nature. The state of nature, understood as being prior to social factors i.e. pre-social, was conceived as the original (natural) condition of human beings, and thus was taken to be evidence for the true and universal characteristics of human beings. At this time, the notion of the state of nature gave humans a primordial origin that civilization had tempered, moderated, or improved upon. Human beings were
65 Heliocentrism replaces the geocentric notion that the earth is the center of the universe. It means that the sun is at the center of the solar system and the earth revolves around it. 66 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 113. 67 Ibid, 114. Ellis 39 described as savage-like with an inherently vicious (‘bad’) nature. The rationalist Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679), much influenced by the scientific revolution, especially the mechanics of Galileo, presented a tragic view of human nature by arguing that people were naturally nasty, and when living in the state of nature experienced miserable conditions, an awful existence of mutual perpetual war. He argued that the human being is insatiable and searches for the means ‘to assure for ever, the way of his future desire’; human behaviour is a determined self-interest where vanity, powerlessness, squabbles, and killing over such things as “‘a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue’” can be the norm68. In this way, men experience a ‘perpertuall and restlesse desire for Power after power’”69.
For Hobbes, civilized society, a contractual state or ‘Leviathan’, emerged from self-preservation and mutual fear. Self-interest is ultimately the motivating force behind the social contract and leads to progressive felicity. A sovereign or representative assembly, law, and order, were formed so to impose peace and prevent a relapse into the state of nature. The assembly were “empowerd to settle all disputes, entrusted with the determination of principles, and thereby made strong enough to enforce its every command”70. Self-interest does not disappear in this civilized state; rather, individuals continue to perceive other people (nations) as mere instruments, the means to attaining ends, in a competitive struggle towards progressive ‘felicity’. Society and progress emerges from the motivations of self-interests and from the desire to gain safety and
61 Stanley Rosen, ed. The Philosopher’s Handbook: Essential Readings from Plato to Kant. (New York: Random House, 2000), 20. 69 Ibid, 19. 70 Ibid, 20. Ellis 40 security. Nature only produced savage and uncivilized brutes, whereas civilization fashioned happy, peaceful, and enlightened human beings.
Hobbes rejected Augustine’s city of god as “an unsupported hope”71 and “joins the Epicurean tradition”, arguing that by nature man is an “a-political and even an a- social animal”, and that the good does in fact equal the pleasant. He wanted to give this doctrine a political meaning by instilling “the spirit of political idealism into the hedonistic tradition” - “political hedonism” - which radically transformed human life .
The basis of the natural, and of natural right for Hobbes, is the beginning of man, a powerful force that determines men, i.e. “the fear of death”, especially “violent death at the hands of others”. In this way Hobbes makes “[djeath take the place of the telos” and thus destroys the notion oftelos13. Self-preservation is at the root of justice and morality and is an unconditional and absolute inalienable natural right from which all duties derive. The function of the state is to defend this natural right. Hobbes replaced the state of grace with civil society, denied the importance of the fall, and argued for a non- teleological natural science, for to him philosophy and science could perfect man’s knowledge of the natural world and right government can remedy the problems of the state of nature.
71 Strauss, Natural Right and History. 175. 72 Ibid, 169. 73 Ibid, 180,181. Ellis 41
CHAPTER FOUR
The Development of the Modern Theory of Progress
The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment is characterised by the attempts at making utopian thought actual. It was a materialist philosophy that attempted to bring the ideal into the real by redefining the parameters of the present via knowledge, science and social reform.
Influenced by exoticism, the idealisation and idolisation of South Sea Islanders in popular literature, it focused on enlightened self-interest, the rejection of feudalism and political absolutism, and used reason, empirical observation, and scepticism to get at the truth and create a this-worldly state of peace and tranquility. It viewed the human world as rationally progressing through the processes and progress of human inquiry. It was an age initiated by the scientific revolution and many other developments of the late Renaissance as discussed above, especially the scientific method, heliocentrism, and Isaac Newton's
Philosophice Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which explained the maths of gravity. Natural philosophy, rational thought, and science were thought to lead to knowledge that could improve human life and rid the world of superstitions and ignorance. Reason and mathematics were glorified, biology and the classification of living things emerged as disciplines of knowledge, and other sciences such as chemistry developed, giving the age a sense of illumination and enlightenment.
During the 17th century a literary conflict emerged between the ancients and modems that began in Italy and then moved to France and England. It involved an analysis of the cultural achievements of the Greeks and Romans compared to that of the
16th and 17th centuries. Ultimately the modems won; modem knowledge was considered as superior to the ancients and there was faith in continuous, never-ending improvement Ellis 42 of knowledge. Modem superiority was defended by such thinkers as Charles Perrault
(1628-1703) and Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757). Perrault argued that his contemporary age was one of highest perfection and that progressive advance is gradual and never falters through time74. Fontenelle argued that nature (human and the natural world) remains the same over time, it is “a kind of paste” yet he uses (whether he was conscious of it or not) Seneca’s analogy of the individual and the metaphor of the dwarfs and giants to argue that progress in knowledge occurs because we build upon the works of our predecessors75. He argued that progress of knowledge was continuous and without end. This preliminary modem view of progress addressed the intellectual progress of humanity, rather than progress in moral, social, and political spheres. After Fontenelle, by the beginning of the 18th century, the controversy of the Ancients and Modems had resulted in the creation of the modem theory of progress, a modified version of classical developmentalism.
This modem idea of progression has “the identical analogy and metaphor.. .of change in time” as propounded by the Greeks yet, like the Christians, it was a modified form of it76. The Christians had altered it such that the decay and death was a final resolution, never to be repeated. The modems denied the premise of decay entirely. It still involved the “vital concepts of growth and development, continuity, necessity, unfolding purpose, telic end, and so on” yet mankind was perceived as having no end, no old age, and always in its prime, constantly developing and accumulating knowledge77. Progress
74 A logical problem with the modem idea of progress was the notion that the Middle Ages was a time of “ignorance, tyranny, and churchly oppression”, which was viewed as a discontinuity. This was supposedly resolved by Perrault’s idea that progress did not stop but went underground (Nisbet, Social Change and Histcm, Hi). 75 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 154. 76 Nisbet. Social Chance and History. 105. 77 Ibid, 106. was seen as a historical process with natural causes, laws, and principles. Providence came to be replaced by theories of progress, of moral amelioration and an indefinite progress in knowledge, and god came to be seen as a process - an unfolding advance, a process of becoming, rather than an unchanging being. Progress was associated with more than just the cumulative development of knowledge; it was applied to the indefinite progress in “governments, economies, social institutions of all types, even morality and human happiness”78. The concept of civilization also became important. Progress as descriptive of knowledge i.e. indefinite, became descriptive of civilization; progress came to be seen as absolutely certain, such that the whole of humanity was considered as necessarily and indefinitely progressing into the future via the use of reason. The developments in technology, science, and materialism, along with mass-democracy, industrialism, and secularism, were seen as the greatest hope for the future. It was a secular version of the Christian world to come, with the same method of attaining the goal, i.e. human happiness via cooperative human effort but by additional means - modem science, rationalism, and the struggle for political and religious liberty. Liberty and democracy were the main features of the modem idea of progress and were perceived as models and ideals for the attainment of peace. Enlightenment progressives can be characterised as promoting a social mission, as appealing to humanity, as being rational and sceptical, as seeking a moral significance without a Christian dogma, and as perceiving the chaos of human events as reconcilable with the belief in an underlying pattern of historical and necessary human progress.
Representing this modem view of progress in the early stages of the
Enlightenment was the Lutheran Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). His view of progress Ellis 44 retained many elements of Greek and Christian thinking about the movement of history through time. He maintained that “everything that is must, by the eternal logical nature of things, have been” for the present is for Leibniz, as Abelard also had it, necessarily the best of all possible worlds79. He perceived the cosmic natural order as a linked and continuous hierarchy of being for “[n]othing takes place all at once...nature never makes leaps: this is what I called theLaw o f Continuity”80. He argued that all things in this hierarchy of being have a dynamic potentiality and that the progress of the universe is towards the realisation of this potential, towards greater improvement and perfection, or
“which serves to make things ripen and become perfect”81. This progress is actually never ending, for it is “a certain perpetual and very free progress of the whole universe, such that it advances always to still greater refinement”82. Many parts of nature are dormant, or in Leibniz’s terms ‘slumbering’, in potential, and will, in time, awaken to ever-continue the perfection of nature. In terms of the premises contained in the metaphor of growth he argued that there is an “unceasing drive toward actuality” of that which is in potential83.
He influenced 18/19th century developmentalists, including Darwin with his statement of continuity - ‘nature never makes leaps’. This notion of continuity was the “most important attribute of growth applied to civilization”84. It allowed for the prediction of the future for the future is contained in the present and the present is contained in the past.
A major figure that stimulated the emergence of the modem theory of progress and heavily influenced modem liberal thought was John Locke (1632-1704). An
79 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 157. 80 Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibnitz, “New Essays on the Understanding” in Philosophical Works of Leibnitz. 2nd ed. trans. George Martin Duncan, (New Haven: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1908) 191. 81 Ibid, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things”, 153. 82 Ibid, 113. 83 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 115. 84 Ibid, 116. Ellis 45 empiricist and materialist political philosopher he wroteAn Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690) declaring that the human mind was like “white paper void of all characters”, tabula rasa, what is now known as theBlank Slate*5. Locke thought that there was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. In other words because all existence is material there are no innate or a priori ideas at birth, we are bomtabula rasa and the contents of our minds derive from our experiences only, or a posteriori. In this way he professed a universal human nature as it was a universal fact that all human beings have no defining internal features at birth, human nature was plastic. He denied the innate ideas of “mathematical ideals, eternal truths, and a notion of God” and argued against the divine right of kings, the authority of the church, the traditional practice of slavery, and inherited royalty and aristocracy86. He stripped man of the indoctrinating authority and of the essentialism of human beings declared by the church and aided in the severance of man from his historical traditions. His idea of the Blank Slate “was a weapon against the church and tyrannical monarchs”87; it was a tool along with science, reason, and the notion of mechanism to fight Judeo-Christian orthodoxy and institutions; these tools were seen to be the means to “alleviate the misery of the poor and strengthen the power of the state against the capitalists - and even, to some measure, help democratize society”88. Man was not to pursue honour or glory, but unify commerce and technology so to feed mans material needs in a relatively peaceful civil union.
Locke was reacting against the conventional Christian explanation of human beings, as being simultaneously inherently sinful and virtuous and so denied there was
15 Pinker, 4. 16 Ibid, 5. 17 Ibid, 18. “ Steven Rose, R.C. Lewontin, & Leon J. Ramin, Not in Our Genes: Biology. Ideology, and Human Nature. (London: Penguin Group, 1990), 48. Ellis 46 anything that could be qualitatively described, except in the negative, as an essential human nature butat the same time Enlightenment philosophy developed the methods of rationalism and empiricism as theories of knowledge and took a deep interest in the natural order of things. It was a turning towards nature to go beyond Christian conventions so to find the true origins of humanity and thus gain ‘proper’ insight into the human condition. It was a return to first things, similar to what stimulated major advancements in Greek thought, but not the same, and it was also a revamping of an ancient debate between nature and nurture. What occurred as a consequence was a complex re-evaluation of human nature, especially what are considered as the vicious and virtuous actions and also a major cleavage in politics, between conservatism and liberalism. The re-evaluation of human nature took three broad forms: i) Lockean or
Blank Slate, which was the complete denial of inherent qualities, ii) Rousseauian or
Noble Savage, which was the denial of vice as it was a social construction and the belief that we are inherently good, and also involved the Cartesian notion of a disembodied self that emphasised tree will and iii) Christianity or Hobbesian social contract, Machiavellian political thought, secular Christianity and other modifications, all involving the view that human beings are both social and unsocial, vicious and virtuous, and that vice and imperfection are necessary for the progress of humanity towards a perfect, or a more perfect, state. The political cleavage can be understood as a debate between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment values. All of these developments are intricately interconnected and associated with the theory of progress and all have both positive and negative consequences. Ellis 47
4.1 The Re-evaluation of Human Nature
There were major events and thought that stimulated liberal progressivism. As mentioned above developments in science, the voyages, discovery and colonisation of indigenous peoples, the Hobbesian state of nature and notion of a social contract, the Protestant reformation, the critical stance against religious ‘truth’, and the LockeanBlank Slate had a direct impact on Enlightenment thought. Other major philosophical influences were the notions of a disembodied self, or what is today known as Ghostthe in the Machine that stemmed from Cartesianism and the notion of theNoble Savage, an idea that comes from
Rousseau (1712-1788). These three notions - Blank Slate, Ghost in the Machine, and the
Noble Savage - are what Steven Pinker terms the ‘Holy Trinity’89
In the first half of the 17th century Rene Descartes developed his a priori deductive reasoning theory of knowledge. His idea, coined by Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) as the Ghost in the Machine, is the notion of the duality of mind and body, the division of the mental and physical aspects of human beings. He thought he could doubt the existence of the body but not of the mind. He took skepticism of empirical (sense) data to a radical edge, and disapproved and renounced all external authority on reality, and hence historical knowledge. He thought that all systems of thought had been based on external appearances, on illusion, and that the superior site ofthe truth of the world was with the individual, the “subjective imagination”, for the only thing left from his methodological
89 The notion of the Blank slate (Locke - empiricism) is linked to the idea of the Noble Savage (John Dryden, Rousseau - Romanticism) and the Ghost in the Machine (Descartes - Cartesian dualism). These three doctrines are independent but often found together, what Pinker calls the “Holy Trinity” (Pinker, 124). Individuals are thought to be bom pure, they are good and not tainted. Rousseau, for example, conceives that men are wicked because of learning and socialisation. In this way blankness is associated with virtue rather than with nothing. Today cultural determinists use the Blank Slate to convey a purity about being bom blank and accuses civilization as a corrupting influence; being blank means being blameless and society is responsible for all the ills of humankind. In this way, the Ghost inhabits the Blank Slate and is blamed for any uncivilized behaviour. skepticism was the “doubt-thinker”: the cogito, the thinking ‘I’90. In a process of doubt and certainty about ideas not grasped by deductive reasoning he concluded,cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I exist’. This idea is the thought that mind is independent of the material body and functions by laws other than physical principles, existing before and after the death of the body. In this sense the mind is an immortal soul, an idea that
Descartes reinforced with biology, with the notion that the pineal gland in the brain was the seat of the soul, a site of connection of the immortal with the mortal flesh. The notion of the Ghost in the Machine allows for the idea that behaviour is freely chosen, actions are accountable by the individual rather than being determined; we have choice and responsibility and therefore freedom, and a hopeful, optimistic future. In this sense, the
Ghost in the Machine liberates the human will from mechanical causation or biological determinism such that human beings can change self and society: we can change what we don’t like about ourselves. The human mind is not seen as having evolved, but is separate from the development of the body and is free, thus the human being can escape determinism.
The reactions against the church, against conventional knowledge, and the notion of a real nature, an original human condition influenced developments in the 18th century about natural history. The process of human development was conceived, like the developmentalists of the classical age, as “successive steps or stages” and in terms of natural man versus conventional history91. Associated with origins the historical method, natural history, is about first things beyond conventions, like the sophistic and other ancient Greek distinction betweennomos andphysis. At this time what was natural to
90 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 117. 91 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 139. Ellis 49
“the thing in question” was inherent to the thing92. This was ‘known’ by the historical method that got through the historic social order to the “forces of the natural order” . It derives “from what one knows of the principles of human nature, of from the circumstances of society, the origin of the opinions and the institutions” and tries to get at the “natural course of human history”, that is, a history without interventions, accidents, or interferences94. This modern-day nature nurture distinction distinguished between appearances, conventions, habits and reality associated with an underlying nature, a distinction only possible via reason i.e. as held by Descartes.
18th century rationalists adored nature, to the extent that Nisbet argues that they had a “cult of Nature”, and associated it with “thepristine condition of a thing” prior to its corruption by way of “adventitious circumstances”. The original state, the origins of human beings, was thought to reveal “the true essence, thenature , of things”. Nature was not just considered as primal and understood via “comparative observation” but could also “be understood through the resources of reason”. Natural history of the physical world was a scientific mode of investigation distinct from convention, from concrete places and necessary for understanding scientific progress, technological developments, and political reform. Natural progress could be aided if oppression and false notions of reality were banished. Enlightenment thinkers saw possibilities for human liberation, uplift, and emancipation. They were hopeful regarding salvation in this world.
Progressivism also includes the idea that human perfectibility is possible in history. This doctrine holds that it is unnecessary to wait for the afterlife for human perfection; the fulfillment of human nature can take place in earthly life. In this way, utopian dreaming
92 Ibid, 143. 93 Ibid, 140. 94 Ibid, 157. abhorred the “church, aristocracy, guild, and feudal tradition” for they were “moral obstacles” to human development. Comte de Volney (1757-1820) for example thought that “ignorance, superstition, ecclesiastical fetters, and political despotism” cause decline and must be eradicated to “allow liberty, human rights, and the natural order of goodness to prevail.. .in a context of rationalist education”. Progress was seen as normal development for man, and the natural order, natural law and history, could and was being obstructed and hidden by “artificial circumstances”, by conventions95. Enlightened power must take over and rid society of institutions that were against nature, against reason.
The notion that certain institutions of civilization were corrupting man was explored by Francois-Marie-Arouet (Voltaire) (1694-1778) of France. He described civilization as “the progressive development of sciences and skills, morals and laws, commerce and industry” and that this progress can be interrupted by periods of regression that most often occur from the “two great obstacles to progress”: “dogmatic religion and wars” - both of which restrict individual freedom96. He wroteEssay on the Manners and
Mind o f Nations (1756) which involved a hypothetical idea of progress. To him God did not govern by intervention, in fact he thought that there was no empirical evidence for providence in history. Improvement in life was “by our own reason the condition of man, to make him less ignorant, better and happier” and alone gave purpose and meaning to history97. It was mans ability to reason rather than the intervention of god that could account for the improvement in society.
Similar to Locke, Helvetius (1715-1771) thought that we are “bom without ideas, without a character, indifferent to moral good and evil, we have only physical sensitivity
95 Ibid, 117.129, 130,140,141. 96 Lowith, 107. 97 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 107. Ellis 51 as a gift from nature; that man in the cradle is nothing; that his vices, his virtues, his artificial passions, his talents, finally, his prejudices, even as far as self-love - everything is acquired by him”98. He developed a doctrine of perfectibility, a psychological theory that held that human nature is indefinitely modified by the intellectual and moral environment. He thought original man to be “cruel and bloodthirsty” and that “humanity is the effect of education in them, and not of nature”99. Education was the key to transforming existing society into an ideal one.
Rousseau (1712-1778) was a leading French philosopher of the Enlightenment, responsible for inaugurating the Romantic Movement in continental philosophy. Partly in reaction to the Hobbesian state of nature and partly in reaction to the notion of a plastic human nature as espoused by Locke he developed the doctrine of theNoble Savage.
Rousseau wrote a natural history titledDiscourse on the Origin and Basis o f Inequality
Among Men (1755) in which he grasps what is fundamental to man, in his primitive state, versus the modifications experienced from civilization. He acknowledges the difficulty of understanding man’s original condition, Hobbes’ state of nature, from the present after a great history had occurred between the two points in time. Many “changes and additions” have altered “his primitive condition” to the point that it is hard to distinguish the features that place present man in contrast with primordial man100; for this is an attempt “to form a true idea of a state [of nature] which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist”101. This may be the case, yet Rousseau still attempts to theorise
98 In Helvetius’s “On Man” from L.G. Crocker, ed. The Age of Enlightenment. (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1969), 46. 99 Ibid, 46, citing Helvetius. 100 In Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality” from Peter Gay, ed. The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 181. 101 Ibid, 182, citing Rousseau. Ellis 52 man’s first original nature in the state of nature, but this is heavily influenced by the discovery during colonialism of indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes that have a primitive social arrangement. Imbued with the thought of sentimental romanticism, he nostalgically cast the natural condition of primitiye man as sublime, a golden state of material satisfaction and egalitarianism. Native peoples were portrayed as being instinctual, peaceful, innocent, communal, selfless, and untroubled. In this way, primitives were cast as noble savages and any individual differences were attributed to natural inequalities such as differences in “age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul”102. Although man, according to Rousseau, in this original animal-savage impulsive state, was privy to his needs of self-preservation, his irrational and amoral instinctual passions, man is also an originally innocent and free agent and by nature, good.
The state of nature was not, as Hobbes had it, a war of all against all, as war did not emerge until later according to Rousseau. For him, the happiest stage was not the state of nature and not civil society, but a stage in between. It was the savages that were
“the real youth of the world”103. These humans had a flexible nature and divine-like origin; an originally innocent, pure, golden nobility of the soul; they were inherently virtuous or “naturally good”104. Rousseau also held man to have “the faculty of self- improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual”; man could be perfected105.
Endowed with intelligence, sentience, and liberty man is distinguished from an animal, man can free himself from his instincts. In this way man is “a free agent” yet reason and
102 Ibid, 186, citing Rousseau. 103 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 148, citing Rousseau. 104 Crocker, 43. 105 In Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” from Gay, 190. Ellis 53 instinct or passion are the mechanisms for human development106. Natural law is what
“commands every animal and the animal obeys” whereas even though “man experiences the same impulsion.. .he knows that he is free to acquiesce or to resist [his instincts]”, he is aware of this freedom107. Our “faculty of making progress”, our use of reason to be free from our instincts and live in a contractual society is what separates man from beast and is why our nature is not fixed108. It is our willing and choosing, our rational, intelligent mastery of the passions that is the process of perfectibility and our sentience and liberty that gives human beings a distinct identity and sets us apart from animals. In this sense we are unique in our political reasoning. Freedom is political, moral, civil and rational, involving civil liberty, a freedom that is gained from endowing action with morality and
“substituting justice for instinct”109, and moral liberty, where man is the “master of himself’, able to override natural liberty, or capable of overcoming a kind of slavery to the passions, the natural impulsions of the appetites, by obeying a self-prescriptive rational law110.
