The Perils of Believing in Progress

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotation of undergraduate dorm room posters is the overarching hypothesis against which I’m going to try to struggle in this lecture.¹ I’m going to try to struggle with it, not to endorse it or quite to critique it, though I do ultimately have critique and rejection in mind. But I wish to try to understand it more clearly than I do. This is going to be my first attempt to work through what I think is the final piece of my next book project, called Justice in Babylon, which is an attempt to generate a political normativity without relying on what I take to be false, distorting, ideological crutches for political normativity: the thoughts that the state naturally orients toward justice, that one’s community of fellow citizens naturally orients toward either consensus or friendship, that political forms naturally progress, and that the legal system naturally orients toward the fulfillment of purposes that moral and political philosophers seek to imbue it with. 

This is a project in what has become known within political theory as political realism, though I started work on it before that phrase, and the specific association of it with Bernard Williams’s thought in particular, had gained quite the currency that they have in political theory. I didn’t begin it with an eye toward the political realism literature, or toward Williams. I did begin it in part with an eye toward Augustine. I turned to Augustine for resources with which to critique what I take to be distorting ideological facts that run through so much of modern political thought that it is difficult to wholly escape them within the chronology of modern Europe. There are ways in which Augustine counts as an alien enough resource to make unfamiliar what modernity makes too familiar. 

From a very early time in this project, which is now something like a decade old, I have repeatedly been met with an objection that is phrased variously in terms of hope, optimism, or especially progress. The criticism is that there is something politically debilitating about the view I’m offering: the idea that, in a sense, being ruled is always with us, that unfreedom and injustice are part of the human political condition, and that when we attempt to imagine them away, what we are prone to do is to dress up injustices and unfreedoms in legitimizing language—to hide the injustice and the unfreedom from view without actually making the world substantively more just or more free. 

But to the extent that that means that I’m saying there are permanent morally unattractive facts and tragic choices about our political lives, thoughtful readers and listeners would keep responding to me: But don’t we need to believe that King was right? Which sometimes, only sometimes, meant that the speaker themselves believed that it was true that King was right. The recurring piece of the criticism, from a variety of sources, has been that it is politically debilitating not to believe it: that if I go around telling people that there are basic features of our political condition that are just with us, that that so demoralizes would-be political actors, that it leaves us fatalist and resigned. It eliminates our willingness and therefore our ability to try to make things better. Now, I think this is wrong, but I also find it genuinely puzzling. Most of what I want to do in this lecture is to try to work out the variety of things that this could mean, and the reasons why people might believe it. I very much hope to get correction and improvement in my views, particularly from people who are more sympathetic to the line of argument that I’m trying to reconstruct. In order to reject it, in order to defend the project of my next book against it, I do want to try to understand it more thoroughly than I do, and I find the view genuinely so strange that this is an exercise in distant alien intellectual reconstruction for me. 

I’m not going to name names because this has been something that a lot of people have said to me in a quick way. And the fact that so many smart people keep saying it to me in a quick way does make me think there’s something there, even if it’s something that I have difficulty getting a hold of. It is also, I do believe, representative of a view that has hold in broader political normative life. And in my book, I’m trying not only to criticize works of official political theory and political philosophy, but to engage in a critique of public ideology. For example, the belief that a democratic public orients toward consensus, and that there really is one underlying popular will, has been deployed to give parties and pluralism a kind of presumptive illegitimacy. They are reduced to special interest and faction. I think that’s a fact about our public ideology in the last 200 years, in the era of large-scale democratic republics. And in saying that, I don’t only mean to be engaged in, for example, criticism of Rousseau. Consider, for example, how often U.S. presidents have given inauguration addresses in which they proclaimed that they have overcome partisanship. Jefferson’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” has become many versions of “all Democrats, all Republicans.” The new president claims the mantle of spokesman for or embodiment of a country that is, in an underlying sense, unified. The distrust toward partisanship one sometimes finds in academic democratic theory, with its orientation toward consensus, represents something in the public political intellectual culture in large-scale democratic republics, including the United States.