In contrast to the savage at peace Rousseau cast civilized man as never relaxed because he wants to be “the sole master of the universe”111. Civilized man is violent, powerful, oppressive, weak, cruel, impoverished and blind and it was human society, social conventions and institutions, specifically “priestcraft, feudalism, ignorance” that corrupted human nature, established moral and political inequalities and incited hate and wickedness112. For Rousseau, the talents and abilities of men are roused and set against
106 In Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” from Crocker, 38. 107 Ibid, 37. 108 Ibid, 38. 109 Gay, 332. 110 Ibid, 333. 111 In Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” from Crocker, 44. 112 Nisbet, Robert, The Sociological Tradition. (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 270. Ellis 54 one another by social institutions, which produces a “conflict of interests” and encourages a restless striving to attain and maintain “reputation, honours, and recognition”113. This ambition, which “multiplies passions”, the resultant property, which enhances a persons fortune against another, and the “secret desire to profit at the expense of others”, makes “all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies”, breeding greed, anxiety, violence, and wickedness114. Once the corrupting institutions were removed, the facts of appearances, conventions, and other distortions, “the moral, psychological and spiritual nature of man” or what Rousseau perceived to be the inherent goodness of man could be revealed115. In this way traditional institutions were not seen to make man, for man had timeless and indestructible instincts such as passions, moral sentiments, and reason, instead social institutions “were made by man and they are therefore expendable”116. The corruption of man’s innate goodness was not perceived to be a permanent alteration.
He thought things could be set right in civilization by setting ourselves on a correct course of nature. For him there could be no return to state of nature, instead he wanted “the restoration of the kind of freedom that man had once enjoyed in his earliest stage of cultural developmentthrough the building o f the political community founded on the General WilFn He i. argued for a radical overturning of society, a destruction of all institutions that stem from private property and inequality. He affected some legislation associated with the French Revolution regarding the interferences with equality.
13 In Rousseau’s “Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men” from Crocker, 42. 14 Ibid, 42. 15 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 144. 16 Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition. 272. 17 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 130. Ellis 55
In summary of the above, the Lockean and the Rousseauian views of human beings had a big impact on the theory of progress and the rise of modem liberalism.
Nature was thought of as perfect, and that natural man, or the savage, rather than civilized man, was the closest to this ideal state, living according to natural law. This was a revival of the notion of a golden age in the past, and a sense of a progressive moral degeneration since civilization began. There was an emphasis on freedom from any kind of oppression
(political, religious, and such). Civilization was perceived as corrupting because institutions were poorly organised and not directed towards freedom. There was acknowledgement of corruption and decay but there was faith, for the first time in history, that “the interferences to progress could be removed by wise legislation or enlightened despotism” 118. Traditions and dogmas were thrown out yet development was cast as a closed system i.e. it remained teleological, with a final end. Progress of knowledge was thought of as “natural and normal” and statecraft must remove all obstacles that prevent this natural growth. Rationalists argued that there was a distinction between natural and normal progress regarding knowledge and the “concrete histories of peoples and areas”. This was the same distinction made by the 5th century BC rationalists, that between growth and history. Knowledge naturally progresses cumulatively, it grows, yet “interferences in the form of war, despotism, ecclesiastical dominance, dogmatic rigidities” as so on retards, even stops, but only temporarily, the progress of knowledge.
For the Radicals of the times the only way to let the natural order reveal itself, or, the only method to reveal natural order was the total destruction of the existing social order by violent revolution. Overall, this enlightenment liberalism held that human nature is plastic, not naturally corrupt or evil, yet at the same time it held the position that man is
"* Ibid, 129. Ellis 56 noble in his original condition and that humanity can achieve peace, freedom, and justice in a good society. It rejects the tragic view of human beings in favour of optimism. It believes in progress, in the transformation and perfection of human existence by reforming or replacing current society. Faith is replaced by reason and education is the solution to all imperfections. It wants to achieve its goals through destruction, whether through reform, revolution, or breaks from tradition - social and human engineering.
Human beings are mastered, either coercively or with self-discipline as a way to engineer a utopian, universal society119.
A fundamentally different view of human nature and progress also developed in the Enlightenment. Similar to the above there was a focus on nature-nurture distinction, on natural history and freedom, but it was a “freedomto develop individual faculties, powers, and talents with the least possible constraint or even guidance” for “freedom is always connected with individualsas they actually are”'20. The proponents of this view of freedom can be considered as liberals; they held that civilization enlightens, it brings man closer to reason, and thus to nature, and is what makes man more perfect. Like the radicals described above nature was associated with “an ideal-type, a character of an entity, physical or social, that is its true essence and thatwill manifest itself provided only that corrupting, deflecting or interfering circumstances.. .do not obtrude”121. The difference between the radicals and liberals was the way to achieve the natural order. For the liberals, the development of man is indefinite, open, and individual liberty is its motive force (in a struggle against anything that stands in the way of this liberty). They wanted to certify the progress of mankind by premising it “on man, his passions,
119 Ibid, 112. 120 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 238. 121 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 141/142. Ellis 57 interests, and reason” and focus on the education of monarchs and legislators122. Only through enlightened rulers could a more perfect society be achieved.
This liberal ideology has a long standing history regarding the necessity of self- interests and a flawed nature for progress. It is found in the ancient Greeks, through the
Christians and middle ages, into the Renaissance, and Enlightenment, and up to the present day, but let us in this section focus on the enlightenment thinkers and the chapter on conflict will discuss in depth the history of the idea of the necessity of vice, imperfection, self-interest and the like for development. Both Thomas Spratt (1635-1713) and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) maintained the idea of providence as progress yet with a darker hue. Spratt saw the Royal Society as the “road to the golden future” and
1 7 1 deemed violence as a necessity for the coming of the millennium . Progress required bloody and fiery conflict, turmoil, and chaos to cleanse the earth of infidels and barbarian evil-doers so that the world could be renewed, purified of its sins and wickedness. This apocalyptic time was seen as the deferential action that would initiate the descent of
Christ from the heavens to reign on Earth, it was a total reconstruction, a treatment of the
‘cause’ of human misery (i.e. wickedness) rather than a treatment of the symptom. Vico, in his New Science, used providence as a method but with a civic, natural, and theological historical course. This was the first empirical construction of universal history that laid down the philosophical principles of an eternal law of providential development; it was a
“rational civil theology of divine providence” in social history124. Vico suggested that history is “double-minded”, that it is dialectic between particular aims and universal
122 Ibid, 114. 123 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 133. 124 Lowith, 116. Ellis 58
1 ends; it is a world made by men but is surpassed by providence . He saw providence as the bearer of things and the means by which belligerence was transformed into social harmony, such that it used the corrupted free will of man to fulfill its own universal ends, creating “out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition [of men] the strength, riches, and wisdom of commonwealths”126. History to him had a prehistoric beginning but no end or fulfillment and moved by the rule of recurrences, a cyclical and historical progression from corso to ricorso, a natural historical development of successive yet repetitive rotations of genesis and decay. He argued that men and nations are historical and not fixed and that history progresses from anarchy, to a savage, mythological and theocratic order in the age of the gods, to an emotional, poetic age with heroic customs and feudalists aristocracy, and then to an emotionally withdrawn age of monarchy, rationalised civilized customs, and widespread commerce. This last stage of history results in a decline and eventual collapse and the beginning of a new cycle. He saw the corsi as an ultimate remedy for barbarism* that gradually rid the world of corrupt men saving “mankind from civilized self-destruction” and emphasized the “primitive, heroic, and imaginatively religious mentality”, the barbarism of sense (generous savagery), seeing this as being more human127.
The conservative liberal, radical empiricist and sceptic David Hume (1711-1776) in a similarly tragic vein as Hobbes, held that human nature was fixed, ultimately selfish and driven by wants, but by reason and the social order, people could achieve their ends
125 Ibid, 126. 126 Ibid, 126. * This barbarism comes about through the “barbarism of [modem] reflection” (base savagery): “men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuze themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substances” (Lowith, 135/133). 127 Ibid, 117. Ellis 59 morally and civilly, with the latter developing solely for this purpose. In this way, man was inherently selfish and reason was the slave or instrument of the passions, yet civil society could temper self-interest and enlighten man, developing in him a civilized and moral nature. Even though he argued that the sciences of man and an understanding of human nature could be reached, Hume maintained that because of the “frailty and perverseness of our nature” it is actually “impossible to keep men, faithfully and unerringly, in the paths of justice”128. Man can morally progress in civilization but this is not an absolute certainty.
D’Holbach (1723-1789) wrote A System o f Nature (1771) in which he said “self- interest is the sole motive of human actions ... each man works in his own way toward his own happiness”129 and “[sjelf-preservation and the happiness of his existence” is the purpose of man130. He argued that man is in and a product of nature and those institutions which go against our natural impulses “are the sources of our unhappiness”131. Actions of others affect us and we judge them, either disapproving or approving, with emphasis on
“valour, generosity, love of freedom: as they do not negatively affect the self interest of others132.
The liberal moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith wroteThe Wealth o f
Nations (1776). He was interested in the causes and the forces (interference, division) that check the natural growth of wealth. He thought that the normal tendency to growth was obstructed by institutions for the natural inclinations of man are altered by European
l2* In Hume’s “A Treatise on Human Nature” (1739-1740) from Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive Anthology. 343. 129 In D’Holbach’s "A System of Nature”, from Crocker, The Age of Enlightenment. 160. 130 Ibid, 159. 131 Ibid, 160. 132 Ibid, 161. Ellis 60 mercantilist policy, which had “inverted” the “natural order of things”133. He argued that it would be an advantage to all if traditions are lifted to reveal natural rights and freedoms. To him, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” produces a division of labour, specialisation associated with differing talents and improves the chances of attaining wealth134. Individual economic freedom, laissez-faire capitalism, was a system of natural liberty that provided prosperity and stability to the social order through natural inclinations, such as the ambitions, self-interests, and egoisms of men. Rather than leading to anarchy, this system of economic competition is governed by “the rule of justice”; profits and material wealth from self-interest ultimately trickle back into society as a public good, which leads to economic progression and happiness, to a “natural progress of opulence”135. He conceived progress to be “the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition”, and if individuals are equally autonomous and free, and governed by an enlightened government, they can produce wealth and prosperity for the nation136.
In France Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (French, 1727-1781), a philosopher and economist, thought that the achievement of freedom was the quintessential point of progress and understood that development in the arts and sciences depended upon economic growth and surplus and these both depended on individual freedom. He conceived history as being a constant and certain progression towards increasing perfection driven by the “self-interest, ambition, and vain glory” of man137. Marquis de
133 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. 2 ,5th edition, (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadeil, 1789), 88. 134 In Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from Gay, The Enlightenment 585. 135 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 190/192. 136 Ibid, 191. 137 Ibid, 180. Ellis 61
Condorcet (1743-1794) displayed a secular faith in indefinite progress, and argued that the inequalities of wealth, condition, and instruction would diminish but not entirely disappear as they have “natural and necessary causes” and that it was important to
118 preserve those inequalities that are “useful to the interest of all” . In hisOn the Progress o f the Human Mind (1797) he thought the progress of civilization was grounded in “the unalterable characteristics of the human mind, in its restlessness, its curiousity, and its faculties generally”139. Like others, he thought that the obstacles to progress were the
“power-driven ways of despots, wars, calamities... induced by human ignorance, inequality, economic exploitation... the superstitions of religion, the machinations of priests”140. He thought that the perfectibility of humanity could be achieved through the proper use of knowledge. He suggested we “secure and accelerate the natural process of progression” through a commitment to the advance of scientific knowledge and conceived a final stage of civilization as being ruled by a bureaucratic class of scientists.
In this scientific utopia society, education, and nature were dominated by the principles of science and reason. He thought that science was the “golden avenue to the future and to the final perfection and egalitarian spirit of the future” and that scientists were futurologists for they knew the laws of nature and so could predict the future141.
A very influential figure that was spawned in the Enlightenment in Germany and continues to have a major impact on progressive thought was the great synthesiser
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He perceived that without “autonomous, rational being[s] who live or should live in accord with the categorical imperative” there can be no
138 Ibid, 211. 139 Nisbet. Social Change and History. 120. 140 Ibid, 121. 141 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 208. Ellis 62 morality142. For Kant the idea of progress depends on the moral philosophy of final causes for his end of humanity was a state of perpetual peace, a world federation of states only attained by a universal reform of political equality. This end was an ethical society reigned by reason in which each individual was treated as an end in itself, not a means to an end. In his essayIdea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Kant Aim argues that history reveals nature’s secret plan for humanity - the perfect state in which all potentials can be developed and human being can live in a perpetual state of peace.
Kant used the same metaphor as Augustine regarding growth. Natural capacities evolve completely to their natural end, their destiny, and for man, this means in the human species and not the individual. The means of nature to bring about this end is antagonism in society, but only if it brings about “lawful order” among men143. He understood that conflict, what he calls “mutual antagonism”, is necessary to progress, that without this “unsocial sociability” 144, this self-protection, passivity reigns and high accomplishments do not materialise. He writes: “Thanks be to nature, therefore, for the incompatibility, for the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped”145 In this way to achieve a world federation of states requires antagonism, a mechanism that would be completely sublimated into constructive competition in the final end of humanity. Conjectural history, theidea of a universal history was “a means of demonstrating the reality of progress as a fixed
142 Ibid, 221. 143 In Immanuel Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” in A.O. Rorty & J. Schmidt, eds. Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13. 144 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 222. 143 Kant in “Idea for a Universal History” from Rorty& Schmidt, 14. Ellis 63 principle”. He thought the progressive attempts towards a final perfection may be faulty but it was our destiny as a species to achieve “social and moral perfection in time”146.
Both of the above views of progress held that liberty was sacred; the whole point of history was conceived as the ever increasing movement to greater freedom and all limits had to be removed that prevented the increase in knowledge, economic progress, and the increasing mastery of nature through science. Freedoms from corrupting restraints were vital for progress, as well as rationalisation, science, secularism, and individualism versus collectivism, but of course these were taken in different directions by the different thinkers and philosophers of the time. The idea of progress envisioned the building of a new world society through knowledge, reform, and the promotion of ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It was a future secular utopia of equality, anti establishment, knowledge, and democracy in pursuit of virtue, truth, and happiness on a mass scale. Technology, rationalisation, and secularism were the key factors that progress utilised with the humanitarian hope that human beings and society could be perfected.
Human beings and the environment came to be seen as malleable, plastic and adaptive and hinged on the mastery over nature, both the environment and human, and an engineering of society towards a utopia, civilization and reason could make man more perfect; more rational, healthy, happy and comfortable. The human condition was thought to be improved by empirical observation and rational management, through laws and regulation.
146 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 119/120. Ellis 64
CHAPTER FIVE
Nineteenth Century Developments in the Theory of Progress
It can be said that by the 1500s Western Europe had social pluralism, developments in commerce and technology, and were ushering in a new era of global politics with international trade networks, including the British, Dutch, and Portuguese East India companies, with the British being the first multinational corporation. Samuel Huntington argues that at this time there were “intermittent or limited multidirectional encounters among civilizations [which] gave way to the sustained, overpowering, unidirectional impact of the West [Christianity and Roman law] on all other civilizations”147. In the late
1700’s and early 1800’s, Americans saw their country as the single nation that could bring “earthly redemption” to mankind, “to bring humanity to perfection” as they perceived their destiny as being one that hastened and prepared the world towards a coming millennium via a spiritual and material revolution involving moral and political reforms and technology148. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) saw the importance of science and progressive development for the development and achievement of liberty, and thought that progress was incapable of occurring without the “Power of Man over
Matter”, without the use of human ingenuity and the mastery and control of nature, and that these developments were going to take humanity to a point where individuals could possibly “live as long as the patriarchs in Genesis”149.
The Enlightenment inaugurated a major shift in Western life. Kant’s notion of the end of history being a final form of human government, the universalisation of western
147 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 50. 148 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress.198/197. 149 Ibid, 200. Ellis 65 liberal democracy, which was also an idealistic suggestion to end conflict, both domestic and global, gave people an expectation of harmony in this world. It was an extremely influential idea that has permeated Western thought, and has justified the emphasis on the modernisation and development via interventionist mechanisms of the rest of the world since. The want of unification, of universalism, integration, and collectivity is inseparable from a want of peace, stability, certainty, and the elimination of fear, hardship, suffering, inequality, poverty, disease, and corruption. What decent human being could deny these ideals? Reform and revolution pervaded the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries including the declaration that all men are equal under law and all have inalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and property, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence. These and such other humane developments stimulated a continuation of the utopian thought of the
Enlightenment seen in such works asVoyage in Icaria (1840) by Etienne Cabet, News from Nowhere (1891) by William Morris, Erewhon (1872) by S. Butler, the utopian socialism of Proudhon, Fourier, and R. Owen, and the scientific socialism of Marx and
Engels, and also H.G. Wells’A Modern Utopia (1904) and many more150. Other revolutions, including the two industrial revolutions of the 1800s, coupled with progress in technology, science, rationalisation, social-cooperation, industry and imperialism (raw materials and resources) stimulated much material advancement. The slavery of colonisation was eventually legally abolished in 1865, an achievement attained especially by the advocations of many Christian groups who argued that all human beings were the children of God, but also because of slave revolts and uprisings in certain colonies and the increasing economic costs for ‘masters’ having bonded labourers.
150 Again, see Utopian Literature: A Selection. (1968). Ellis 66
Even though there was an increasing recognition of humanness of other peoples the idea of progress became precarious when progress to freedom and peace for all increasingly became associated with the idea of absolute power. Rousseau, in hisThe
Social Contract had thought that in civilized society “[m]an was bom free, and he is everywhere in chains”151. He further argued in hisOn the Origin o f Inequality that it was not liberty but the “laws of property and inequality.. .labour, servitude, and misery” that defined modem life152. Inequalities had given rise to conflicts between classes, nations, and territories and eventually led to the formation of the institutionalised political state.
This form of government incensed existing inequities, and confined the masses in
“perpetual labour, slavery, and wretchedness”153. There was no going back to a former harmonious age because of the faculty of improvement”, of self-perfection or an inherent drive of an individual towards self-interested ends of fulfillment that was leading to a gradual development of all the abilities of humanity154. In hisSocial Contract, he suggested the active restoration of virtue and equality through the reconstruction of politics, involving a government based on the sovereign general will, freedom from enslavement from inequality and private property, and a contractual type of exchange between individuals and the state involving the individual giving up certain rights and freedoms to become a member of this civilized, egalitarian, and virtuous society.
However, freedom had come with a cost, the individual will must conform with the
131 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston, (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 2. 132 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC., 2007), 78. 133 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 245. 134 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. 31-32. Ellis 67 general will of absolute power, for any individual who disobeys will be “forced to be free” by the whole social body155.
Rousseau was not alone in 18th century Europe in seeing absolute power and nationalism in the name of progress. Romantic liberalism blended Rousseau’s dictum about individual freedom, and the notion of nation,volkstum (nation); individual freedom was the aim of human progress and would be achieved through democratic revolution and absolute power. In Germany, Johann Herder (1744-1803) saw everything as interconnected in a continuous chain of being with human beings as the highest link and employed other ancient concepts such as the analogy of the individual and plenitude in his thinking. He wanted to decentralise Germany into autonomous and free national communities and was devoted volkstumto believing that national language was the
“deepest source of [social] unity”, that it brought the nation together as a whole and was vulnerable to pollution from foreign languages, which diluted the purity of the nation156.
Fichte (1762-1814) added to this by arguing for the legal-political national state that would provide the social, economic, moral, and spiritual needs of human beings. He was advocating National Socialism, Nazism. The ideal nation-state to him provided all material and nonmaterial needs and hopes, and was to be made up of moral individuals who were defined and protected by the state and were living in a social order that cultivated a moral nature, and thus a moral nation. Changes had to be made, such that the economic social order as governed by the self-interests, desires and base tendencies of man was to be replaced by a political order that was designed to provide the conditions for the development of the so called intrinsic worth of man. These conditions were
155 Rousseau, The Social Contract. 19. 156 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 271. Ellis 68 grounded in work, what Fichte valued as the “highest and general purpose of all free activity”157. Fichte and others saw this totalising and all-pervasive power of nationalism as the outcome of a long and natural evolutionary progress of the history of the universe towards ever “higher perfection in a line that runs into the infinite”158.
Nationalism and thinking along the lines of the perfection of the globe were inseparable components of the idea of progress as power. The point of historical advance through nationalism was one of a global world of civilized people (really a homogenous mass), living in harmonious effortless ease, in full health, and having complete mastery over nature. It was a global world order in which all peoples eventually would join in after the necessary stages of development had been completed, that is to say, they had become civilized according to the German model. Every individual on the earth would be a member of a single world culture under the all-powerful nation-state. This is reminiscent of Augustine’s idea of the unity of humankind under a universal Christian
Empire and Kant’s world federation of states.
For George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) the absolute political state
(German model) was an ideal society that was the manifestation of the latest phase of historical progress and governed the spiritual, secular, social, political, and economic activities of a single unified nation. This absolute monarch was an ethical ideal that conceived all individuals as rational, autonomous, and ethical subjects who engage in objective relations with each others. These individuals give up certain rights and freedoms in order to be a member of this absolute state and attain freedom, a freedom
157 Ibid, 273. 158 Ibid, 275. Ellis 69 that emerged from the recognition and belief of “that which is common to the whole”159.
Their collective national Spirit was what made the power of the nation-state possible, for
“state power is the achievement of all”160. Hegel justified the militaristic power of the absolute nation-state by arguing that it was ethical and progressive, protecting the people and the state against corruptions. His philosophy very much influenced nineteenth and twentieth century movements of the West in military nationalism, imperialism, socialism, racism, and World War.
In the 19th century, the idea of progress as power developed in strength. In France
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), heavily influenced by Saint-Simon, saw that Western civilization “alone is specifically dynamic, progressive, universal in its meaning”, in its
“missionary zeal”, and that the physical, biological, and chemical conditions for the historical evolution of mankind originated and are concentrated in the white West161. He thought that Catholicism had advanced the moral and intellectual realms through changes in personal, domestic, and social virtues, such as humility, brotherhood, charity, and
“private munificence” and had unified and organised the European nations through promoting a universal viewpoint and adding to this ensemble, international law162. His approach and use of Catholicism as a progressive power in his positive utopia was to emphasise the organisation of the Church, its spiritual influence, and drop the Catholic doctrine, the authority of which was held by the temporal State. HisPositive Philosophy, was a history of the sciences that also promoted a positive utopia, and was a reaction to the anarchy and the moral and intellectual decline in Europe rooted in the changes
159 Herman, 281. 160 Ibid, 33, citing Hegel. ‘AH’ means the “Spirit of the people itself’ (Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 277. Lowith, 68. 162 Ibid, 77. Ellis 70 incurred by the reformation, enlightenment and revolution, arguing that the reformation had not replaced the “educational and social achievements” of Catholicism thus not promoting a social order that was in “harmony with progress”163. He believed in the inevitable perfection of society (not just an ideal utopia as he replacesperfectionnement with secular development and progression) coming about from the necessary forward movement of modem society and science.
Comte, much influenced by Condorcet and Leibniz, especially that letters notion that 'the present is big with the future’ thought that “change is simply the incessant realisation of a higher level of order”164. To him history progressed along a linear, organic continuity from primitive to advanced stages with each branch of civilization and knowledge going through three different stages: the theological (fictitious; childhood), the metaphysical (abstract; youth), and the scientific-positive (empirical; rational; manhood). He claimed that it is “the slow, continuous accumulation of these successive changes which gradually constitutes the social movement”165. He surmised that the development of knowledge stemmed from the pattern of the human mind and understanding the development of disciplines of knowledge must never be separate “from the total progression of the human mind or even from the fundamental evolution of humanity” 166. He argued that positivism, as the last stage of the development of knowledge, should be promoted specifically through ‘social physics’, or sociology, the new science. He wanted a new system to replace the decrepit one he lived in, one that was based on a patriarchal stable social order that was governed by a spiritual elite
163 Ibid, 78/80. 164 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 167. 165 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Vol. II, trans. Harriet Martineau, (New York, Cosimo, 2009), 464. 166 Ibid, 496. Ellis 71 preaching a religion of humanity, science and the law of progress and wanted to use these and associated principles of social development to create, in nature and society, a “perfect harmony”167. He promoted positivism because there was a “growing pressure of necessity for a spiritual power entirely independent of the temporal” to come into existence and because he thought that science was peaceful and would destroy the “military spirit” through the supportive mutual relations with industry168. One of his methods was to harness the “vicious circle” of the anarchical revolutionary dynamic and reactionary restorations of the modem progressive era to liberated yet stabilize them “through order and progress”, giving the idea of progress a scientific purpose169. This would be done by an overarching force of cohesion and direction, the “supreme spiritual authority” a
“philosophical priesthood” a hierarchy with the scientist-sociologists at the top170.
In the 19th century what is called the comparative method, which has roots in the
Greeks, was fully developed. It held that societies are at different stages of development compared to the model of Western society. Such differences included technology, knowledge, social organisation, traditions, economics, militaristic capabilities, success, growth, and well-being. The rate of social development was based on sets of conceptual tools that enable superior, moderate, or inferior navigation of the environment. The
Western notion of progress, of increasing complexity, a higher order of differentiation, was hierarchical and employed the notions of successive stages, ages, and races.
According to Nisbet, with this comparative method the West placed themselves at the
“top of the evolutionary hierarchy of cultures”. Non-Westemers were perceived as exotic,
167 Herman, 35. 161 Lowith, 86/85. 169 Ibid, 73. 170 Ibid, 85. different, but especially “reflecting lower stages of an evolutionary advancement that was thought to be universal”. Imperialism, slavery, Christian missionaries, commercial traders, colonialism and colonial administrators in “primitive” areas of the world could be easily justified and forgiven, for in the long run, it was thought that these actions would hasten the “development of these peoples toward modernity”; they were considered as
“accelerators to modernisation”. Examples of such paternalistic attitudes towards the non-West that thought they were showing the way to modernisation so to quicken “social evolution to Western peaks” include the East India Company and the Western political position in Africa171.
The non-modem cultures could be justifiably dismissed i.e. social organisations such as religion were replaced by modem developments of technology, equality, rationalism, anything that was deemed progressive and the ‘right’ thing to do. What is called the Doctrine of Survivals, formulated by Tylor, was the elaboration of the distinction between traditionalism and modernism, in which elements of the former are found in preliterate societies such that these “elements existed in perfect conformity with the consensus or social structure of that preliterate people”. These elements (i.e. superstitions) can still be found in ‘backward’ parts of Western society and could be proof that Western society once was also like the preliterate societies, but had progressed, via rationalism, relegating such superstitions to “children’s games” and other lower-strata activities. In this way, labels such as progressive, developed, modernised, or not, were used as standards to show degrees or intermediate developments and thus show continuity of universal social development. Enlightenment intellectuals (reformers and revolutionaries who wanted emancipation from medieval traditions and used progressive
171 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 201/202. development as a footing) discovered qualities of technology, individualism, and secularism, and social evolutionists in the 19th century conceptualised these into the comparative method, an evolutionary framework172.
Along with the ethnocentric and imperialistic tendencies of the West at this time the developments and consequences that grew out of the Enlightenment and the 19th century such as improvements and expansions in science and rationalisation and the removal of the theistic assumptions of historical progress, challenged the foundations of
Western European Christian thinking and consciousness. Modem civilization and all its accomplishments had transformed the human being and the perceptions of human life.
There was faith in progress, science, freedom, economic growth and power so to reach the good life. The Crystal Exhibition Palace in London, then the Chicago Fair in 1893 were attended by tens of thousands of people and exhibited the scientific, mechanical, architectural, and industrial achievements of progress. Science was also blended with religion, justifying each other, and was applied in academic fields, especially in the new discipline of social science, producing things like Christian Science and positivism.
Individual perfection was seen in evolutionary rather than spiritual terms, such that
Charles Darwin in hisOrigin wrote that “natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection”173. In civil society theory history was seen as “a general movement toward modem commercial “opulence”” and man had developed from primitive savage to civilized, moral, economic, and peace loving social man174. The main elements in this civilizing of man were: the “refinement of manners” associated with the rise of science,
172 Ibid, 204. 173 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 175. 174 Herman, 24. Ellis 74 more rational and civilized tastes, tolerance, and a notion of the intrinsic worth of human beings; the “rise of politeness” that involved rational, social, and moral beings that treated each other with respect; and the “growth of commerce”, which was “central to all human improvement” for wealth of commercial society provides a more stable supply of collective needs and wants thus removing prejudices and uniting man175.
Other thinkers promoted the Enlightenment liberal thought in which all human beings were equal and could collectively achieve a utopian society through radical means
- violent revolution. Such a thinker was Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883). In his natural history of capitalism he makes use of the law of continuity such that he thought the revolution of the proletariat as being “a final, triumphant, and more or less dramatic stage of growth just as continuous in its sequence of stages”176. He presented a materialistic thesis that argued that all history is “absorbed into an economic process” and is moving linearly and continuously forward toward “a final world revolution and world renovation” which would be after capitalism177. He saw capitalistic society as being divided into proletariat and bourgeoisie with the proletariat being “enslaved to alien 17ft power, to capital” and suffering from alienation from the existence of private property .
He claimed that the industrial and scientific powers had become the master of man and nature, altering mans relationship with production such as through the specialised division of labour, had objectified things, concretised abstract exchange values, exploited man economically and rendered his life empty and uninspired. He argued that “modem society cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of social relations
175 Ibid, 23. 176 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 178. 177 Lowith, 33. 174 Ibid, 35. Ellis 75 of production” and that the historical pattern of advance was about the struggle between social classes; a dialectic between oppressors and oppressed, between forces of production and social conditions179. Historical progress for Marx occurred through economic antagonisms. He thought capitalism was the “last antagonistic form of the social process of production” and saw the proletariat achieving “the eschatological aim of
i sn history by [an explosive] world revolution” to overcome the bourgeoisie . He envisioned the abolishment of private property, competition, and profit and a collectivist, centralised political absolute power, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which the
* A * working class of the world unite to end history as progress . This could be achieved by the working class becoming new men, the communists, and transforming the existing socio-economic order into a classless society in which men are in charge of their own social development, and the desires of individuals and social relations are united in “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all182. Utopian in its philosophy, Marxism held hope in a future “new world” in which we can shape our nature and where “people will be motivated by self- actualisation rather than self-interest”183.
Around the same time that Marx was making his mark in the world, Charles
Darwin (1809-1882) was working towards his publication of On the Origin o f the Species
(1859). His addition to the history of knowledge was the idea of evolution by natural selection, a radical idea that became abused to support such movements and events as
179 Ibid, 40. 180 Ibid, 35/37. 181 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 265. l82Lowith, 41. 183 Pinker, 295. Ellis 76 early forms of social Darwinism, racism, eugenics184, social engineering, and Nazism.
The etymology of the word evolution is Greek: e (out) andvolvere (to roll) or to roll out, unfold. This unfolding evolutionary development theme has been present since at least the ancient Greeks, for example Anaximander thought there was an order of progression among living things. Empedocles deliberated on stages of development and the principle of adaptation. Democritus considered that there was a mechanical atomic process underlying the increasing complexity of development. Plato argued that there were great cycles of time, of death and rebirth of cultures and his age was in de-evolution. Aristotle thought the species were fixed yet proposed the idea of potentiality (the means for the idea of development) that can be applied to the species rather than the individual (like
Kant). In the modem age but still prior to Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution by natural selection, Herder surmised that lower and earlier stages of development were conditions for the higher, later stages and discussed notions of survival and adaptation.
He also argued that revolutions and setbacks in development are necessary such that “the stream” does not “become a stagnant pool”185. Hegel argued that existence was a process; it was an evolvement of the self in an immanent dialectic. He also divided human history, civilization, and the spirit of freedom into the stages of growth of a single individual - re using an old-age analogy, and argued that this advancement was “made inexorable by the very constitution of humanity”186. This was because he thought that development is “a property of organic natural objects” ... “an internal, unchangeable principle; a simple
184 Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, pioneered in eugenics and also coined the term ‘nature versus nurture’. I8J John Godfrey Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Vol. 1, trans. T. Churchill, 2nd edition, (London: Luke Hansard, 1803), 416. 186 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 122. Ellis 77 essence... which subsequently develops a variety of parts’ . Schelling (1775-1854) considered existence as vitalistic, and this was his conceived principle of development, a successive process of organic self-evolution. Finally, Comte advocated for cultural evolution and divided development into a law of 3 stages. He argued that science was a means to individual development and the scientific age is man’s historic goal.
Darwin continued the ideas of the 18th century such as “progressive development, uniformitarianism.. .genetic continuity”, ideas that are associated with the concept of
1 fifi change which are present in the Greeks regarding the metaphor of growth . He thought that there was small but continuous variation in time such that “all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus”189. He introduced the idea that
“evolution is an algorithmic process” of natural selection, which is automatic, mindless, and mechanical with “descent with modification” accounting for species variation and diversity190. The natural world arose from “a blind, unforesightful, non-teleological, untimely mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time”191.
This ‘dangerous idea’ of Darwin’s argues that “design can emerge from mere order via an algorithmic process that makes no use of a pre-existing mind”, in other words our
100 existence can be explained without transcendental notions of God or higher purpose
His ideas also involved the notion that all species of living things are mutable consisting in “a long chain of being” and progressive development is innate193. He considered
“necessity in progressive development” and it was “always ... toward the good of each
1,7 Ibid, 179, citing Hegel. Ibid, 163. 189 Ibid, 175. 190 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1995), 60. 191 Ibid, 315. 192 Ibid, 82. 193 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 123. Ellis 78 being”194. However, it was through conflictual competition, a process of the natural selection of the fittest, that “natural selection necessarily acts by the selected form having some advantage in the struggle for life over other forms, [and] there will be a constancy tendency in the improved descendants of any one species to supplant and exterminate in each stage of descent their predecessors and their original parent”, thus pushing life into more evolutionary developed structures195.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), much influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, coined the term the ‘survival of the fittest’ and extended evolutionary theory into the social realm of human beings (social Darwinism or social evolution) using theories of Lamarckinism to describe the evolution of societies. In his
Progress: Its Law and Cause he argues that evolution is a law of all nature, is a law of growth - biological, social, physical, historical - and “organic progress” proceeds from chaos and homogeneity to structured order and heterogeneity, from “simple into the complex, through successive differentiations”196. Even though there are setbacks and miseries, he thought that progress was “a beneficent necessity”197. He also rejects the religious view of original sin, the notion that human nature has been corrupt since the
Fall, yet there remains the view that the so-called ‘negative’ aspects of human beings are what stimulate advance.
Biological and social evolution are different theories with the latter not directly proceeding from the former. The theory of biological evolution stems from “a
194 Ibid, 179. 195 Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species bv Means of Natural Selection, introduction by George Levine, (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 107. 196 Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions. (Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 2004 [1890]), 6. 197 Ibid, 50. Ellis 79 populational and statistical theory” whereas social evolution is a “typological construction” such that “social class, kinship, culture, law, society as a whole [are] types and structures into which the normative and institutionalised behaviour of human beings fall”198. Social evolution is abstract history (i.e. methodology one) not historiography (i.e. methodology two); it is not about the particularity of events and peoples, of geography or the history of humanity but it is a “method for the study of human evolution, progress, or development”199. This is the same distinction as natural and conventional history, where social developmentalism is associated with natural history and supplemented with ethnographic data200. It also focuses on origins, ‘first things’, and successive developmental stages. It studies abstract entities, such as the economy. Economic development is associated with technology and culture and the successive transitions in the modes of economy are generally understood as the development from hunter-gatherer tribes, to horticulture and pastoralism, agriculture, industry, and finally the post-industrial information age. In this way contemporary “materials of the documentary and archaeological present [are] juxtaposed to the materials of existing cultures in scalar relation to one another - and endowing these materials with the set of attributes of slow, gradual, and continuous change”201. However, many of the ideas embedded in biological evolution are also applied in social evolution such as the role of conflict, seen in terms of competition. Competition between all individuals, groups, ideas, is considered to drive social evolution in human societies; this is evolutionary change through the survival of the fittest.
1,8 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 162. 199 Ibid, 165. 200 A discussion on the distinction between natural and conventional history,physis or andnomos is discussed in depth below. 201 Ibid, 212. Ellis 80
CHAPTER SIX
Twentieth Century Developments in the Theory of Progress
Industrialism, technology, urbanism, rationalisation, and secularism were the key factors that progress utilised with the humanitarian hope that human beings and society could be perfected. Human beings and the environment came to be seen as malleable, plastic and adaptive. Hinged on the mastery over nature, both the environment and human, and an engineering of society towards a utopia, civilization and reason could make man more perfect; more rational, healthy, happy and comfortable. The human condition was thought to be improved by empirical observation and rational management, through laws and regulation. There was an increase in scientific and medical attention and intervention of the human body in the 19th century in regards to a national economic, moral, and political agenda; the modem day penal system arose and there was a commodification of social relations and the family. The mastery and control of the environment (social and natural) and the perfecting of human nature was seen to serve the needs and desires of the social group and social institutions. The individual became secondary to society. Social cooperation and solidarity was fostered. It was a time when rationalism, science, and objectivity stripped man of his dignity and he became separated from him self, without an essential nature; man was a Lockean Blank Slate, yet noble in his original condition202.
This empty nature of man was challenged by the emergence of sociobiology in the mid-20th century, popularised by Edward O. Wilson in his bookSociobiology: The
New Syntheses (1975). Sociobiology is “the systematic study of the biological basis of all forms of social behaviour, in all kinds of organisms under natural conditions” and Ellis 81 informs and is influenced by ethology, behavioural ecology, genetics, and evolutionary psychology203. It looks at the similarities between human cultures rather than the differences and focuses on whatis rather than what ought to be204. It is interested in researching the interaction between genes and environment, “how social groups adapt to the environment by evolution”, acknowledging the complex relationship between nature or genes and nurture or environment and how this effects human behaviour205. To sociobiologists much of human behaviour is ultimately a manifestation of genetics such that certain traits can be explained by biology rather culture, i.e. there are evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviours. Edward O. Wilson, for example, argues that “each person is moulded by an interaction of his environment, especially his cultural environment, with the genes that affect social behaviour” yet insists that thefoundation of human social behaviour is genetic rather than social206. This genetic substructure is an evolved biological base that determines basic categories of behaviour.
Wilson argues that certain human behaviours, such as aggression, sex, altruism, and religion, are innate features of human beings that have developed according to many years of evolution by natural selection and are partially inherited. If a behavioural trait ensures or enhances the individuals’ ability to survive and reproduce then this is considered as greater genetic fitness. The greater the genetic fitness the greater the representation of these genes in the next generation, more offspring show these genes. By a slow process of natural selection these superior genes are then spread among the population and the trait becomes an innate characteristic of a species. The idea of
203 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 16 204 It avoids the naturalistic fallacy. 205 Wilson, On Human Nature. 17. 206 Ibid, 18. Ellis 82 innateness can be understood as that which is pre-social, already within man. Wilson defines innateness as “the measurable probability that a trait will develop in a specified set of environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all environments”207.
In this sense, human beings, as well as other mammals, have a “behavioural scale” or
“spectrum” such that different behavioural responses can emerge depending on the specific circumstances208. It can be said that the spectrum of human behaviour can range between violence and altruism which I will discuss in the chapter on conflict.
According to sociobiology we are not bomtabula rasa as many modem liberals and social constructionists believe. Behaviour is a mixture of genes and learning; it is “a
4 A Q developmental process leading from the genes to the final product” . In this way, human evolution proceeds by dual inheritance, the idea that there are two types of inheritance that characterise an individual210. Soft inheritance is related to Lamarckian or cultural evolution, a very fast process in which the characteristics acquired during an organisms lifetime can be passed on to their offspring, they are inherited .
Characteristics acquired during ones lifetime are known as second nature or habit.
Cultural evolution is associated with the civilizing process involving cultural traditions, institutions, manners, norms and such and involves self restraint or self-discipline, the use of reason to control the passions, to control our biological nature. Hard inheritance is when genetic material or DNA, a person’s genotype, is inherited by the offspring from the parents and is not affected by the environment. Hard inheritance is determined by
207 Ibid, 100. 208 Ibid, 101. 209 Ibid, 61. 210 Also related to Azar Gat’s two-tiered motivational system, which is biological and cultural. See Azar Gat War in Human Civilization. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially chapters 4 on Motivation: Food and Sex and 5 on Motivation: The Web of Desire. 211 It can be contrasted with Darwin’s gemmules and the notion of Pangenesis (Aristotle). Ellis 83
Darwinian evolution. The difference between these two types of evolution and inheritance is limited by biological natural selection; biology ultimately has the last word on cultural change, for it is the substructure of our existence.
Another development in the 20th century associated with progress is globalisation.
Globalisation is a combination of economic, technological, socio-cultural and political forces that promotes progress, modernisation around the world. The 19th century was the era of modem globalisation, it was an initiation of major international trade via European,
American, and colonial powers which has created a global economic interdependency and further fuelled modernisation in ‘undeveloped’ nations. Since this time there has been increasing standardization to satisfy, on mass scale, material needs; the rise of mass- democracy and human rights; mass entertainment, leisure, and consumerism; and a mission-oriented, progressive, eugenics of the mind. Mid-20th century progress was more inclusive and humanistic, rather than the older progress which was exclusive, nationalist, ethnocentric, elitist, and imperialistic. After Nazism, and other fascist ideologies that cast doubt on the reality and feasibility of progress, modem globalisation has broken down borders that hamper trade so to increase global prosperity and interdependence and decrease the chance of war. International organisations have arisen such as the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Bretton Woods, and the United Nations. With the push for immigration multicultural policies, which necessarily involving tolerance, have come to the forefront of politics. In a push for global unity, for world government (a centuries old process i.e. associated with quests for world empires, the idea of progress, the world federation of states, unity of humanity, brotherhood of humankind, quest for Ellis 84 peace, the belief that the erosion of boundaries will prevent major conflicts and wars between groups defined by these boundaries) the development of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 has provided a global standard of justice and a way to fight against discrimination and oppression across the world. Human beings can now be considered as global versus national citizens. The UDHR is an example of an international organisation committed to securing justice to all people regardless of differences in age, sex, creed, or race. It is a common understanding of what it is to be a human being which is vital for cross-cultural cohesion. It is a homogenous paradigm that is also a dominant ideology.
20th century thinkers continue to believe in the reality of progress. For example V.
Gordon Childe, an historian and archaeologist thought that history if a “series of troughs and crests.. .each crest out-tops its last precursor” and that “[progress is real if discontinuous”212. Sir Charles G. Darwin thought that “sometimes new discoveries will for a time relieve the human race from its fears, and there will be golden ages, when many for a time may be free to create wonderful flowerings in science, philosophy, and the arts”213. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thought that modem knowledge reveals “an internal, timeless, perfecting principle, one that has led to global unity” in “events” of the
“biosphere”. He even went on to suggest that “the principle of progressive, purposive, and perfecting evolution is the answer to man’s doubts and fears”214.
Continuous developments can be seen in technological and industrial innovations and practices, in medicine, higher standards of living (the average poverty rate has decreased), the proliferation of goods (basic and luxury), increasing equality, an emphasis
212 V.G. Childe, What happened in History. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), 292. 213 Nisbet, Social Change and History, citing Charles G. Darwin, 221. 214 Ibid, 221. Ellis 85 on liberal-democratic values, satellite communications and increasing cultural and social interconnectivity, mass media, entertainment, and leisure time. There are now new categories of consciousness and identities, cultural boundaries have been broken down by the internet, economic prosperity has increased, civil liberties have been enhanced, the distribution of resources are more efficient, life expectancy has increased, infant mortality has decreased, there has been an increase in literacy and child labour has been reduced. Today, in the West, novelties, exoticisms, upgrading, modifications, adaptations, newer, better, more progressive, more improved, more perfect, more upbeat, hip is the focus*215. What is now sought is the novel, the new; it is neophilia, or the love of the new, a term coined by D. Morris. There is also a distinction between growth and development, with the former meaning bigger, quantitative increases in economic output, and the latter meaning better, qualitative changes such as improvement in life, nature, and human harmony with the slogan ‘think global act local’.