I think something similar is true about the idea of progress. A few years ago, the online publication Vox commissioned a series of essays on the following question: What idea or practice from the present will be considered unthinkable in fifty years? where “considered unthinkable” was just an implicit synonym for those things about which future people will know we were wrong. They asked me to contribute, and I said the only thing I can possibly write on this question is that it’s a deeply silly question, and it rests on all kinds of confusions about the relationship of morality and time. And presumably, that’s not what you’re after. They said, no, no, that’s great, so I did.

A disproportionate amount of my writing career consists of that kind of exchange: people will ask me to write on a premise, I reply, “I reject the premise; I think that it’s absurd,” then they invite me to write about why. So I wrote the piece for Vox. But every other participant in the symposium took the question in just the spirit in which it was asked. That is to say, they picked some view that they hold about something that is wrong today and used their certainty about the wrongness as a basis on which to say, “In fifty years, everyone will agree with me. We will have learned by then. We will know by then. Those future people who will know better than we do will look back and judge all of you for having this bad view that I’m already telling you is a bad view.” 

It’s true that Vox isn’t an academic publication. But it is sometimes an intellectually substantial publication; and I find it telling that the other authors, and so many readers, were satisfied with the question and framing. That so many people took it that way does help persuade me that there’s something worth grappling with here, and that there might be a piece of public ideology, like the public ideology about consensus, that is worth engaging with. This is the roundabout way of getting back to saying why I’m not going through a list of contemporary theorists or named academics whom I’m trying to criticize. I’m trying to come to terms with the criticism in both its academic and its non-academic faces. 

To close the introduction out, I’ll note that the famous poster quote is not Martin Luther King’s last or only word on the subject. In the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King says that “time itself is neutral.” Waiting longer will not bring about the end of Jim Crow and the triumph of civil rights. This is a rejoinder to the white moderates, of whom he is so critical. Such people say, “Well, be patient. Don’t hurry. Your hurrying is disruptive. And if we wait a little while longer, people will be more ready to hear the message of civil rights.” And King says: time itself is morally neutral. Time does not bring us closer to the end of Jim Crow. Action does. Politics does. In that moment, King says what I think is closer to the truth, which is that indeed the belief in progress can be politically debilitating. It can lead us to think that political improvement comes not through our choices, our ideas, our actions, but through time overcoming. And there’s something politically fatalistic about precisely that. 

That’s the end of my commentary on King. Why use this topic to introduce a lecture framed around the Enlightenment? I do have substantive academic interests in the Enlightenment. They are primarily in Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment. Neither Montesquieu nor the Scottish Enlightenment is going to feature in this lecture, however. I have fewer academic interests in most of the rest of the Enlightenment, and the book itself won’t spend much time on the rest of the eighteenth century. However, the idea of permanent, ongoing moral and political progress is traditionally attributed to The Enlightenment, the capital-T and the capital-E. It’s most closely linked to the Parisian philosophes and encyclopedists, including ultimately the Marquis de Condorcet.

It is not, I think, the view of the encyclopedists’ patron intellectual saint and slightly senior partner, Voltaire. Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake famously rejects Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire took seriously the fact of misfortune and mass death in the world, and he rejected the kind of theological imagination that Leibniz brought to bear in thinking this is the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire says: Go tell that to the dead of Lisbon. 

The rejection of the claim that this is (already, now) the best of all possible worlds, the rejection of the claim about history that is implicit in it, is a rejection of important kinds of progress narratives. I want to stress this: a belief in inexorable or inevitable progress sounds like a belief about the future, but it logically must be a narrative of the past. 

If you believe in the inevitability of progress, then one of two things must be true about the relationship of the present to the past. The first way that progress might be inevitable is that the present is the best moment in all of human history, and that 25 years ago was better than 50 years ago. There might be some fluctuations, but that there must be a long-term moral and political improvement that you can meaningfully trace over historical time, such that the present is meaningfully and consistently better than the past, and the near past is meaningfully and consistently better than the distant past. That’s one possibility. 

The other possibility is that you think that something has interrupted the course of human history, right now or pretty recently, such that progress has become inevitable from now on. And so, while the past might be an endless list of horrors, and indeed today, and yesterday, and the day before yesterday might have had worse horrors than the ancient world ever knew, still, something has broken the trajectory of history. In this case, you owe the audience a very clear explanation about what that something is, how it is that it came to change basic features of our moral condition, why we would think that now that it started it would go on forever, and so on. There are, I think, rhetorical moments in the Enlightenment that attribute that kind of history-interrupting ability to the scientific revolution, to the belief that now that we humans have learned how to learn, our learning will be cumulative. 