Progress is now measured by specific standards such that the Global Project measured the progress of societies by sets of key economic, social, and environmental indicators216. Other measurements of progress include nutrition, health, housing, education, and economic security. There is emphasis on the environmental value of eco- development and technology such that it progress may be sustainable. The United
215 See John Leland Hip: The History. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). Hip is Wolof, from the verb hepi - to see, or hipi - to open one’s eyes. The linguistic start of the word hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and coastal Gambia. It is about reinvention, such as found in blues, jazz, innovation, styles of fashion, intellectual debates, and revolution. It is about non-conformity, transcendence, hybrids, and synthesis of polarities, of conflicts, and oppositionalism. Today, “the underlying principle of hip is reduced to a commercial shell” (Leland, 289). The hipster has become something that can be repetitively produced, sold, and bought as a commodity. The branding of style loses the ambivalent nature of hip; die tricksters’ narrative has been forsaken, its irony and signification overlooked by its reduction into a sellable product for profit. Hip loses its fluidity; it becomes signified, static, a fixed thing, a mass produced popular product, rather than an evanescent signifier of transcendence. 216 The Global Project ended in October 2010. Even still, you can find information here: http://www.jzlobal- proiect.eu/ Ellis 86
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) produced a Human Development Report in
1990 that measured world GDP, citing the richest 20% produced 82.7%, 2nd 20% -
11.7%, 3rd - 2.3%, 4th - 1.4%, 5th - 1.2%217. Human rights can also be a measure of progress, such that those countries that don’t follow this universal standard of justice can be considered as ‘backward’ or ‘undeveloped’. Recently there has been the creation of
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the United Nations that seek to resolve issues of world poverty and other issues within a specific timeframe218.
217 You can find information about human development reports since 1990 here: http://hdr.undp.org/en/ 218 Information about MDGs can be found here: httD://www.beta.undD.org/undD/en/home/mdgoverview.html Ellis 87
CHAPTER SEVEN
Criticisms of Progress
Reactions to the manifestations of the ideological principles and goals of the modem theory of progress and the conditions it has produced for the masses started to emerge in the mid-18th century. With the Enlightenment came optimism, hope, confidence, and belief in progressive amelioration; it was a ‘Century of Great Hope’ in which humanitarians, democrats, socialists, and utilitarians abounded. Yet it was a ‘Century of
Foreboding’ as many began to negatively regard the results of progress, such as individual estrangement in freedom and rationality. Ideas of decay had proliferated by the
19th century including those of Ferguson, Tocqueville (1805-1859), Burckhardt, the
Adams brothers, Weber, and others. According to Nisbet, there was a sense of an
“impending tragedy” by post-revolution conservatives219. This melancholy view of the future was generally explained by the fact that history is “periodically seized by deep moral crises” that remain “to haunt and mock man’s hopes of secular salvation”.
Ferguson wrote An Essay on the History o f Civil Society (1767) in which he argued that in his age there was much corruption of values and social decay which leads to the thought that time does not necessarily bring improvement, rather “every age hath its consolations, as well as its sufferings”220. In this distrust of modem European development was a sense of moral disenchantment, of “social dislocation” and
“centralisation, levelling, secularisation” - “wounds” that may not “heal themselves”.
Conservatives brought in “a profound doubt” about the qualities assured by progressive
219 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 130. 220 Law of the conservation of energy: energy can not be created or destroyed only transformed. Ellis 88 developmentalists or modernists or utilitarians, as being beneficial for social development221.
In Western Europe there was a deep suspiciousness surrounding mass-democracy.
For example Tocqueville “saw a double-edged fate in the development of social equality”. Burckhardt thought that the future was in the hands of “bureaucracy and militarism” - “democracy’s twin forces”; Frederick Le Play argued that “democracy, liberalism, laissez-fare industrialism” are a “negation of morality and human happiness”;
Nietzsche lamented over “decadence, philistinism, and idle romanticism”; and Weber criticised the rationalisation of everything including “society, thought, and mind”. There were also many sceptics of progress in the USA during the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Henry and Brook Adams. Henry Adams (1838-1918) argued that there was regress in history, a “running down of vitality”222. He rejected the metaphor of growth and focused on the principle of decay, insisting that development will result in a final stage of chaos. It was a “gradual depletion of human energy” such that history was understood as a history of decline: civilization was “a manifestation of decay.. .of the raw, primal energy that alone betokened man’s true individuality and creativeness”. His brother Brook Adams (1848-1927) also argued for the principle of decay but was more cyclical in his views, such that he advocated for cycles of growth and decline in history, in his book The Law o f Civilization and Decay (1896). A society may become extinct but another one takes its place, and so the rise and decline of civilizations does not extinguish human civilization in general. The ‘torch’ of civilization continues223.
221 Ibid, 127-132. 222 Entropy is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. 223 Ibid, 132-135. Ellis 89
By the 20th century a proliferation of dystopian literature emerged. Utopian ideologies and striving to live in perfection regularly have a hidden price (whether intentionally or unintentionally), often awful, dark and atrocious, which destroys, causes suffering, or generally causes malaise and lack of authenticity, and sometimes death.
Take for example the necessary action of human beings involved in the production process of material progress, let alone the miserable living conditions of many in the world that supply the materials or labour for those that live on that labour. People are living tools, machines, may be operating dead machinery in factories producing mass goods, they are the manual labour behind material progress. Without mass work forces, labour forces, there has to be a willingness, an understanding, of what is actually basically needed, so that it maybe produced (and we could find a way that was absolutely ethical and humanitarian i.e. it could be done with machines so that no one had to work in a way that was gruelling and such or we could give up on certain labours that achieve luxurious and decadent ends) without all the other frills, wastes, corruptions, and such, but more importantly, the labour would have to be donefreely , without resistance, grumblings, disagreements. Could we ever produce this type of ideal society?
Dystopia or negative utopias are a nightmarish terror, characterised by oppression, or deprivations that often benefit a few. Examples of dystopias include A. Huxley’s
Brave New World (1932) and G. Orwell’sAnimal Farm (1945) and1984 (1949). They, like utopias, are deliberate designs of a future society, yet instead of being beautiful and peaceful places, they are about miserable living conditions that benefit a select few, or to achieve an idealised goal. Often they involve governments or corporations against the freedom of individuals, advanced technology and radical change of human beings, or Ellis 90 apocalyptic, disaster aftermath scenarios. These societies describe all the pessimistic things that can and have happened, that which we consider wrong, such as those things that create suffering, misery, death, destruction through dehumanisation, degradation, and cruelty. Much of the wealth of dystopian literature is based off of real life situations such as the regimes of Stalin and Hitler. Dystopias have a moral message - the difference between a bad life of oppressiveness and primitivism, of divisions and chaos, and the good life, in which humanitarianism, justice and freedom reigns and none is the master of another. In some ways modem dystopias are a continuation of Aristotle’s fear of the progress of technology. According to Strauss he could not conceive of a world state because none of these conditions were in existence at this time; but there is more, he thought that science was an “essentially theoretical” endeavour, and that technology free from political and moral regulation would “lead to disastrous consequences”224. Much of what has occurred that can be considered as dystopic has been via the progress of technology, such that modem warfare has utilised science and technology to create weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare, nuclear capabilities which has resulted in mass-murder and genocides and mass wars such as WWI and II.
The above can reinforce the idea that intellectual advance does not necessarily reflect improved or sophisticated human relations. Knowledge does not always lead to improvements, to social amelioration for many, as the interests of a few can monopolize knowledge for power and profit. An example of this way of thinking is by MacIntyre in his After Virtue. In this work he argues that the law-like generalisations that are required by managerial organisations are false and the establishment of these universal laws, which occurred in the Enlightenment era and the early 20th centuries, are especially
224 Strauss, Natural Right and History. 23. Ellis 91 associated with the rise of the social sciences. Managerial bureaucracy “disguises and conceals rather than illuminates and it depends for its power on its success at disguise and concealments”225. The rise of the human sciences garnered information, knowledge, about the behaviour of human beings such that this information was then used for political and economic ends. MacIntyre also argues that “bureaucratic authority is nothing other than successful power”226. It is vulgar conventionalism (as defined by
Strauss), a way of viewing reality first articulated by Thrasymachus and further described by Nietzschean will to power. The general public in the contemporary West is afflicted with Big Brother, a pervasive and invasive panopticon that is twinned with the notion of the nanny state - in which behaviour is puritanised by paternal and patronizing money making bigwigs that require ‘normalised’ behaviour such that the people can serve political and economic agendas. In some ways, in a neo-imperialistic, neo-colonised world, done in the name of modernisation and development we live lives of decreasing freedom and independence enforced by political correctness.
The focus on individual gain without moral restraints, i.e. capitalism, became a main tool of the 1960 development decade ‘take-off theories, a method of modernization and development of the whole world via capitalist interventionist policies, or as
Weatherby describes their goal: “to create a critical mass of concentrated capital that will support takeoff of Other World economies into sustained economic growth”227. It is thought that Other-world economies can achieve self-sustaining growth in a capitalist world economy; this is an inundation of the utopian promise of eventual material
225 MacIntyre, 103. 226 Ibid, 25. 227 Jospeh N. Weatherby, The Other World: Issues and Politics of the Developing World. 4th edition, (New York: Longman, 2000), 55. Ellis 92 abundance for all via large scale industries and the creation of jobs. Take-off theories attribute problems of inequality to the necessities of progress, another example of using progress as a justification of miserable conditions. Human beings are thought to be unequal in essence and that it is necessary for human evolution that a top few have unencumbered progress, thus supporting the imperialistic agendas of the most powerful nations and justified by economists such as proponents of Keynesian capitalists and also social evolutionists. Of course, capitalism is responsible for the increase in life expectancy, literacy, access to education, and development of infrastructure in these ‘un developed’ countries. Yet, take-off development strategy is implemented to intentionally benefit the strong as it is focused on individual gain rather than egalitarianism, not to mention the structural adjustment programs and other loan programs that create massive debt and dependence of these ‘developing’ countries on the ‘strong’. In this way, hierarchy and elitism reigns strong in this so-called progressive world. This relates to the
‘noble lie’ (and thus disguise of the will to power and might is right) and also the construction of discourses, of power-knowledge according to Foucault. More about this is found in my next chapter on conflict.
The reality of progress is that it implies measurements, standards, judgments, comparisons, inequalities. A world state requires technological development which in turn requires “that science be regarded as essentially in the service of ‘the conquest of nature’ and that technology be emancipated from any moral and political supervision”228.
Freedom (to be, think, and act) for the mass public requires covering basic needs in mass quantities and this requires mass wealth, resources, and security. Where do these come from? Well the fulfillment of needs requires labour and mass needs requires mass-labour
228 Strauss, Natural Right and History. 23. Ellis 93 which means that many are not free; sophisticated goods (that go beyond basic needs) requires complex production and the specialised division of refined labour which means interdependency, a complex economic and social system, and inequality from the scarcity of these sophisticated goods and those that produce these goods for the few. In this way progress is not just about enlightenment (freedom, equality, rationalisation, mass- production, standardisation, homogenisation, universals) as it requires hierarchies of development according to ideological principles and standards. It is intricately intertwined, indeed inseparable from domination, imperialism, slavery, and colonialism
(or general inequalities). Take for example the notion of freedom - freedom from what, in what? The idea stems from slavery: slave to a master, to passions, to labour, to nature.
Progress can justify inappropriate and barbaric actions i.e. miserable conditions can be justified as necessary for a future state. Again, more about this will be covered in the chapter on conflict.
The above are only a few of the criticisms associated with progress. The following is a brief discussion of the limitations and issues of progress, advancement, or what we can now call globalisation. A major issue is environmental degradation from industrialisation. If providing a good quality of life for the masses through materialism requires mass-industry then we can see why there has been environmental damage. Not only do we see pollution from development we also critically question the sustainability of material progress. Is it indefinite? Population growth via better medicine and the decrease in infant mortality, the availability of renewable and non-renewable resources, creative drought, natural disasters, and global epidemics all make us question the reality of indefinite quantitative progress. This coupled with the decadence and waste of the Ellis 94 most advanced societies, and in the last few decades the rise of industrialism (and consequential pollution) in the rest of the world, really calls to question whether this idea of spreading globally an industrially productive, material way of life is the right approach to achieving the ‘good’ life.
The medicalisation of the human condition and the ‘normalisation’ of behaviour to a statistical ideal is an increasing problem. Anything that can be labelled, categorised, or considered as ‘deviant’ from the ideal human type can be considered as a health problem, whether emotional, psychological, or physiological, and can be prescribed drugs so to modify human existence. A complicated issue is that of mass-depression and the mass use of anti-depressants. In a similar vein, the fact that we can live longer is a sham.
It often requires medical intervention (pills, surgeries) to the point that when we die we are either in hospital or at home on drugs, or aided by machinery, often prolonging our misery and pain, an issue that is currently being dealt with by ALS sufferers and such who are advocating for a humane solution - legal euthanasia. Is it really ethical to keep someone alive when they are naturally dying? There are also costs to the environment when we live longer. For example, with better diets and nutrition the use of pesticides, transportation, and waste-management gets more complicated. There also what are called diseases of civilization such as obesity, and type II diabetes. And to top it all off there are now new diseases like super-bugs from the overuse of antibiotics, and the spread of diseases from other parts of the world from more efficient transportation and world travellers considering themselves as worldly citizens.
Another major issue is mass poverty. There is an increasing deterioration of the middle class in the West, partly from outsourcing and massive lay-offs, and this means it Ellis 95 is harder to achieve upward mobility and climb out of a lower class existence of border line poverty. This translates into mass poverty such that those who are ridiculously rich and have a fantastic standard of living only form a very small percentage of the population, whereas those who experience poverty, or close to poverty make up the majority of the population. A related issue is the creation of mass man and mass culture by mass-democracy, the levelling of standards, such as in education, art, and morality. In this way there has been a loss of high culture, something that can be understood as that which sustains culture, pushes it to creative heights. There is a fear that stems from mass- democracy - the ‘tyranny of the masses’ which caters to the lowest denomination and emphasises mediocrity, preventing a high quality, merit-based, sophistication from nourishing the very fabric of inspiration and creative development. Another related issue is multiculturalism. Multiculturalism and cultural diversity may promote peace and understanding and stimulate progress yet imported culture can lead to loss of local culture and thus a reduction of diversity, loss of skills, original traditions, and ways of life, laws, and knowledge. Some may argue that differences are important for the vitality of a culture, as explored below, and a homogenised mass that stems from the political correctness advocated by policies of tolerance and equal rights actually cause creative drought and finally ‘cultural suicide’. It can be said that diversity is not compatible with equality for differences can not be logically equated with sameness.
The aestheticisation of existence is another big issue. Consumerism, materialism, consumption, and economic gain via free-market capitalism can lead to a lack of distinctions and can develop into barbarism, self-seeking without constraints. Zygmunt Ellis 96
Bauman thought that “economic life is increasingly aestheticized”229. The aestheticization of economic life can be related to the ‘palliative measures’ of Freud: the soothing and distracting means of religion, art, intoxicants, and so on, which pacify the frustrations and aggressions of the civilized but repressed human being230. Mass consumerism, living life now without thought, for thought comes after action, and the letting go of self control is promoted by liberal capitalism, which channels competition into pacifying aestheticism.
This can all produce a self-delusion and a reckless abandon of the important things in life, such as love, friendship, and family. The illusions created by the media are allusions to the possibilities of perfection and consumerism can be understood as the attempt to buy
‘perfection’. In this way modem capitalist consumption is aesthetic, cosmetic, decadent, artificial and a completely empty kind of living and it is a commodification of human life by the promotion of the consumption ethic by advertising agencies to buy or act now and think later. This lack of responsibility results in going beyond one’s means and creating massive debt that ultimately affects the economic prosperity of a nation. Sweatshops are a related issue, associated with consumption. Large corporations take advantage of export poverty, lower wage rates and people buy a mass of cheap goods at the cost of the labourers disgusting work conditions. This is a violation of the much heralded UDHR; in this sense the Western corporations and consumers are hypocrites, as they may uphold these rights at the domestic level but not at the international level (i.e. Burma). When one is removed from the situation one does not care. The heart does not grow fonder with distance, but cares less.. .it is not happening in my backyard so I don’t care.
229 In Austin Harrington, ed., Modem Social Theory: An Introduction. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 267. 230 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans James Strachey, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961). Ellis 97
There are many ‘anti’ movements that oppose neo-liberal capitalist progress in the contemporary world, such as the anti-corporate globalisation movement and the anti globalisation group who instead wants sovereign, democratic states and barriers for international trade and the transfer of people, goods, and beliefs. These groups are against unregulated power of multi-national corporations and the destructive transformation of cultural traditions. They focus on human rights, democracy, and egalitarianism, often promoting individual rights, socialism and nationalism. Other alter-movements include the global justice movement, alter-globalisation movement, counter globalisation, the
World Social Forum (which focuses on justice, social contract, fairness, responsibility, peace) and is against the World Economic Forum (which promotes elitism and the educated classes). All-in-all these types of anti-globalisation movements can be considered as being in reaction to too much power of the IMF, WB, corporations, monopolies, and multinational giants which are accused of creating a lack of small competition and standardizing goods, off-shoring of labour, and so creating a lack of jobs at home. Power elites monopolize positions of power and restrict the movements and the ability of wealth accumulation of others.
There are obviously many more issues associated with modern-day progress, but I could not possibly cover these in this particular work for fear that the reader is falling asleep from over-information. So, this next section will look at one of the biggest issues that rages in much contemporary thought. This is the political cleavage between conservatism and liberalism, a split that was initiated during the ancient Greeks, recurred during the Enlightenment and then resurfaced in the 20th century reaction to communism and socialism. This division reflects what I will be discussing in the chapter on conflict - the dual nature of human nature, of human discussion, and nature itself. In the following I will discuss the Greek physis-nomos distinction and the difference between classical and vulgar conventionalism, and then will focus on the creation of relativism by modem day liberalism as associated with the nature-nurture distinction and the reaction of conservatives, or the counter-Enlightenment, to this state of affairs. Ellis 99
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leo Strauss and the Distinctions betweenNomos andPhvsis and Classical and Vulgar Conventionalism
The natural development orphysis of one’s naturaltelos was considered as a natural right by classical political philosophers, initiated proper with Socrates. Yet there were also arguments for the non-existence of natural right, a disagreement represented by the fundamental distinction between the notion of natural growthphysis or and of convention, ornomos. Previously to philosophy, customs and ways of life were equivalent to nature. Customs were seen to be right, to be divine law because of their oldness, their stability, their ancestral beginnings, because they were “homebred and prescriptive”, of known heritage, rather than novel and strange231. These ancient customs were considered to be the first things. First things were considered as “imperishable”,
“eternal” and were “more truly beings than the things which are not always”; they were the ultimate cause of “beings that are not always”232. Philosophy questioned these first beginnings, these traditions and the authority they had over the present. Philosophy arose when the first thinker discovered nature, and it was a quest for the principles of things, of beginnings, of the origin of man, and of the eternal order of things, beyond orthodox beliefs. This doubt of authority was necessary for the idea of natural right, for it replaced divine revelation as a source and guide of what is right and good. Socrates, who discussed these views with the young men of Athens, was challenging traditional authority and stimulating thought about natural rights, about the quest for right and good, and thus was replacing conventional or authoritative good with natural good, with natural
231 Strauss, 83, citing Burke. 232 Ibid, 89. Ellis 100 right. In this way, nature is a “term of distinction” that divides the ‘totality’ of phenomena into natural and non-natural or conventional233. Customs are split into nature, physis, and convention,nomos once nature and philosophy are discovered. In this way, nature, first things, is hidden by authority, by laws that make claims about things, about ways of life, and thus nature is experienced as custom. By philosophy and the discovery of nature ancestral authority is uprooted as an original beginning and replaced by nature; nature becomes man’s oldest ancestor, oldest authority, and the provider of the materials of creativity and “the models for all arts”234. Arbitrary and artificial distinctions between things were replaced by natural distinctions, on that which could be seen, rather than what was heard.
Classical conventionalism holds that rather than right and justice being rooted in nature, they are instead against nature and are grounded in “arbitrary decisions, explicit or implicit, of communities”235. There is a distinction between philosophical and vulgar conventionalism, which Strauss highlights. To him, vulgar conventionalism holds that the most pleasant is to have more than or rule over others. The city and rights both originate in convention and impose restraints on the natural. For vulgar conventionalists “life according to nature” consists in a small natural elite which “cleverly exploits] the opportunities created by convention or in taking advantage of the good-natured trust in which the many put in convention”236. Examples of vulgar classical conventionalist thought are the doctrine of Thraysmachus(459-400), ‘might makes right’, or the notion of the sophist Protagoras (490-420BC)that ‘man is the measure of all things’.
233 Ibid, 82. 234 Ibid, 92 235 Ibid, 11 236 Ibid, 114. Thrasymachus’s doctrine means power determines justice. This is a descriptive and normative take on ethics and a pre-Nietzschean amorality237. Sophism, a sidekick to vulgar conventionalism, is a discipline that manipulates arguments, words, and concepts by the use of rhetoric and it employs reason in pro/con debates. It can be seen as the corruption of philosophical conventionalism because it does not care for the truth of things, or teaching the truth of the whole, rather it wants power and prestige. It does have a healthy scepticism towards orthodox traditions, values, beliefs, and ideas, discussing and criticising them, yet this may lead to relativism and nihilism. It doesn’t perceive the beginnings of humanity as a golden age; rather it is cast as a state of nature in a constant state of war. It argues that the polis would be impossible without a sense of justice , without order, laws, norms, ethics, a sense of right and wrong, the value of toleration, and common goals. Agreement and unity are emphasised rather than conflict, so that outside threats (such as Persia at the time of the ancient Greeks) can be dealt with properly.
In contrast, philosophical conventionalism holds that the good life is the “retired life of the philosopher who lives at the fringes of civil society”. In other words, civil life is “not the life according to nature”239. Life according to nature is not the life of a tyrant and it is not about pleasure from wealth and power. Philosophical conventionalists believe that human thought can grasp the eternal i.e. Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which the cave represents the world of appearances, of variable opinions rather than knowledge, and the struggle towards the light is towards the truth of the all- comprehensive eternal order, or reality. Plato argued that there were two realms of existence, one being the world of eternal Forms, which were perfect and timeless, and
237 This can be taken as a naturalistic fallacy, the identification of an ethical concept with a natural concept. 231 Understood as “beneficent coercion” (Strauss, 133). 239 Ibid, 113. Ellis 102 could be represented by geometry and apprehended through the mind, and the other being the world of appearances, of incessant change and development, imperfection, and history, and could be apprehended through the senses. Previous to Plato, Socrates is known to have advocated that the nature of things comes from opinions, which are
“important vestiges of the truth”. In the tradition of philosophy, ascension to knowledge and truth is “guided by opinions” for a conversation of opinions of what things are is dialectic, a conflict, and in this way, opinions are “fragments of the truth”, of the whole,
* \A f\ are parts of the whole and point towards it
A commonality of both philosophical and vulgar conventionalism is that both agree that “by nature everyone seeks only his own good or that it is according to nature that one does not pay any regard to other peoples good or that the regard for others arises only out of convention”241. However, vulgar conventionalists do not recognise common good as a whole but perceive it to be only a part of the whole as it is the “ruling section” that make laws for the common good but “with a view to its own interest” . The basic premise of conventionalism is that what is good is what is pleasant. It can be associated with the classical philosophy of hedonism such as that of Plato and Epicurus. Plato associated the natural good with the pleasant and he replaces the ancestral good with the good as pleasant by distinguishing between nature and convention, leading to what is forbidden or not desired by ancestral customs. The pleasant is “emphatically natural and hence intrinsically good”. To Plato what is good by nature is “what we seek from the moment of birth, prior to all reasoning, calculation, discipline, restraint, or compulsion” and “the primary pleasure is the pleasure of the body”. For Plato there were three objects
240 Ibid, 124. 241 Ibid, 115. 242 Ibid, 103. Ellis 103 of choice regarding the pleasurable: i) the greatest pleasure, which he argued was the
“end toward which we are tending by nature and to be accessible only through philosophy”; ii) the useful, which wasn’t pleasant but was “conducive to pleasure, to genuine pleasure” and is associated with virtue; and iii) neither pleasant or conducive but it is “that which is praised”, a “good by convention”; it is that which is considered good by others243. For Epicurus (340-270) the purpose of philosophy is happiness through a life of tranquility, of freedom from fear and from pain. What is pleasurable is what is good. He had a scientific approach to understanding the universe, which he saw as infinite and eternal, holding that change was caused by the movement of atoms in space.
Epicureanism is the developed version of the classical hedonism of Plato.
Plato’s hedonism was more social, focused on philosophical pleasure, virtue
(social), and conventional social good. However, according to Strauss, classical natural right critiques this hedonism, claiming that “the good is essentially different from the pleasant” and is “more fundamental”. The various pleasures are associated with various wants, but these differing wants are “not a bundle of urges”, rather there is “a natural order of the wants” associated with the natural constitution. The ordered hierarchy of wants and inclinations is determined by the ‘what’ of a being, man’s natural constitution.
According to Strauss’s interpretation of Aristotle, the good life is the life in which “the requirements of man’s natural inclinations are fulfilled in the proper order to the highest possible degree”; it is “the perfection of man’s nature”, a life in accord with nature, which is “the life of human excellence or virtue”. Aristotle emphasised self-restraint as
243 Ibid, 109-110. Ellis 104 being as natural as freedom and that there could be no perfection of man’s humanity without restraint of “lower impulses”244.
He also claimed that men are not “equally equipped by nature for progress toward perfection” some need guidance, others do not245. He thought that “men are naturally different”, that inequality was natural, and “the intellectual ability to plan rationally for the future ... marks a man out to rule; but the man who is merely able to carry out physically what he has been ordered to do is a slave by nature”, merely “an animated tool”, a living machine of the master246. The civilized man is one who is not urged to action by mere impulse, instead he has forethought, or prudence, and “is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant”, whereas the brute slave merely acts on impulse247. This is what is known as the natural theory of slavery. Those that were ‘natural’ slaves were mentally incompetent and determined by an emotional and ignoble animal nature. In this way it is unjust to have equal rights for all; some are by nature superior to others and rule others.
The perfection of man could only occur in a closed civil society; all members must be acquainted so to foster mutual trust, without which there is no freedom. In a similar vein,
Aristotle also thought that some societies are distinct because of their “call to perfection”248, to human excellence, which is the “core of happiness” and that not all societies can be perfect249.
244 Ibid, 126,127,133. 245 Ibid, 134. 246 Vogt, 34. 247 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), 15 24> Strauss, Natural Right and History, 132. 249 Ibid, 134. Ellis 105
CHAPTER NINE
Leo Strauss and Alasdair MacIntyre on Liberalism versus Conservatism
On the one hand, many conservatives are considered as conventionalists. Take for example the idea that the conservative value system includes people like Thrasymachus, the man who is famous for the doctrine ‘might makes right’ or power determines justice.
In other words there is no natural law other than that which is determined in the context by the mightiest and strongest who go on to determine the rules of justice. Weatherby argues that this type of political thought strives to maintain freedom and protection for those above the common man such that it is believed that “protecting the special positions and abilities of those who have risen above the common masses is necessary for the evolution of the human species and the grandeur of humanity” (survival of the fittest) .
Nietzsche is another example of this line of political reasoning - he argued that through the will to power certain people, the creative geniuses or the tragic philosophers, naturally rise to the top of the human pile and push the envelope of evolution. But this is vulgar conventionalism, a strain of thought distinct from philosophical conventionalism.
On the other hand, liberalism can be considered as conventionalist. What I mean by this is that they are anti-hierarchy, anti-authority, anti-foundationalist, and anti tradition. They consider that traditions and past historical hierarchies are meaningless to the point that these things should be replaced by a new and better social order and reality, one that is engineered, and involves the modification of man and nature by science and reason so to conform to this view. They want to construct an artificial life by ‘improving’ the world with rational theories. Liberal reason involves the imposition of categories on
250 Weatherby, 55. Ellis 106 the world i.e. ‘man is the measure of all things’ - another example of vulgar conventionalism. They cast human beings as being like god because they have the ability to reason, but there is indifference to God, to values, and to sanctions. They are loyal only to the future and reason, to progress, improvement, making things better, rather than history, tradition, the past, or ancestors. They are nominalists, believing that there is no natural order, no truth, and no universals - all that is in human society, including standards of right and wrong, and values, are creations of man.
Modem liberalism often “despises” the four Western traditions that gave birth to it and which it depends on. These are, according to MacIntyre: i) the Judeo Christian tradition which involves moral commandments and provide the moral foundations to social justice; ii) the intellectual speculation of the Greek mind; iii) the Roman Empire’s universalism and law, or the legal tradition and iv) the Middle Ages. Modem liberalism is a moral tradition stemming from theses traditions and arose in the Enlightenment and it appeals to universal tradition-independent norms. It wants to provide a political, economic, legal framework with rationally justifiable principles that are neutral, divorced from any historical tradition, which allow for peaceful tolerance of differing conceptions of the good to create a harmonious global order in which everyone gets along politely and tolerantly.
Modem liberalism promotes an open society. This means there is no certainty, beliefs, and values, no core mental sets for guidance, no standards for judgment, and no certain statements. There is no dogma, no authority, just a liberal democratic society. A value they do promote is tolerance. Yet, regardless of the fact that Liberalism severed itself from traditions and has a relativistic philosophy it, in actuality, is still tradition- bound and has a broad conception of the good. It promotes tolerance yet it is intolerant of rival conceptions of the good and thus is not neutral. It is intolerant of strong beliefs of cultural traditions, those with strong ontological foundations, because it wants people to be a homogenised mass. In this way the liberal value of tolerance is a form of conformity, exclusion, orthodoxy, intolerance, and dogma. For if a person is not tolerant of tolerance
(i.e. not liberal) then they are not tolerated by liberals. In this way tolerance reveals a contradiction and thus an inherent value system. Liberal toleration is a moral standard, a moral judgment.
Liberalism cannot invoke a conception of the good to defend state policies and actions because it defends neutrality of justification. It begs the question - what are the limits to being open? If we have no ability to judge we can have no standards to judge.
Sanctions including morals, values, rules, norms are important ‘oughts’ for the survival of society. It can’t function properly without boundaries. Modem liberalism may be associated with Greek freedom but is not the same as it lacks the moral, social, and political structure. It fails to understand the connection of human beings to their community; it fails to understand that human goods and ends have their origin in the social matrices. Liberalism casts individuals as having asocial individualism in politics and morality - there can be no political consensus and justice can have no rational ground. A rational and intelligible morality as well as the human good is impossible with modem liberalism.
In contrast to these vulgar conventionalists, philosophical conventionalism, stemming from the philosophical quest for the truth that arose in the 5th century BC in
Greece, is a striving to find absolutes, a noble quest so to sustain ones culture. Many Ellis 108 conservatives are accused of being dogmatic and absolutists in this way. Their belief in reason does not hold it as the only way to live, to understand reality. In supplement, they understand the limits to who we are and what we do. Many religious conservatives believe that we are inherently flawed such that evil is endemic, a view that stems from the doctrine of original sin. However, as discussed above, non-religious conservatives cast this ‘evil’ as the other side of what it means to be human - we are both creative and destructive in our tendencies and behaviours, a view also discussed further in depth below. Conservatives are counter to enlightenment values and ideals. They distrust the modernizing, progressive forces of mass democracy, industrialism, technology, urbanism, rationalisation, and secularism, arguing that they bring tyranny, isolation, rationalisation of spirit, moral crises, and ‘sterile disenchantment’251. They argue that the moral relativism that was produced by modem liberalism has left Western man without certainty and order, and there are threats of societal breakdown, alienation, and ‘cultural suicide’ (James Burnham).
Moral relativism is a radical individuality stemming from the Enlightenment emphasis on individualism, on the subjective and personal interpretation of morality and the denial oftelos. The work of this historical period revealed the situational context of all inquiry, which means that different traditions have different standards of rational justification. There can be no objective and impersonal standard of right and wrong as each tradition is revealed to have its own standards, its own logic, and therefore none is better than another. Disputes between these different ethical systems cannot be rationally terminated. In this way there is a lack ofrational moral argument in contemporary liberal society which advocates relativism i.e. we are stuck with perpetual assertion and counter
251 Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition. 268. Ellis 109 assertion in arguments. There is no rational method to secure agreement about true and false moral judgments. Moral argument is often about “expressive assertion”252. The adoption of a position, a stance on a particular moral matter is because of a “non-rational decision” and thus it is a “disquieting private arbitrariness”253. Its main tenet is that anything is permitted; there is no universal or sacred morality, which leads to the degradation of values. Moral human relationships in the social milieu involve people treating each other as an end in themselves, whereas non-moral human relationships i.e. in contemporary liberal society, involve people treating each other as a means to an end.
This latter form of social relationship involves individual wills with own attitudes and preferences meeting and using each other to achieve some satisfaction and in this way it is all about opportunities for enjoyment and the prevention of boredom. This type of social interaction also involves persuasion rather than normative rationality, which is a
“manipulative mode of moral instrumentalism”254.
In response to the metaphysical void left by the ‘death of god’ produced by science and by the failure of secularism to provide any viable objective moral standards modem liberalism established man as being emotivist. The doctrine of emotivism is as follows: evaluative or moral judgments “arenothing but expressions of preference, experience of attitude of feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” .
It denies the rational justification of objective moral standards yet it utters universal principles, but they are apparently only based on preferences “embodied in our
252 MacIntyre, 10 253 Ibid, 8. 254 Ibid, 23. 255 Ibid, 11. Ellis 110 culture”256. Liberal emotivists are historicists. Historicists are sceptical towards metanarratives, towards grand theories because these dismiss the chaos and disorder of the universe and ignore the heterogeneity and variety of human existence. They also hold the belief that these narratives are created and reinforced by power structures, such as the church, and so are untrustworthy. In general they are an unacceptable view of historical development regarding progress towards a specific universal goal. They argued that the promotion of universal principles and norms alienates men. What was valuable was the local and temporal; localised narratives, local contexts and specifics. Yet they retained and defended the belief that there were immutable laws in history - that the natural law of progress could explain the historical evolution of humanity.
Another group that reacted to the establishment of universal principles and norms were the Revolutionaries, who held that the natural was what was individual, and the unnatural was what was conventional and uniform. The latter to them was in opposition to the right of every man to pursue his own individual happiness; it was “impossible to individualise rights in full accordance with the natural diversity of individuals”. The only solution was historical rights of the “local and temporal variety”257. These two types of historicism denied the transcendence towards a best political regime, and denied the existence of universal norms. It was a battle between those that saw in history particular, historical, and concrete principles and those that abstracted universal principles.
Historicism views all human thought as being based on unpredictable contextual affairs,
256 Ibid, 21. 257 Ibid, 14. Ellis 111 on “fickle and dark fate”258. It is relativistic. Nothing is understood outside the historical context.
For liberal, emotivist, historicists that which is termed right is a utilitarian evaluation and consequentialist - what produces die most good in contrast to alternatives in right action. But goodness is not an intuition and right action is not just about utility according to MacIntyre. He argues that it claims it is a theory of use but it is actually a theory of meaning. He claims that analytic moral philosophy is against emotivism as it considers moral reasoning as a reality and that moral judgments are linked logically259.
Without standards of justice, or notions of natural right, secularism and emotivism have failed to fill the void left by the death of god and man. Secular morality was deemed a failed project according to Nietzsche as a lack of context created by science; rationalism creates a moral vacuum that aches to be filled, a dangerous situation, which can be occupied by totalitarian ideologies and other destructive creations of humankind.
Nietzsche, according to MacIntyre, thought that the “tenets of morality need to be explained in terms of a set of rationalisations which conceal the fundamentally non- rational phenomena of the will”260. Objectivity is actually “expressions of subjective will”261. In other words, the noble lie conceals the will to power, and both need to be exposed for what they are.
Nietzsche thought that objective moral judgments are a “mask worn by the will to power of those too weak and slavish to assert themselves with archaic and aristocratic
251 Ibid, 19. 2,9 A criticism against those who criticise emotivism is that emotivism can be seen as a bridge between the is-ought distinction as it is an emotion, a feeling, which is not arbitrary, nor purely rational, but is a moral capacity, a moral sentiment. 260 MacIntyre, 111. 261 Ibid, 107. Ellis 112 grandeur”262. There can be no real objectivity as we are subjects experiencing the world and we can not get outside of ourselves, or get away from our subjective interpretations of things. Nietzsche thought that the “Aristotelian account of ethics and politics would have to rank... with all those degenerative disguises of the will to power which follow from the false turning taken by Socrates”263. To Nietzsche the Socratic dialectic had produced decadence and Socrates had focused on this method of inquiry as an excuse that hid his weak and feeble nature which prevented him from participating in the aristocratic war-like culture of the Greeks. In this sense Socrates wanted to overturn the existing structures because of his flawed and inferior persona. He took the war-like nature into the psyche and created a battle-ground in the mind, focusing the dual nature of man into the purely Apollonian aspect of human beings. In this way, Nietzsche was against modem morality and wanted to construct a new morality, to self-create standards of good, which, according to MacIntyre, were based on metaphor rather than reason.
When values are deemed subjective, based on choice, or self-creation and apart from the community, according to MacIntyre there is “conflict between rival values
[which] cannot be rationally settled”264. There can be no rational justification of one opinion over another. When there is no overarching framework for the comparison of concepts it results in interminable disputes. But, argues MacIntyre in critique of liberal emotivism, people are means not ends and moral judgments must attain objectivity and impersonality. He argues that without a shared conception of the good (without a shared telos) or an overarching framework there can be no coherent form of political community and no proper politics.
262 Ibid, 21. 263 Ibid, 110. 264 Ibid, 25. Ellis 113
Instead of history being what the historicist makes of it, history “seems rather to prove that all human thought.. .is concerned with the same fundamental themes of the same fundamental problems” - this means that “there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles”. Human thought is capable “of grasping something trans-historical”. Historicism has a
“transhistorical character”, the same as natural right doctrines. If all human thought is temporary then historicism is temporary, but if historicism is true then it is a universal truth. Historicism claims the absolutism of relative truth. This line of reasoning makes historicism “self-contradictory or absurd”265.
The doctrine of classical natural right (the Socratic goal) was altered by a focus on
Biblical faith (the best regime came to be seen as the city of god), and egalitarian natural right. A universal standard to judge ideals of all societies is natural right - to judge ideals and distinguish, and solve, a hierarchy of needs. The historical approach refutes the universalism of natural right by arguing there is no ‘uniformity’ and no ‘immutable’ principles of justice; instead there are “an indefinite variety of notions of right or justice”.
But Strauss argues that just because there are different notions of right and wrong it does not refute natural right, rather it stimulates the “incentive for the quest for natural right”266. In defence of natural right, Strauss argues that the lack of agreement about the principles of right, the various cultural norms and rules and forms of justice created by convention, do not prove that natural right does not exist. The reason he gives for the variety and changeable conventional notions of right and justice actually stem from “a corruption of human nature in those who ignore the true principles”. If this is so then
Strauss, 23-25. 266 Ibid, 9,10. Ellis 114 maybe only some societies or some members of a society can be “regarded as the only normal human beings in existence”. Different principles of justice lead to contradictions between different societies and these differences are based on an “insufficient grasp of natural right”267.
The rejection of natural right and the creation of the social sciences have had disastrous consequences. Social science is an instrumental science of liberalism. The same can be said of philosophy. Philosophy had been “the humanizing quest for the eternal order”, but in the 17th century that changed and it became a “weapon” and an
“instrument” for politics268. Philosophy in the first sense of the term searched for absolutes and was deemed by historicists as impossible because of their view that there are no ‘natural horizons’. It is caves (opinions, subjectivity, and relativity) all the way.
Socratic natural right is in opposition to relativism and unfettered individualism (liberal goal). According to MacIntyre justifying natural rights is problematic because natural law addresses the selfish interests of people and competitions between them. This is the ‘is- ought’ problem. There are also issues (naturalistic fallacy) with justifying human nature such as the ‘might makes right’ doctrine. Human nature can be defined as anthropocentric. Strauss argues that natural right ought to be separated from the doctrine of Thrasymachus. In this way, this is a distinction between vulgar and philosophical conventionalism. The argument is that natural right can be discerned by reason; the eternal forms of Plato can be understood by the wise, the philosopher kings.
267 Ibid, 98,99,100. And, in some ways, we can think here about what Aristotle and others have said about the natural inequalities of menand societies: that some are capable of perfection and others are not. Discussed further below. 261 Ibid, 34. Ellis 115
In order to solve the problem of moral relativism and the loss of rational standards associated with liberal progressivism, there is a necessity to emphasise the need of structure, paradigms, frameworks, boundaries, so to not get lost in the multi-dimensional dynamic of life and human life. We need to differentiate and categorise to make sense of the world and to have order and stability. Abstract formulas and theorising are the development of guidelines so to help deliberation about practical action. Human life, to
MacIntyre, is both predictable and unpredictable. The former is required for long-term projects, social structures and institutions and such, and also for a sense of meaning and purpose. Unpredictability is associated with fragility, vulnerability, and the material environment and these factors affect the outcome of long-term goals and plans.
Unpredictability is something that progress wants to “overcome in some progressive future”269. This is because there is a natural want for certainty, explanation, absolute understanding, and to achieve a state of existence impervious to the oscillations of history, i.e. the rise and decline of civilizations and societies, and nature i.e. natural disasters, and our death. There is a want to achieve a certain type of infinite, eternal, immortal state of existence so to overcome the uncertain, painful, and fearful things of human life and life in general. There is nothing wrong with these ideals, yet they cannot in their entirety be attained, especially with the uncertain situations created by liberal emotivist historicism. Strauss suggests that we need to either restore “the Platonic notion of the noble delusion” or deny theory proper and conceive thought to be “subservient to or dependent on, life or fate”270.1 think MacIntyre’s suggestion is more practical. His solution is to go back to Aristotle.
269 MacIntyre, 98. 270 Strauss, 26. Ellis 116
MacIntyre advocates ethical pluralism arguing that there is some truth to each of the common ethical theories, and that this type of ethics is against both absolutism and relativism. Ethical pluralism does not support relativism as a cultural system of ethics because the latter can not make judgments of others because of its value of tolerance and does not support absolutism because it doesn’t address the diversity of values. To
MacIntyre, virtue needs to be restored to solve radical moral disagreement. Virtues are central to a rational framework of morality. Accepting communal and historically determined standards initiates the individual into forms of life in which human judgments are objective and impersonal, and thus transcendent of emotivism. Morality (teleology and virtues) is needed for objectivity and impersonality. Aristotelian natural-end ethics enable human beings to escape opinions. By social interaction and dialogue with others, understanding is expanded. The range of rational deliberation with others, and the common mind or good, could be rationally established. In ethics, the method of transition between is and ought is viatelos i.e. pursuit of excellence. To Aristotle, moral rules account for the true end of human nature(telos) or what man is and what he ought if he had the chance to fulfill his potential. In order to restore morality Aristoteliantelos must be reintroduced, and the emotivist self must be rejected by regarding the person as defined by social, cultural, and historic circumstances. Ellis 117
CHAPTER TEN
Conflict
“Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs throughout history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party”271.
“In biological as in cultural evolution, breathtaking creations come at a horrible cost”272.
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you wont find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no desip, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference273
A final problem with progress is its Stoic, or Christian, or Kantian, or secular vision of
‘perpetual peace’ and global unity. Conflict is an ever-present hindrance to the complete union of a global civilization. As Samuel Huntington has said, as well as many others, change is inevitable but progress is not. Harmony is an illusion. There are continuing ethnic conflicts, divisions of us and them, in and out groups, creations of sub-cultural groups, polarities of orient and Occident, north and south, center and periphery. There are economic class divisions: the rich, modem, and developed, versus the poor, traditional, and undeveloped. There are cultural divisions from differing values, ways of life, languages, and continuing conflicts amongst the liberated. The multiplicity of other cultures persists such that we can still understand the split between the West and the rest.
271 Russell, 16. 272 Robert Wright, NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), 264. 273 Richard Dawkins, “God's Utility Function.” Scientific American. 273, (November 1995): 85. Ellis 118
A common view today is of historical cycles such as found in social cycle theory, which started out in the Greek age as classical social theory or developmentalism. Progress is not a law. But what may be considered as a law is the law of conservation, which holds that progress is not simple and continuous, instead, there is simultaneously advance in some areas and retrogression and deterioration in others. Energy can not be created or destroyed, merely transformed. In this way, what we consider as progress is an illusion, for its only change. It can be change for the better, or for the worse but there is no assured and indefinite progressive ascension to some golden age in the future.
There may have been progress in knowledge, an accumulation of facts, theories, understandings, which has spurred cultural evolution and made our material lives more comfortable. When we look at human beings though, we have not changed for thousands of years. Our nature remains basically the same - we share the same gene set of primitive hunter-gatherers. Our biological predispositions are masked, modified, sublimated, tweaked by the social environment, by contextual learning and experiences, - we adapt - but this does not mean that our biological substratum is fundamentally altered such that we are nothing but culturally determined, or a blank slate at birth. Human nature is an ongoing, or what some people would call ‘timeless’ fact and issue. Man has not necessarily progressedin himself as a species since the dawn of civilization, but our material world has from our collection and application of knowledge to the environment, both social and natural. Knowledge may make us more aware of ourselves, our prejudices, our behaviours, and such, and change our behaviour ‘appropriately’ but it still does not alter the way we originally think - we still need to learn this knowledge from outside of ourselves so to change ourselves within. And this inner change is not DNA Ellis 119 altering, and does not get passed on to our children, like Aristotle thought via pangenesis, or via the gemmules of Darwin. Each individual that is bom starts anew. Each is unique in genetic composition. And each life has its own brand of experiences that shape and form the development of this composition into the individual that is come to be known and recognised by others. But who knows? Nietzsche thought he did with his idea of the ubermensch, a being that was an evolutionary developed form of man that occurred through the continuous competition of geniuses in a republic. Maybe the progress in knowledge and its resultant cultural evolution will eventually have an effect on our biology such that we evolve into a higher species and transcend the human condition.
We deal differently, in each ‘age’, with the same basic timeless human issues, take for example our nature, our vices, our passions, our propensity for violence, disagreements, lust, ignorance, lying, misunderstanding, greed, and selfishness, and also things like rights, defence, food, sex, reproduction, waste management, power and elitism, natural inequalities, justice, government, discontent, health, labour, leisure, and so on. These issues have stayed with us, indeed are embedded in the very fabric of global human relations today in spite of progress, since at least written history, if not before, and they are not likely to disappear any time soon, thus perpetuating, in each age, the quest to find efficient, sustainable, and inventive ways of dealing with them.
What Nisbet has identified as being a uniform cause of progress or development, conflict, is a timeless issue also. In the following pages I will explore and discuss in depth the notion of conflict and how it relates necessarily to development. Since at least ancient times (and still prevalent today) people have had to have the means to live with conflict.
To aggressively protect ones kin, ones interests, to maintain ones independence from the Ellis 120 threat of extermination and an ‘others’ oppression, and to also exert dominance over others, has been an extremely important historical aspect of human groups and their relations to one another in assurance of survival.
In his genealogical approach to historical analysis Nietzsche examined some of the characteristic features of ancient Greek life, such as conflict, competition, conquest for dominance, cruelty in victory - triumph, and the exaltation of the combats of the
Homeric world. He argued that these were at the root of western self-reflection and self- criticism, of political debate and philosophy, of social and discursive thinking, which developed proper in the 5th century Greek world. The origin of society, for Nietzsche, was a site of brutal struggle and violence. According to Timothy Wilson, Thein Birth o f
Tragedy Nietzsche writes about the culture of the Greeks as having a dual character of existence defined by perpetual strife. This conflict stemmed from a primordial struggle defined as Dionysian, a force of nature that divides and binds beings into relations of tension; the whole is a tense engagement of opposites . In this way Being is “radically heterogeneous”, it is strife275. This original struggle is the “locus for a series of structural oppositions”, characterised by two types of strife oreris, destructive/bad and constructive/good discord276. The first type oferis is linked to the Dionysian impulse, which is a cosmic agonism that permeates and defines all things, and separated Being into beings “through differentiation”277. Ontological strife is Dionysian at its core, terrifying and chaotic. The Dionysianeris is a natural impulse towards bloody and
274 Dionysius was known as a “disreputable god of wine and drunkenness”, representing the passions and base impulses of man (Russell, 14). 275 Timothy H. Wilson, “Nietzsche’s Early Political Thinking: ‘Homer on Competition,”’ Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 9, (2005): 198. 276 Ibid, 186. 277 Ibid, 195. Ellis 121 wicked war and feuding between individuals and states and this primordial struggle defines the pre-civil state of human nature and life itself.
What Nietzsche revealed was that agonism, the Greek pattern of conflict and warfare, stemmed from the mythological accounts of pre-Homeric combat scenes such as from the Iliad. Cultural practices with tribal origins, such as “symbolic exchange, gift giving, friendship pacts, and ritualised competition”278 and the pre-Homeric myths of
Homer reveal a state of existence which was a “brooding atmosphere”, a place where
“combat is salvation” and “the cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life’s jubilation”279.
Bronze Age Greece (1600BC) is the origin of Greece, but Classical Greece is the origin of Western civilization. Bronze Age Greece was not rational, scientific, or democratic as
Classical Greece came to be. The Bronze Age is associated with Mycenaean civilisation which commanded local trade and information routes, had far-reaching international connections and “engaged rather seriously in overseas trade”280. The Mycenaean rulers of
Greece were poetically advocated by Homer around 750 BC in theIliad. The main characters in this work reveal that the aristocrats were warriors who revered the value arete, excellence in warfare. In support of this work, the Shaft Graves of Mycenae discovered by Heinrich Schliemann reveal that these early Greeks were “war like lords” and “charioteers” in warfare and wealthy rulers of a large estate that may have extended
“beyond the Argolid”281. In 1200BC this civilization was destroyed by an invasion by the
271 Barry Sandywell on “The Agonistic Ethic and the Spirit of Inquiry: On the Greek Origins of Theorizing” in Martin Kusch’s (Ed.), The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 99. 279 Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., The Portable Nietzsche. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 34. 280 Robert Drews, The Comine of the Greeks: Indo European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 184. 281 Ibid, 170. Ellis 122
Dorian’s282 and it resulted in what is known as the Dark Age, a period of insignificance compared to the Mycenaean’s. Nemo, in his bookWhat is the West, describes this period as an era of transition towards the emergence of the Greek city in the 8th century BC.
In Homer’s Contest (1872) Nietzsche portrays ancient Greek society as arising and separating itself from the Dionysian struggle of death and destruction, from “the dark horrors of its past by developing a system of laws”283. Nemo suggests that it involved an emergence of the public assembly or Agora, the creation of the art of discourse and rational argument formalised by logic, dialectics, and rhetoric, the emergence of proper politics, and a change in status and sacred functions of aristocratic warriors. Nietzsche argues that the “natural impulse to struggle” was “redirected” inwardly such that the barbaric instinct was cultivated in such a way that it promoted a cultural and political identity. This channelling of theagonal energy of the barbaric instinct inwardly promoted new forms of desire and motivation; the Greeks “struggle[d] amongst themselves in ways that sustained and even reinforced the bonds of the cultural unit”284. The Dionysian conflict was transformed into an Apollonian strife, which is a political form of tension that develops social institutions and communities and requires competitive discord between the passionate ambitions and self-interests of individuals. Agonism stems from the wordagon, which means “bringing together”285. Nietzsche’s good or constructiveeris is this ‘bringing together’ into a community. It is the “jealousy, hatred, and envy” of men
2,2 According to experts on the origins of Greece, such as Drews, there were waves of invasions of Greece from the same Indo-European gene pool i.e. the Myceneaens and the Dorians. See Gimbuta’s Kurgan hypothesis and caskey’s two wave hypothesis in Drews’ The Coming of the Greeks. Dale Wilkerson, Nietzsche and the Greeks. (London; New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006), 72. 284 Ibid, 76. 285 Wilson, 206. Ellis 123 that “spurs men to activity... [to] fights which are contests”2*6. The annihilating
Dionysian strife becomes channelled into “socially productive forms”; it becomes institutionalised as Apollonian competition, as constructive strife in Greek society287.
Sandywell, following a Nietzschean style of genealogical analysis, argued that the same belligerent attitude that divided Greeks from non-Greeks came to be processed and contained within civilized measures of the polis, “redefined as the basis of civic rather than tribal or familial identity”, and associated with philosophical debate, free speech, and scepticism288. Greek warfare became ritualised and aestheticized; “agonistic norms operated as an organising matrix” formalising the zero-sum paradigm of agonism throughout social, cultural, and political practices in 7th century BC Ionia289. For example, in the 7th century BC, the Pan-Hellenic (Olympic) Games were a major influence in the development and generalisation of the “zero-sum model of victory or defeat” throughout the Aegean290. Ancient conflict was transformed into an ‘agonistic ethic’ that pervaded all of life, splitting everything into a dualistic system of competition and a striving for excellence, an impulse to be the dominant in any given arena of human affairs, including war, politics and philosophy, triggered eris,by the good envy.
Competition ultimately served the community as it was understood as a vital aspect for the growth of ancient culture and knowledge. It was capped and tempered by laws to prevent the system from collapsing due to human tendencies towards greed and pride.
As Keith Ansell-Pearson aptly says, “it is the contest(agon) (in politics, in the arts, in sport, and in festival) which serves to sublimate and channel the fearful and
2.6 Kaufmann, 35. 2.7 Wilson, 206. 282 Sandywell, 111. 289 Ibid, 94. 290 Ibid, 104. Ellis 124 aggressive impulses of human nature, ensuring that the individual drives promote the
‘welfare of the whole, of the civic society’. It was a shift from “the conflict of blood” to what Wilson calls “the conflict of accounts” or arguments regarding what is just and good in the court, theatre, and assembly291.
Every Athenian ‘was to cultivate [his] ego in contest, so that it should be of the highest service to Athens and should do the least harm”292. In this way, these ancient
Greeks transformed barbaric struggle while affirming the necessity of struggle and its meaning. The Greeks recognised and acknowledged conflict and cruelty. Rather than containing and repressing it, they “considered it an earnest necessity to let their hatred flow forth fully”293. Yet they still had polar extremes in what they considered as good from evil conflict, or ‘eris ’. Evil eris was seen in hostile fights to the death while good eris was see in envy and hatred that drove men into hostile competitions with one another. The latter form oferis, competition, involved no one person being the best, for to be the best would constitute “the rule of one”, which presents dangers of destruction and disgrace through acts of hubris, spurred on by the envy of the gods294. Ostracism of the best enabled the flow of the “contest of powers” to continue, for it stimulated competition and excellence and provided a measure of security against tyrannical forms of power295. Competition was considered to be vital for the well-being and preservation of the state - not just because talents were developed through antagonisms, or because selfish ambition actually increased the reputation of the city-state, but because without it
291 Wilson, 206. 292 Wilkerson, 76, citing Keith Ansell-Pearson from An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist. (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 76-77. 293 Kaufman, 33. 294 Ibid, 37. 293 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, and trans. Carol Diethe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 191-192. Ellis 125 the form of evil eris would arise, hatred and nihilism would flourish, and man would deteriorate back into the pre-Homeric state of nature.
Sandywell argues that the militaristic and athletic way of life had become adopted into all ways of life - an elevation of the“ethos of struggle and competitive conflict into one of its supreme values”, and it drove the Greek competitor, especially with masculine aristocratic pride and ambition, to “pursue the best in war, politics, and culture”, to be the most excellent, so to achieve glory, social status, and power, in all arenas of life296. The critical intellectual stance of the pre-Socratics, those who criticised the “anthropomorphic stories” pertaining to the gods, who were skeptical of the received tradition, and critical of the pan-Hellenic games, had the competitive character of the agonistic spirit297. These thinkers, with the passion and pride of the warriors in Homers epics, expressed their excellence within the intellectual and socio-political domain of discourse and dialectical argumentation, in verbal battles rather than physical contests. Free speech was one of the main features of the development of critical inquiry, or philosophy. In some ways though it is Socrates that can be considered as the main individual that channelled the war-like dialectic, the agonism into an agonistic ethic for he channelled it in to the mind, into philosophical argument, or the Socratic dialectic and focused on the quest for the good life. The agonal Dionysian instinct was internalised, which led to intellectual contest, the seeking out of weaknesses in opponents’ arguments and works, and became a creative force. Positing an idea and the critique of it is the pitting of one against the other to find the strongest argument, one that can withstand refutes and critiques. Dualism in intellectual debate is reason itself. This is a crucial feature of human life, the
296 Sandywell, 96,101. 297 Ibid, 105. conversational, dialogical, narrative character of man. Human language of dialogical expression is enriching. The progress of knowledge requires a dialectical force, an intelligent and reasonable dialogue.
Verbal suasion, convincing others to ones views, using reason to argue for ones position, or sophistry and rhetoric, was “the paramount medium of civic discourse” for the ancient Greeks and closely related to power and “politicalarete . So was the pursuit of ‘universal truth’, transcendental philosophy. These were all related through their expression: the intellectual combat, the agonism of verbal debate and clash of ideation, the dialectical denial, the superimposition of one interpretation over another, they were all struggles to attain knowledge, truth, power, and glory. In sum, to have one’s ego recognised and acknowledged. The agon was a place where verbal battles of public debate, oration, and rhetoric were performed. It was a space that saw “the skills and resourcefulness of each participant [were] opposed and tested”299. The public assembly was like a think tank that deliberated on public organisation and made decisions by persuasive reasoning without violence and aggression. The citizen state did not want to return to disorder and belligerence, to an aristocratic leadership or divine rule. They knew that human beings had tendencies towards aggressive, unruly, irresponsible, and egotistical behaviours and so what was demanded of the Greek citizens for a socially cohesive state of affairs was the responsible culling of behaviour. In the 5th century, the
Greek city state which emerged in conjunction with the first scientist-philosophers (such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) and the creation of the Milesian school, relied on a specific value, what is known assophrosyne, moderation The Milesians conceived that the natural world obeyed “natural, anonymous, universal, and necessary laws” called
Nomos which is why “the earth, the oceans, and the stars” kept their orderly place300. In this way, sophrosyne was considered to be a natural law of man. By moderating the passions, controlling impulses, appetites, and extreme or excessive behaviours by the use of civic reason, the ancient Greeks achieved a calmness that enabled them to create, for the first time, a powerful and intellectual civilization.
They exhibited a tense balance, or what Dale Wilkerson calls a “glorious mixture” 1A. between their Apollonian and Dionysian impulses . The Dionysian-Apollonian dualism of nature can be understood in terms of what are the ‘finest’ and the most ‘terrible’ aspects of human practices and humanity itself. Nietzsche, inHomer on Competition uses similes of a carnivorous predatory animal, the tiger, and five “real and artistic” examples to emphasise the darker, violent, destructive and cruel character of human nature. In this way, Wilson explains that Nietzsche revealed a “horrible truth” about the beginnings of
Western civilization, the existence of primal violence that shaped ancient Greek cultural development. It was a truth that was apparently “veiled out of necessity during the Greek pinnacle of cultural creativity”302. Art is the form that nature takes when defined in terms of conflict and when this conflictual nature produces a different product via the
“channelling” of this “destructive and violent strife” into “a creative outlet”. This channelling can be understood as a concealment of a truth, the “terrifying element to our existence”, by “aesthetic deception”; the tragic nature of a meaningless and horrible
300 Phileppe Nemo, What is the West?, trans. by Kenneth Casler, (Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 13. 301 Wilkerson, 67. 302 Wilson, 184. Ellis 128 existence is transcended by Art303. Nietzsche refers to two types of artistic deception, that of the “children of the night”, or the Dionysian impulse of “natural, limitless and aimless violent strife”, and that of the “lighter, gentler and warmer” Apollonian impulse which veils the first304. The union of these two artistic deceptions is what Wilson calls the
“creative affirmation” that characterised the Greeks of the tragic age. This tragic culture was authentic precisely because the Greek genius creatively affirmed life and acknowledged and justified the Dionysian impulse. The tragic culture was an experience that reshaped the natural chaos by “veiling and limiting” it; nature itself channelled strife into social institutions and “limited competition”305. Without this balance the human being can become thoroughly Dionysian; man can become “pre-Homeric” and return to a
savage state, “cruel”, “godless”, and “evil”306.
Greek warfare had the zero-sum logic of friend-enemy, with or against me, and polarised the world into this binary opposition so that a “biopolitical model of the belligerent excellence of the Hellenic form of life” developed that saw non-Greek peoples
as the barbaric enemy307. They distinguished themselves from those they deemed
barbarians, mostly every other state or society. It is important to note here that during the
height of the Greek age Athens became a center of a slave economy. The transition from the victors of battle killing all men and enslaving the women and children to one in which
the men, women, and children were all enslaved, sold or used by the victors to carry out
manual labour, housework, entertainment and such is noteworthy. In conjunction to the
Dionysian impulse becoming sublimated or transformed into gooderis and cultural
303 Ibid, 186. 304 Ibid, 192. 303 Ibid, 193. 306 Kauftnann. 39. 307 Sandywell, 99. Ellis 129 development including sports, politics, poetry, drama, and philosophy, how booty was treated by the victorious in war is a significant occurrence at this time. A mass of slaves allowed the citizens of Greece time to pursue higher interests; they had the free time, away from manual labour, to labour in their curiosities, i.e. philosophy, and the arts and sciences. In this way, the agonistic ethic, or the channelling of the warrior ethic into institutionalised social good is inseparable from the changing tactics of warfare, the transition of killing to enslaving men. Culture, in the sense of Greek culture, the roots of
Western civilization, can be said to possibly not have occurred if this slight increase in the humane treatment of human war-booty did not take place. Without slavery, or a mass of working poor, there can be no cultural development. The products of high culture depend on the few who have time on their hands to develop these aspects; it depends on those that have the freedom to pursue these interests and have mastery over others.
Slavery or a mass of working poor can be understood as necessary for leisure and the development of arts and sciences, and thus progress in the social realm, including freedom for all and the development of human rights and law - no justice without injustice308.
By being transformed into creative energy theagonal instinct nourished Hellenic culture with prosperity. This role of struggle in Greek history morphed from a “struggle- unto-death” in pre-Homeric times to a “struggle to become great” during Homer’s era
30* See Bruce Thornton, Greek Wavs: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man. Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks: an Introduction to their Life and Thought (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1965), Andrf Bonnard, Greek Civilization: From the Iliad to the Parthenon. Vol. I, trans. A. Lytton Sells, (Norwich: Jarrold & Sons Ltd, 1959), Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Volume I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1991), and Jacob Burckhardt, History of Greek Culture, trans. Palmer Hilty, (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963). Ellis 130 and the Greek age of tragedy309. In this way the Dionysian destructive e ra produced the inspiration for productivity, its sublimation into “feelings of envy, ambition, and
‘competition’”, into Apollonianeris, resulted in social beneficence and prosperity that contributes to the overall health of the state and the human species310. Rather than being shrouded with a destructive emphasis, strife is illustrated as a governing force that constructively shapes the formation of culture and state and cultivates the creative genius.
For Nietzsche the creative genius was the pinnacle of humanity, and the means by which the human species evolved. The veiling manoeuvre that conceals the “horrible truth” behind Greek culture is, according to Wilson’s interpretation of Nietzsche, “proper to human nature and enables its highest achievements”311. The political arrangement of society is a positive fiction, a “noble lie” which holds that the community is one; it is a necessary concealment of the horrifying blood-thirsty Dionysian forces behind the origins of Greek society312. The reason why this concealing is a positive and noble act, is that it hides the truth on behalf of the “common good of the political community” and thus
“furthers natures end” i.e. the development of the creative genius313. In this way, art and culture are “deceptions” created by nature so that it may “overcome itself’314. Cultural
309 Wilkerson, 79. 310 Ibid, 79. 3,1 Wilson, 186. See James C. Scott on euphemisms, the concealment of an underlying meaning in words, language, and action i.e. power relations discourse, dominant-submissive relations, master-slave, denotative and connotative meanings of discourse and practice in his “Prestige as the Public Discourse of Domination,” Cultural Critique: Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige, no. 12, (spring 1989). 312 Wilson, 200. 3.3 Ibid, 200. 3.4 Ibid, 188. Nietzsche sees man as being self-interested and experiencing limitless strife, and, at the same time, he sees human nature as tending towards standards of behaviour, limits created by competition itself. Nietzsche is between the Sophistic and the Socratic distinctionphysis of andnomos in the sense that he sees that nomos is relative to the particular conditions of the moment yet is grounded in nature,physis, in which is our foundation. He thought that culture stems from nature, from our nature and that cultural rules, norms, and standards ought to be aligned to nature’s end, which is the “production of genius” and the “overcoming of our terrifying, Dionysian existence” (Wilson, 222). Nietzsche held that the distinction Ellis 131 institutions are grounded in the natural and are a way for nature to express and fulfill itself. Not all cultures are adequate to do this job; some cultures are shaped in “equal measure” by the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses and are thus more in tune with nature’s ends i.e. “the production of the creative individual or genius”315.
The creative genius then uses the Apollonian impulse as a veil to hide the terrifying Dionysian nature. Those individuals that were in the balance between
Dionysian and Apollonian impulses, i.e. the tragic-philosopher, understood that the limits of a particular society were arbitrary and they placed their own boundaries around the
Dionysian core. The artist-philosopher as ‘creative genius’ can go beyond a particular polis, the “arbitrary nature of the standards” a political society holds onto and its limited competitions316. Creative geniuses do not become ostracised and lose membership in a community like regular citizens engaged in regulated competitions, instead they come together and form their own community, a community of creative minds, a ‘republic of geniuses’. Unlike those that become ostracised and collapse under hubris such as
Miltiades who incited the envy of the gods, creative geniuses in the tragic age discovered
“another level of competition” without fighting with the gods317. They remained human; they preserved their humanity by maintaining a balance between their Apollonian and
Dionysian impulses and incited upon themselves neither evil below nor evil above but cohesion with other great individuals. Knowledge is not, according to Wilson’s account of Nietzsche, the object of the genius philosopher or poet, but the point is the
betweenphysis andnomos, and between Socratic and Sophistic conceptions of human nature and humanity, “is to be embraced as a locus of questioning and dialogue” (Wilson, 180). It is a dialectical dynamic. 315 Ibid, 189. 316 Ibid, 214. This is similar to the doctrine of Thrasymachus: might is what is just and right 317 Ibid, 215. Ellis 132
“advancement of nature, the advancement of life through its highest specimens”318. The creative genius is the means by which human society evolves.
Let us now delve into this agonistic nature as acknowledged (or did it influence them?) by many others in history and its authority on development and the theory of progress. The Dionysian-Apollonian aspect of human nature has been deemed through the use of other terms throughout Western historical thought. Nisbet had argued that Saint
Augustine was the first to present this dual nature of man in his conflict of two cities, the
“dramatization of the uniform conflict in human nature present since the Fall” . He thought that this was the first archetype of conflict “the actuating force of history” that has pervaded Western thought. But, as we can see from the above discussion, Saint
Augustine was not the first. The Greek conflict between gods and goddesses, and between gods and men, the notions of Dionysian and Apollonian nature, of reason and passions, the ancient mythological figures of Pandora and Prometheus, and even the
Platonic notions of the eternal realm of the Forms in distinction to the realm of appearances show that there has been an understanding about the dual nature of man and nature for a very long time prior to Augustine. Even still, Nisbet argues about the oldness of the comparative method. He claims that this method has historical and ethnocentric foundations which are rooted in the ancient Greek and Roman “interest in origins and cultural stages”320. It did become more systematic in the 19th century and was used to support the theory of progress but it stemmed from the ancient Greek idea ofphysis.
Explanations of growth required collections of facts and distinctions, and the Greeks distinguished themselves from others by calling themselves civilized while many others
3,8 Ibid, 126. 319 Nisbet, Social Change and History, 185. 320 Ibid, 189. Ellis 133 were termed barbarians and savages. But it was more than just a “comparison of types in terms of overt attributes”. It was a comparison “within a presumed order o f growth and development” according to thephysis contained within a thing; it was a “comparative- developmental perspective”321. This line of comparative reasoning has continued to pervade Western thought in many forms through Thucydides, Aristotle, to Hobbes,
Locke, Rousseau, Condorcet, Smith, Ferguson and many others up until today’s theory of social evolution. This is dialectical reasoning that stems from the channelling of the aristocratic militaristic spirit of the ancient Greeks.
Before I discuss the people in Western history, other than Nietzsche, who deemed conflict as a necessary mechanism of progress, I will discuss the ethnocentric foundations of the comparative method and the associated phenomena of othering. Othering, distinctions, inequality, scapegoating, threats, and enemies, can be seen as necessary to the well-being of individuals and societies. This is a surprising fact in our liberal tolerant society. A healthy society is one that can be considered as a ‘closed’ versus an open system. A closed system is necessary to foster mutual trust, share a telos, a common understanding, and still allow for debate and disagreement - in the polis - a social, political, rational arena. The Club of Rome is a global think that was founded in April
1968. It published a book called The First Global Revolution (1993) in which it states “It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose....The common enemy of humanity is man....democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead” and also “[bjecause of the sudden absence of traditional
321 Ibid, 192/193. Ellis 134 enemies, ‘new enemies must be identified’”322. This recognition of the historical need of human beings for an ‘enemy’ and the acknowledgment that there has been a major shift, or a widening of our moral circle to include strangers, animals, and even the Earth, so to retain this humanity and focus on outside ‘threats’ is heartening. This movement from an archaic form of morality to an expanded version, can be understood as either a hypertrophic modification323 as held by Wilson, or the expansion of the moral circle as held by Peter Singer and Steven Pinker, and is related to the idea of moral progress. What the Club of Rome suggested was the following: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself’324. However, I don’t think we human beings can shift absolutely an ancient evolutionary mechanism of othering other human beings to othering non-human things so easily. What a simplification of the human condition! And it is a side-stepping of the real issue of progressive development and the darker sides of its reality.
A closed society requires exclusion, membership, hierarchy, and inequality.
Ethnocentrism and othering stem from grouping - people are bonded together by mutually reinforcing and overlapping ties of kinship, social cooperation, and cultural distinctiveness. Social Identity Theory holds the idea that the qualitative and quantitative classification of people into social categories, into membership and non-membership is
322 Alexander King & Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution: A Report bv the Council of the Club of Rome. (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1993), 70. 323 Wilson explains hypertrophy as “the extreme growth of pre-existing structures” in On Human Nature. 89. 324 Ibid, 115 Ellis 135 associated with social affiliation, gender, age, race and ethnicity, class, regions, religion, education, and self-presentation. There is favouritism for in-group members which are the bonds of cohesion not found with out-group members. It is a cognitive bias which leads to a negative stereotyping of non-in-group members. A scapegoat is a person who is deemed to be responsible for a variety of problems; it is associated with the divisions of friend and enemy, us and them, I and other and is a cross-cultural phenomenon which helps human beings to categorise especially in terms of good and evil. Wilson argues that human beings tend to dichotomize, indeed we are only “fully comfortable” when placing ourselves into two categories of “members versus nonmembers, kin versus nonkin, friend vs. foe”325. This binary classification, along with the distrust of unknown persons, of strangers, can trigger conflicts, which are often attempted to be solved through aggressive tactics. The Other or the out-group is subject to what is called pseudo-speciation, the reduction of ‘foreign’ peoples and societies to sub-human status, a process that clears the conscience of the degradation that is dealt to the out-group by the in-group. By considering the ‘other’ as not human, as not having the right to being treated with respect and dignity, for these are luxuries only experienced by the chosen few (the moral circle), the mind is able to treat the ‘other’ as an inferior creature. This polarization of in and out groups, of kith and kin versus enemies and strangers, is a biological pre-disposition related to biological territorialism, the aggressive defense and conquest of resources
(modem day a.k.a. private property) and space (land). Modem day ethnocentrism is a modified or hypertrophied version of kin and tribe allegiance and is the “force behind most warlike strategies”326.
325 Ibid, 70. 326 Ibid, 111. Ellis 136
Being able to differentiate oneself, by setting apart one’s community, social group over and against an Other requires comparison and judgement so to rate differences according to one’s hierarchy of values. Identity, and perspective, whether individual or a group (social organisation or society) is gained by making distinctions and requires an
Other. Through differentiation and comparison an individual and community gains a sense of individuality and belonging. Distinctions, paradigms and mental boundaries, grouping, and categorising enable awareness. To be is to be something, other than something else i.e. beings are differentiated from each other. A culture can be defined by a specific set of traits that another culture does not have. War and the enemy, distinctions and othering produces group cohesion and solidarity - a common goal brings people together and also gives people a common identity, membership, protection, security, reliance and dependency. The importance of preserving diversity of cultures and individuals requires the other, depends on conflict, and necessitates the rejection of homogeneity and standardization and the embracing of inequality. This is a need because of the threat of losing the richness of humanity, of the creative process, and innovative thinking. In this way difference, hierarchy, and elitism are essential to progress. There can be no fine arts of excellence without a hierarchy, without inequality. The form of this inequality can be corrupt (monopolization, hubris, greed, an uneven distribution of possibility for all who can) or natural (social hierarchy or meritocracy - is good if it enables the development of skills, talents, of all in a competition for excellence). Ideals and values (such as honour, social esteem, reputation, and other immaterial goods) are segregating factors in society (and especially important in global society)327. Someone
327 See Gat’s second level motivations in his War in Human Civilization. Also see Pinker The Blank Slate. 326-327 and his discussion on the culture of honour of males which is found almost universally. Ellis 137 who emulates the highest ideals is at the top of a hierarchy, whereas those who do not possess these are at the bottom.
Scapegoating and its prevention of the disastrous rather than constructive consequences can be understood through the politics of recognition as discussed by
Charles Taylor. In his The Politics o f Recognition he argues that identity is partly shaped by the presence and absence of recognition328. Oppression and harm can come from non recognition or misrecognition i.e. if inferior or demeaning images are projected onto an other then it can distort and oppress as these images are internalised producing low self esteem and possibly destroying the other as can be seen in bullying where the victim ends up committing suicide. Not to recognise an other is a method of dominance, as can be seen after the conquest of a society, the victors labelled the conquered inferior, and without due recognition329. Identities have to win recognition through exchange and there is always the possibility of failure. Identity is defined in a dialogue with and struggle against the expectations of others. Even still, Taylor argues that dignity is a universal human potential, a shared capacity, which ought to be respected. This is what he calls the
‘politics of universalism’. But he also argues for a ‘politics of difference’, for each individual has their own unique identity. In this way identity is considered as universally equal as all human beings have it; the politics of difference has a universal basis. The principle of equal respect is fair yet it suppresses identity as it is a homogenising
328 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992). 329 This can be associated with the Greeks turning from killing to slavery and the way the slave was considered as sub-human and not recognised as having dignity and thus not a citizen, a member of the social group. Ellis 138 principle and thus inhuman. Recognition and the fostering of particularities are discriminatory yet it allows for human differences330.
And human differences are what characterise social relations, as well as similarities, and shared goals. This stems from our dual nature. What is interesting is that there has been acknowledgment that material and cultural progress is intimately connected with the notion of moral degeneration:“the conception o f moral and spiritual decline is inextricably tied up with man's possession o f faculties which are crucial to his material and cultural progress on earth” whether conceived in Greek, Roman, Christian or secular terms331.The Dionysian aspect of human beings has been recognised and channelled into a social good, a motor and constructive force of progress for thousands of years. The conflict of our differences stimulates production, prosperity and development.
The dialectical and comparative process is about tensions between distinct things.
Tension develops talents through constructive, regulated conflict. As mentioned above
Greek Dionysian eris was channelled into an Apollonianeris and a pervasive ethic such that politics, sports, philosophical debate, and other such competitive social relations developed. Conflict has helped explain “flux, growth, and change” including both political (social) and physical scenarios332. Conflict is a definitive trait of the creative development of human beings, of our potentials, and also for the progress of civilization.
We need strife, turmoil, and division, conflict, discord, debate, and competition for change and progress. This is because progress occurs through our vices - our pride, gain, lust, knowledge (think Eve biting the apple from the tree of knowledge), emulation,
330 Taylor, Politics of Recognition. 331 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 94/95 333 Ibid, 86. Ellis 139 coveting, outdoing, differentiating, jealousy and such. The struggle, the conflict in human life, is necessary for development, for growth, for creative existence.
10.1 Conflict as Necessary to Progress; Saint Aumistine to John Mavnard Kevnes
History to Saint Augustine was one of “endemic conflict” especially portrayed between his two cities, the city of God (“love of God and man”) and the city of Man (“egoism and self-love”). Conflict was cast as “divine, epical, cosmic” and the efficient/motor cause of all in history and in the future333. From Adam we fell from spirit and perfection into imperfection, the earthly city of sin and selfishness in history and time. All that we are is found in Adam, so his vices are in us. Yet these vices are instrumental to secular wonders created by man. Vice is an “actuating, giving, movement” and conflict is a “relentless convulsive struggle.. .between the two natures of man, base and noble” as articulated in the conflict between the two cities. The struggle between good and evil is a motivating force within the city of man, man against man, and between the city of god and man. The city of man is materialistic, characterised by drives and instincts, by individualism, division and disharmony. People presume truth, thinking themselves as little gods who, alone, can decide right from wrong. The Church is the city of god within the city of man.
The education of the people to constrain their internal beastly qualities was done with
Christianity through the Church and not the individual and is the only way to actualise the potential of the city of god within the city of man.
Dutch philosopher, jurist, and poet Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) contrasts the sociable and unsociable aspects of human nature. In hisThe Rights o f War and Peace
333 Ibid, 69. (1625,1631) he argues that “man is an animal of a higher order” as there are certain things peculiar to man, such as the “Desire of society” and a peaceful community334. He argued that man is self-seeking as an animal, but as a human being, he develops a care for society that expresses his ‘special nature’ which is the source of law. This care is concerned with maintaining society according to the intellect, or reason, and this is his sociability. In other words human beings are self-seeking yet are inclined to live in society in reasonable relationships with each other. Even though we may want to be sociable and live together, the central differences between human beings at both the domestic and international levels are property and power. He suggests that natural law ought to acknowledge the sociable and unsociable aspects of human nature but find empirically observable ways for human beings to get along. Warfare and other sources of conflict, under this natural law, would be regulated.
Another Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1630-1677) argued that the human passions, such as hate, anger, envy, pride, and pity are core natural properties of human beings rather than vices. Everyone acts to fulfill a desire, acting according to self-interest, which is a mode of striving that is found throughout the universe and not just unique to human beings. Spinoza also mentions, in his bookEthica (1677), that we can feel pleasure when we give others pleasure, and feel pain at their pain, while at the same time can be consumed with envy, hatred, and vengeance if our desires are thwarted by others i.e. “Everything.. .in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its own being” .
Human beings then are motivated by their passions, but these can cause evil or suffering, making men by nature enemies, and it is only through reason that the individual can
334 Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace. Vol. 1, ed. Richard Tuck, (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2005), 79-81. 335 Russell, 572, citing Spinoza Ellis 141 become free from his passions and attain the good life. A life of reason is the most morally excellent form of living, for “passions in different men may conflict, but men who live in obedience to reason will agree together”336. Even in society our pursuit of self-interest does not cease; in this way we have never left the state of nature, merely moderating our desires through law and customs, through reasonable means, so to encourage the constructive passions and discourage the destructive ones. Civil peace can be accomplished by pursuing self-interests in a free society in this manner.
The Swiss legal and political theorist Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748) wrote a two volume work that was published after his death titledPrinciples o f Natural and Political Law. He argues that man, as an infant, is weak and when he matures he is rude, ignorant and confused. When he is alone he becomes melancholic. Pre-civil society is ignorant and uneducated and these are the chief sources of its misery. Man needs society, for it is here that we are educated and we find that social company develops sociable feelings of “benevolence, friendship, compassion and generosity”, which make us feel the greatest joy. These sociable feelings are what God wills; our sociability is the principle of our social duties. The principles of international law follow from the principle of sociability337.
Others criticised the idea of sociability, such as Bernard de Mandeville (1670-
1733), a Netherlander who spent most of his life in England as a philosopher, political economist, and satirist. In hisFable o f the Bees (1714) a non-utopian hypothetical society, he argued that civilization and prosperity are dependent on vices (envy, vanity)
336 Ibid, 573. 337 J.B. Schneewind in “Good out of Evil: Kant and the Idea of Unsocial Sociability” in Rorty & Schmidt, 100. Ellis 142 as they are virtues “from the social point of view”338. He claims that man is sociable because of his vilest qualities, such as pride and desire for dominion, and not because of his desire for company and good nature. People who cannot stand to be alone, those that have weak minds and feel empty, crave human company; self-interests of ease, security, and improvement in our own lives are the focus of social relations, whereas sensible people are solitary and think social gatherings are rude and noisy. The power of governance explains social life; it indoctrinates children to be pliable and obedient, behaviours that ensure self-advantage. Like wine, which is made out of grapes by invention, society is made out of human beings by invention. In other words, by living together men are made sociable, rather than being bom with sociableness. And it is through the governance of vice that the progress and success of society is found: “vice is beneficial found, when it’s by justice lopt and bound” and “Bare virtue can’t make
Nations live in Splendor”339. A society of altruists has no motivating force; it can not make the common good; instead it is “private vices” that create “public benefits”340.
David Hume (1711-1776), who published O f the Rise and Progress o f the Arts and Sciences in 1742, argued that the universal passion of avarice, the desire for gain, and of emulation were the causes of the rise and progress of commerce. And it was artistic contention and philosophical debate that gave rise to the sciences. What deprives progress in the arts and sciences is the homogenization of learning and the centralisation of government, as had happened with Christian Rome. Sameness does not produce very
338 Crocker, 31. 339 Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive or Knaves Turn'd Honest ed. Jack Lynch, http://ethnicity.rutgers.edu/~jIynch/Texts/hive.html, 11. 340 Nisbet, Social Change and History. 185. Ellis 143 much. Ambition and avarice, decentralisation and heterogeneity are important for progress341.
The Geneva bom political philosopher and romanticist Jean-Jacques Rousseau acknowledged “the ceaseless operation of man’s vices - avarice, ambition, etc.” in society342. In his Discourse on the Origin o f Inequality he argues that social or immaterial goods such as reputation, honours, and recognition “stimulates talents and abilities” and cause us to compare them; we have “competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflict of interests on the other, and always the secret desire to profit at the expense of others”343.
Vices are cast negatively but are associated with the development of civilization. Vice increased with the development of civilization or, as Froude has said about Rousseau:
“human nature deteriorated with the complication of the conditions of its existence”344.
Increasing social complexity results in more morally degenerate human beings. Diderot
(1713-1784) argued that man is both moral and immoral. In hisThe Encyclopedia he writes that man is “a peculiar mixture of sublime attributes and shameful weaknesses”345.
This dual nature of man, his sociability and unsociability is aptly captured in
Kant’s essay Universal History (1784). For Kant there is an underlying and hidden mechanism of history; a dynamic principle of historical progress and a civilizing process346. He thought that human nature was a paradox; human beings were both
341 See David Hume, O f the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, found at http://infomotions.com/etexts/philosophy/1700-1799/hume-of-737.htm 342 Nisbet. Social Change and History. 185. 343 Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”, from Crocker, 42. 344 J.A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. Vol. 2, (London: Longmans, Green, 1891), 355. 345 Diderot, “The Encyclopedia”, from Crocker, 291. 346 Robert Louden identifies 5 types of drives that Kant says are behind progress: unsocial sociability, the spirit of trade, government, education, and religion. The chief means of human progress is unsocial sociability which this essay will focus on. For further discussion of these five drives of progress see Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: from Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156-157. Ellis 144 gregarious and self-interested, and termed this duality “unsocial sociability”, especially conveyed in the fourth proposition in hisUniversal History. This paradoxical nature is the hidden mechanism of history. Its proper definition goes as follows: the unsocial sociability of human beings is “their propensity to enter into society, which, however, is combined with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to break up this society”347. As healthy individuals, human beings are social, friendly and dependent as well as unsocial, solitary and independent. Human beings do not experience total harmony or total seclusion; instead they oscillate in their relations with one another, in concord and discord, harmony and friction, peace and conflict, agreement and argument.
Kant explains that an individual is “driven by a social inclination, he seeks the company of others, a company, however, that he sometimes finds difficult to bear”348. Individuals seek social relationships for a variety of reasons, such as to attain a social identity or gain esteem, power, and glory. Cooperation with others has as its end, the attainment of basic needs, and, according to Kant, people are socially cooperative precisely because they want to fulfill these self-interested ends and not because they have concern for the interests of others. In this way, people use others as a means to their own ends. Each individual harbours the “unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with [our] own ideas” and is in ‘resistance’ to the self-seeking of other individuals349. This is an antagonistic social endeavour of conflicting interests and
347 Rorty & Schmidt, 13 348 Heiner Bielefeldt, Symbolic Representation in Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 131. 349 Ibid, citing Kant, 131. Individuals want to preserve independence, freedom, creativity, and inner reflection. It is important, according to MacIntyre, for self-disclosure in human relationships to be partial, thus some o f us remains hidden to others and in this sense we are opaque and unpredictable because of the threat of the “productive practices of others” (98, MacIntyre). We want to be able to predict society and others with generalisations, yet, at the same time, we want to remain unpredictable ourselves. A want to remain individual, distinct, beyond objectification and imitation; a definition of self over and against the Ellis 145 intermingling that can result in precarious dramas which can cause anguish, despair, and even death from violent conflict and war.
Rather than these self-seeking, antagonistic, and resistant tendencies of social relationships only causing debilitating social conflict Kant points out that the unsocial qualities of human beings can and do have positive public consequences. Conflict can be competitive and beneficial to society. By the impulse of mutual emulation, a constant comparison with others, people become more perfect by competing and cultivating innate potentials that otherwise would lay dormant and undeveloped. Heiner Bielefeldt explains that Kant argues that conflicts are “a precondition for the development of the individual as well as the species”350; they can act as catalysts for the progress of civilization “by shaking human beings out of their lazy self-sufficiency”351. Or, as Kant wrote, it is the
“desire for honor, power, or property” and the seeking of status that cultivates man to become civilized; it is the “vices of culture”, “asocial qualities” such as “envy, jealousy, ingratitude”, which reveal hidden talents that would otherwise remain dormant in a peaceful and harmonious society352. The resistance between individuals in society, between human nature and social behaviour, awakens all human powers, reveals hidden talents, and develops all the potentials, in time, which the human species have to exhibit.
For Kant, the unsocial yet creative aspect of human beings is the foundation for culture, science, politics, and art and progress occurs because of it but as an unintended consequence.
other, yet absorbing characteristics and expressions from each other - a perpetual process. This is associated with the idea of hip, staying one step ahead. Original, ingenuous, progressive, transcendent (of extremes), unifying, changing, of die moment, spontaneous, non-conformist, integrative, fusion, blending, creative, innovative, symbiotic. 350 Bielfeldt, 131. 351 Ibid, 132. 332 Ibid, citing Kant, 132. Ellis 146
The dynamic social conflict of interests is not just a free for all in civil society, but is regulated by mutual recognition and cooperation such that the destructive power of conflict is contained and progress occurs. The primordial drive of unsocial sociability in civil society under a social contract is limited in its free-play of inclination and action and tends towards the good. It is the enforcing of self-discipline that can develop the “seeds of nature”353. As Kant has said, “in the end”, the tension of social relations must be “the cause of all lawful order among men”354. These two impulses in opposition with each other “provides the uniform and timeless dynamic of mankind’s ascent from primitive barbarism” to civilization355.
The dialectical forces, the conflict of opposites in human nature and human relationships were also used by many in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Hegel,
Marx, Saint Simon, Tocqueville, Smith and Keynes to explain progressive development.
Hegel perceived the historical process as one of permanent change, of becoming and continuity, and was driven by “the boundless impulse of the world Spirit”356. This impulse of the world Spirit is the mechanism behind historical movement and is the pattern of progress; it is the dialectic, a “dynamic essence” of ongoing movement between different developmental states357. The individual will to action in the pursuit of self-interests, passions, and selfish desires was seen to be necessitated by the impulse of the world Spirit and as spurring the movement of history through the “dialectic of passionate action”358. Individuals were “tools in the hands of god”, conceived as
353 Louden, 154. 354 Louis Duprg, “Kant’s Theory of History and Progress,” The Review of Metaphysics 51. no.4 (1998): 817. 3Si Nisbet. Social Change and History. 185/186. 356 Herman, 32. 357 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 277. 358 Lowith, 56. Ellis 147 particular creatures with particular intentions driven by a universal purpose - spiritual perfection and fulfillment359. He thought “internal conflict” was the “effective cause of development” regarding the idea of freedom and described the dialectic as “spirit [being]
‘at war with itself”360. Progress towards absolute truth, absolute universal spirit, occurred through the dialectical circular interplay of thesis and antithesis with synthesis as a qualitative advance over the struggle between thesis and antithesis. He thought that the ultimate conceptual truth of genuine reality was slowly uncovered through the unfolding evolution of the history of ideas.
For Marx conflict was “an inherent process in economic society”361. His materialist dialectic focused on class conflict and he proposed that only through the destruction of private property and social class this struggle could end. Progress was to a final goal of egalitarianism and no class distinctions. Tocqueville argued that the development of democracy has its motivation in endemic conflict between “values of equality and of achievement”. He envisioned the former winning such that “a final condition of standardisation, homogeneity, and inertia, will all-embracing political power having arisen out of the passion for social equality”362. Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) focused on science rather than liberty in regards to progress.
He wrote the New Science and introduced the new science of sociology, involving research into statics: the structure and organisation of society, and dynamics: the laws of successive development and progress. He argued that history has alternating “organic” and “critical” periods, with the organic being orderly and creative, such as seen in
359 Ibid, 55. 360 Nisbet. Social Change and History. 186. 361 Ibid, 186. 362 Ibid, 187. Greece, Rome, and the Christian Middle Ages, and the critical being characterised by disorder and a lack of intellectual and moral ground363. He saw this latter period as being vital to progress because critical thinking about present circumstances and established institutions and traditions weakens the organic structure, opening a space for a new age to emerge, which is a higher organic period. This alternating period of organic and critical is the perfection of the social order towards a golden age in the future. As mentioned above
Smith thought that “competition” was the “uniform cause of development”. It was through private and personal endeavours, through liberty and greed,aura sacra fames, that material well-being of society can occur. Regulated competitive conflict can fuel laissez-faire commercial liberal society. In a similar vein, Keynesian capitalism argues for the drive to profit, greed and avarice unleashed can propel us through the “tunnel of economic necessity”364. A few people with concentrated wealth “will create an individual system capable of producing material abundance” for society as a whole365.
There is a problem with knowing reality as it really is, as being both destructive and creative and this knowledge can lead to all sorts of atrocities such that anything is permitted. But that is why we have the noble lie. Those that have the capacity to perceive and handle reality should be stewards of the masses that can’t and that stewardship requires the noble lie, requires regulation mechanisms. Those that gain the truth in their hands without the ability to use it wisely, well, it could lead to disastrous consequences -
Hitler may have been a great man, but he bastardised the truth. He may have had the
German people in his mind but the mass-destruction he rippled across the European continent is inexcusable. The Apollonian and Dionysian forces must be in balance in all
363 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 249. 364 Weatherby, 55, citing Keynes. 345 Ibid, 55. Ellis 149 actions, and not just for the sake of ones own. Truth is difficult to bare, to tell, to acknowledge - self-deception, euphemisms, lies, - urination, defecation, fornication - all hidden by language and architectural walls. Living in a world where we seek ways to cope with our desires, our passions, our impulses through palliative measures, is a sublimation of who we are.
The individual impulse is “an impulse of perfectibility” that has been documented since Hesiod; it is the striving of potentials to develop, through conflict, into actuality and distinguishes man from all other orders of organic being366. Civilized interaction requires at the least the overcoming of destructive animal instincts and impulses i.e. raw aggression, by the use of reason. Laws and behaviour policies are applied and learned to achieve this state of human interaction. It is a transcendence of the primitive drives and needs so to achieve something idealised as human, humane, civilized, or modem. In this way we can say that our knowledge has evolved yet we have retained our animal nature - our primitive drives and needs. Our knowledge has become more logical, rational, abstract, analytical, yet we retain our irrational, chaotic, unpredictable nature. Reason is only a portion of who we are. The noble lie creates the illusion, and comfort - all people want comfort - but the reality of the matter is that when a woman gives birth it is a painful experience, now hidden with an epidural needle, the ‘progress’ of medicine. And it can be deadly for dying while giving birth was common before modem medicine.
Creation can and is a destructive reality. When the forest fire bums, destroying organic greenery, and the animals, insects, lifeforms run for their lives, dying, maimed, burnt, it is a terrible thing yet, at the same time, there comes new life, a newer, greener growth. This
366 Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress. 280. Ellis 150 is not to say that I advocate disastrous conflict and destruction, it is merely to point out that nature itself is not ultimately kind.
The dialectical force is transhistorical, natural and necessary. Motivating conflicts, binary oppositions of good versus evil, egoism versus altruism, oppression versus oppressed, reason versus the passions, sociability versus unsociability, friendship versus enmity, and so on characterise the history of the West. Contraries, paradoxes, juxtapositions, dualisms, conflicts are a persistent dynamic that directs progress and development and is inherent to the nature of man and the relationships of men367. The dialogue of contrasts is what fuels progress. The philosophy of history of the West contains this “mechanism of endemic conflict of elements”368. The emphasis of conflict for human development has been understood as a “uniform mechanism to give continuity and necessity to social development”369. There is a difference between intentions or motivations and the mechanism of progress. There is disagreement with the idea there is one main engine of progress i.e. liberty, technology, capitalism, and the like, but these are motivations. Conflict, a dialectical dynamic of opposing forces and the numerous forms produced in their syntheses is the actual mechanism behind progress. Motivations to change may be considered as the actually motivations of conflict. To change something, to be motivated to make something happen, to strive after an idealised vision requires persistence, struggle, taking a stand, and such. There are different modes of conflict: warfare, revolution, strikes, interpersonal, ideologies and resistance to dominance, and all
367 If I had more time and more space I would have liked to have discussed the nature of drama, both comedy and tragedy, in the history of the West, and how it captures the antagonism in human relationships. Just think of all the thrillers, dramas, and action movies, films, and books that people seek out to watch and read. These works familiarise us and give insight to our own real experiences with each other. 361 Nisbet, Social Change and History, 86. 369 Ibid, 186. intend to achieve something that is not. What is, is static, inert, whereas making something, creating something else, making a change requires force, work, struggle, toil, and hardship. Change does not come easily for many are in resistance to it - “Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change has its enemies”370. Change, progress, is not passive but it is political power, it is the deliberate transformation of society by intelligent action of the human will. Through counter-forces, through polarity, and the synthesis of dynamics transformation occurs. Conflict is the overarching mechanism of progress, a general feature of all the explanations, drives attributed to progress.
By keeping up with the neighbours, with the Jones’s, by mutual emulation (Kant), the striving to outdo others, we fulfill our competitive nature. But conflict must be regulated. The Dionysian destructiveeris must be sublimated into rule-bound constructive or Apollonianeris but without denying the existence of the dark and destructive side of human beings and nature itself. The reality of human behaviour is often a variable that is overlooked or denied in theories of utopian progress with their focus on getting rid of conflict so to create perpetual peace and global unity. Human desires, passions, sins, cravings, selfish ambitions, greed, power, and egoism, are cast as immoral, as things that need to be eradicated so to realise an ideal society. Often though, they affect the outcome of a proposed ideal as can be seen in the disastrous consequences of eugenics, the penal system, mass man, ethnic cleansing and such. These are obvious examples of the failure of liberal goals. Another example, but more hidden, is that the increased sophistication of knowledge about human beings, i.e. human sciences has been appropriated by businesses and politics in order to use people for a particular end i.e.
370 Robert Kennedy economic and political production. Domination of the masses occurs through the use of data from the new human sciences so to manipulate sentiments, prejudices, emotions, and weaknesses and supposedly is done in the name of perfection. But it is the plain programming of human nature, the use of human beings as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves.
The Dionysian aspect of human nature has been moralised since the Greeks yet they still acknowledged it and saw the necessity of it. The Christians, and many progressives also saw this aspect of human nature as useful, to be tempered for the good, yet today it is ignored, denied, and pacified by modem liberalism such that the
Apollonian, or the virtuous is emphasised. Progressive perfection of the Apollonian nature of man is much influenced by the romantic notions of the noble savage. This is a denial of human reality, a pretension that we are solely good and can perfect, that we can be what we are not. This is a misunderstanding of imperfection, of original sin, vices, and selfish ambitions. These are necessary for the natural developmentphysis ( ) of both the individual and society. Liberal perfection is the rejection of the Dionysian. Perfection in this way is not real. We are not perfect. We can strive to be, but that just reinforces the point. We are not perfect. To pretend that we are is wrong thinking. There is a difference between excellence and perfection, between actualising potential and liberal perfection which is merely focused on pure reason, the Apollonian. It is a disembodiment and a disaffirmation of the reality of human life. The notion of perfection of Rousseau differs from the ancients as men by nature are seen as inherently noble and good (noble savage) and can be increasingly perfect through the enforcement of rules by socialistic elites lusting for control over ordinary human beings. Whereas the Greeks had Apollonian and Ellis 153
Dionysian in balance, a perfection, excellence in rational debate, through the ambitious development of their singular telos, their own nature, each of which was unique - unlike
Rousseauian one-sidedness.
Imperfections are necessary motivators to aspire to development. As Bentham has said vice and misery rescue one from perfectibility - the latter is like perfect happiness, an imaginary universal elixir. Too much perfection will lead to dissolution. Or as Russell has said “much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of
[mental] intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion”371. Or as Herder has written: “In a system of changeable things, if there be progress, there must be destruction: apparent destruction, that is; or a change of figures and forms”372. And as Mandeville has said, a utopian society purely focused on virtue will not amount to anything. All greatness will collapse. What is needed is a balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian, a balance of opposites to fulfill the human potential. Much like the Hegelian dialectic the syntheses of these two opposing forces is a dynamic that nourishes human beings and society itself. A blend of the creative and destructive, the dual nature of human beings is vital for human well-being and success. Homogenisation and the liberal scathing of the Dionysian must be denied so to maintain creativity stemming from distinctions, without which we would have no development. Archaic impulses ought to be checked by prescribed rules, the will and appetites must be controlled, so that reason utilises the energetic, motivating force of the irrational passions and allows the unique potentials of individuals and nations to fully develop.
371 Russell, 16. 372 The quote continues: “But this never affects the interior of nature, which, exalted above all destruction, continually rises as a phenix from it’s ashes, and blooms with youthful vigour”, John Godfrey Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Ellis 154
CONCLUSION
The idea of progress actually stems from the ancient Greek notion ofphysis, a natural growth of the individual, and the theory of classical developmentalism. Many of the elements of this classical theory are embedded in Western thought even though there have been three major modifications of the doctrine - Christian (epic), secular (linear), and the synthesis (spiral). Critical sentiments against progressive theory in general arose throughout history, and especially emerged in conjunction with the modem, liberal, secular, utopian theory of progress that formed during the enlightenment. These criticisms express concern about the feasibility and sustainability of modem progress.
They also bring to light the consequences for individual and societal well-being (such as moral relativism, fascism, loss of freedoms, and social dissolution) caused by the denial of human nature, the emphasis on the inherent goodness of man, and the ambitions of social and individual engineering towards a global utopia, which focus on using reason to attain the ideals and goals of enlightenment perfection.
In this work I have shown that thinkers and writers since the beginnings of
Western civilization, from the ancient Greeks, and up to and including the present have identified a major trend in history, what is called the efficient cause of development. The overwhelmingly main force or motor cause behind progress, growth, or development is binary opposition, or dualism in the form of conflict and competition. It is a dialectical dynamic which is unique to Western society for it stems from a warrior aristocratic spirit which is at the very foundations of Western civilization. This dynamic agonism has been channelled into constructive or creative and regulated debates and competitions and has caused the innate potentials of Western man to be actualised. Without this dialectical Ellis 155 force one can say that Western civilization may have never become the most progressive and greatest human social group this modem Earth has witnessed. I also show in this work that the motor cause of progress is associated with the final cause, or end goal of progress, in the sense that it is conflict that progress seeks to eventually overcome; a final transcendent end of human suffering. In this way it can be said that the whole of progressive Western history, especially emphasised with enlightenment ideals, has been a search for a final solution to the human condition and that a plurality of solutions have emerged, with none fully satisfying the desire for the total eradication of all human problems. Attempting to achieve a utopian society can often lead to a dystopic state of human existence.
The conflict of our differences, a timeless human truth, stimulates production, prosperity and development, but only in a closed social system. This is because boundaries are necessary to foster mutual trust, share a common goal and still allow for debate and disagreement in a social, political, rational arena. It requires exclusion, membership, hierarchy, and inequality because identity, whether individual or group, is gained by making distinctions against an Other. Through differentiation and comparison, indeed through conflict, an individual and community gains a sense of individuality and belonging, and this enables preservation and progress. Social and cultural diversity depends on conflict, on inequality, and necessitates the rejection of homogeneity and standardization. In this way there can be no fine arts of excellence without difference and elitism.
Change is not passive but it is the deliberate transformation of society by intelligent action of the human will. Through counter-forces, through polarity, and the Ellis 156 synthesis of dynamics transformation occurs. The dialectical force is transhistorical, natural and necessary. Contraries, paradoxes, juxtapositions, dualisms, and conflicts (in the form of the conflict of interests stemming from the spirited, restless, passionate drives, vices, and self-interested ambitions of individuals in a society, as well as between societies) are a persistent dynamic that are inherent to the nature of man and the relationships of men. The dialogue of contrasts is what fuels progress.
Modem, progressive, liberal perfection is the rejection of the Dionysian. It is a disembodiment and a disaffirmation of the reality of human life. Human greed, power, and egoism are cast as immoral, as retrogressive, as things that need to be eradicated to realise an ideal society. Yet these aspects of human nature are necessary for the creative and natural development{physis ) of both the individual and society. Reason is only a portion of who we are. Our knowledge has evolved yet we have retained our animal nature - our primitive drives and needs, which are timeless truths. Our knowledge has become more logical, rational, abstract, analytical, yet we retain our irrational, chaotic, unpredictable, agonistic nature. Because human nature has ongoing or timeless aspects to it, evolutionary predispositions that are necessary for self and social development, man has not necessarily progressedin himself as a species since the dawn of civilization.
Progress has made our lives more materially comfortable. Yet, while knowledge may make us more aware of our prejudices, it does not alter the way we originally are. The progress in knowledge may eventually affect our biology such that we evolve into a higher species and transcend the human condition but there is no assurance of this because of the disparities between social and biological progress. Ellis 157
It is the conflict of human affairs that liberal progress seeks to eventually overcome. The development of modem liberalism and its focus on eradicating conflict in the name of a peaceful and global unity may, in the end, be the cause of our decline. My argument is that there can be no final solution to the human condition because of the very nature of Nature itself. There can only be a regulated reconciliation of man’s dual nature at the very best. Laws and behaviour policies can be applied and learned to achieve this state of human interaction. It is a channelling of the primitive drives and needs so to achieve something idealised as human, humane, civilized, or modem, but without denying the primordial foundation of our existence. Existence requires distinctions for otherwise there would be an undifferentiated mass of everything and these distinctions, in order to be maintained, necessitate conflict. The struggle of all life to survive, including human societies, requires death, destruction, impermanence, injustice, and conflict, for without these things there can be no life, creation, permanence, morality, or peace.
In this work I may have come across as being a Nietzschean. This was not my intention. I approached my research with the questions ‘what is progress?’ and ‘have we progressed?’ in the back of my mind and over time what information I came to be exposed to and the tangents I was able to follow logically in relation to these questions influenced where I arrived at with my thinking at the end of this project. Overall, to me,
Nietzsche was on to something very important that has shaped and given life to the course of Western history. As I have shown, he was not alone in thinking that conflict is at the heart of human relations and individual and social change and development. In this way, I would not say I am Nietzschean. Rather, I have a strong affiliation to the idea that conflict in the form of regulated competition is necessary for creative expression and the fulfillment of innate potentials. Although, in this respect, I am much more a pattem- seeker in historical thought about the human condition and development, and focus on such abstract notions of duality, metaphor, and myth as found in historical works by great thinkers, in another respect I can say I lean towards Nietzsche’s interpretation of this line of thinking. This is because he takes it to a deep-seated, primordial or metaphysical level which I consider to be an apt synthesis of what people have been expressing about the nature of human beings, Nature itself, and how this character of life is the mechanism of development since the beginnings of Western civilization. These inclinations will be further investigated at the doctorate level of research.
I agree with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the origins and mechanism of creative development, whereas I do not agree with his solution to the moral relativism that stemmed from the enlightenment era. I think that we are not entirely subjective in our interpretation of history and we can not create our own personal values in a social vacuum. We are not asocial and in this way we are objective for I think there are certain timeless issues such as human relations and base behaviours. The self is partly defined in the context of struggle, of interacting with others, in which we gain recognition, and, as
Aristotle has argued, in a social and political arena, we are able to actualise our potentials, become fully human, whileat the same time, nourish our community. Values, a moral framework that is conducive to one’s social group, stem from socially regulated self-ambitions.
It is difficult, because of the broadness and complexity of this topic, to come to any final or definite conclusion. Maybe it would be best to say I have put forward several incomplete conclusive statements which require a more sophisticated level of analysis Ellis 159 and research in order for me to reach a final and encompassing end-claim. What I did intend with my work is not a solution to human problems, or a new suggestion for social engineering to an ideal, instead 1 wanted to open up a debate, a dialogue, about the nature of human beings and the processes behind creative development. This is because I perceive that our liberal progressive age seemingly refutes the existence of essences, advocates a philosophy of relativism, critically questions the feasibility of overarching narrative schemes, persistently denies the role self-interest and the conflict of differences plays in the creative development of individuals and societies, continuously emphasises the inherent goodness and sociability of man, and justifies these stances with ideologies of tolerance and political correctness. I realise that liberalism is a complicated issue that requires further research, which is a part of this large project, which will continue to be explored and documented at the PhD level. Ellis 160
APPENDIX A
Some Identifiable Dualisms in History
D Abstractions (Universalism) and particularities □ Thesis and antithesis D Ignorance and wisdom D Ancients and modems (The Quarrel) D Manicheanism D Yin and Yang D Suffering and Liberation D Absolutism and relativism D Idealism and Realism G Passions and Reason D Fission and fusion (like nuclear capabilities, progress can be destructive or creative) D Attraction and repulsion D Diversity and Unity D Peace and conflict D Non-zero and Zero-sum D Rationalism and empiricism D Rationalism and irrationalism D Slavery and freedom: master-slave; inferior-superior □ Winners and losers D Civilized and Barbaric D Predictive and non-predictive □ Proletariat and Bourgeoisie D Vices and virtues D Evil and good D Primitive and civilized D Unsocial and social D Apollonian and Dionysian Ellis 161
D Prometheus and Pandora D God and Satan D City of God and City of Man D Weak and strong D Developed and undeveloped D Us and them; I and other; subject and object □ Nomos and physis; nature and nurture (determinism and constructionism) D Conservative and liberal □ Birth and death D Activity and inertia; change and stability □ Difference and similarity/sameness □ Progress and regress/degeneration D Cyclical and lineal □ Capitalism and socialism/communism □ Free will and determinism □ Body and mind D Is and Ought D Realm of forms and realm of appearances D Golden age versus primitive savagery D Macro and micro D Beginning and end D Public and Private D Meaning and meaninglessness D Belief/faith and nihilism D One and the many Ellis 162
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Clare Elizabeth Ellis
Aberdeen, Scotland
UNB, B.A. Philosophy (Honours) and Sociology, 2008
UNB, M.A. Interdisciplinary Studies, 2011
Academic Background:
B.A. Philosophy (Honours) and Sociology, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, N.B.
M.A. Interdisciplinary Studies, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, N.B. Thesis topic: The Idea of Progress and the Agonistic Ethos of Western Man. Thesis advisor: Dr. Ricardo Duchesne.
Anticipated Publications:
Dualism and Progress: A Comparison and Contrast of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Slavery and Freedom in Ancient Greece: A Conceptual and Historical Foundation for Human Progress
The Idea of Conflict as the Efficient Cause of Western Progress
Peer Reviewed and Invited Conference Papers/Presentation Delivered:
Social Sciences and Humanities Student Conference Feb. 19th 2011. Dualism and Progress: A Comparison and Contrast of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Other Academic Experience:
VP External, Philosophy Society, UNBSJ Sept. 2006 - April 2008 Marker for Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, Sept. 2007 - April 2008 Marker for Dr. Chris Doran, Jan. - April 2008 Research Assistant for Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, May - July 2009 Teaching Assistant for Dr. David Flagel, Sept 2009 - April 2010 Teaching Assistant for Dr. David Flagel, Sept 2010 - April 2011 Teaching Assistant for Dr. Hugh Williams, Jan. - April 2011