Having first learned how to talk about heavenly bodies and principles of motion, we will now turn our learning how to learn toward the human, social, and moral sciences. Just as, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, our ancestors embarked on a now-permanent campaign of endless improvement of our knowledge of natural philosophy, so too will we now, in the eighteenth century, embark on an endless campaign of the improvement of our knowledge of moral, political, and social philosophy. And when we know better, surely we will do better. Our knowledge will directly inform our politics, our social reform movements, in something the same way that advanced scientific knowledge improves our technological applications. So the course of history from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onward will be different.

There are, as I said, recurring bits of rhetoric in the eighteenth century around this. However, the most famous work of the eighteenth century that really committed to the doctrine of progress does not make that claim about a discontinuity in history. In Condorcet’s “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind,” he wrote that progress may sometimes be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde. And he built that history out from his imagined evolutionary beginnings of humanity through ancient Greece, through ancient Rome, to his day. This is not a story that begins with Galileo or Newton. The claim that the history of the mind can never be retrograde is used to introduce and structure a whole history of humanity. 

Now, I find it noteworthy and confusing that having begun the essay that way, Condorcet then described a number of moments in which history is retrograde. 

The Enlightenment, in its self-understanding in the eighteenth century, was substantially an extension of the Renaissance. And those are both images, both of which are partly historical projections backward, partly picking out pieces of narrative and rhetoric. And that pair of metaphors—rebirth and illumination—are both about a relationship to the past. The Enlightenment is the emergence from darkness, from the Dark Ages, as people then spent a long time retroactively describing much of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance is a rebirth, a rebirth of knowledge and culture and the arts, beginning to restore some of the greatness of the ancient world after the long degradation and collapse of the Middle Ages. “Enlightenment” and “Renaissance” are both historical narratives, and they’re especially historical narratives about the claim of a long medieval collapse. 

I have strong views about that claim. In my medieval political thought class I devote two or three days to its falseness. That’s not of concern here. What’s of concern here is that Condorcet, having said that history can never be retrograde, then tells what we come to think of as the conventional story of a millennium of collapse, which indeed followed the partial collapse from Greece into ancient Roman Christianity. History is, for him, a story of how there can only ever be slower or faster progress, and yet he cannot help but tell a history that looks nothing like that. 

It’s important, I think, that Condorcet wrote this essay while he was in hiding from the French revolutionary state, which had outlawed him. He had been a revolutionary. He had been a member of the National Assembly. But he had opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and he opposed the outlawing of the Girondins, and as a result he had become politically unacceptable to the Jacobins, who had proclaimed him subject to punishment. And so he went into hiding. That is to say, it’s in a dark political moment. There is a way, I think, in which the essay is Condorcet’s contribution, not to the historiography that the philosophers and encyclopedists had been doing at mid-century—the triumphalism of our great present, which can only go on to increasing accomplishments—but rather to an exercise in a kind of consolation. It looks as though we’ve suffered a reversal. Our moment of greatest hope in the Revolution has led us to a time of real darkness, but he writes to himself and his readers: We must take the long view, and with the long view, we can understand that, yes, the French Revolution is the dawning of a great new history, and that this moment will pass, leaving us again on the inexorable upward trajectory. 

In any case, that narrative comes to be remembered as a crucial piece of, and a symbol and summary of, much of the social and historiographic thought that gets called the Enlightenment—a phrase in retrospect that is assembled out of pieces from a bunch of different people in a bunch of different places, not exhausted by my list of the greats, but rather it’s something like Voltaire and the encyclopedists, and at least a little bit of Kant, though sometimes only a little bit of Kant, and a little bit of Rousseau’s deeply oppositional and skeptical stance that nonetheless proclaims the doctrine of future human perfectibility, notwithstanding his deeply pessimistic account of human history up until now, which has led us into moral degradation and collapse. 

So what people call the Enlightenment, or the Enlightenment project, when they’re summarizing, will have that messy constellation, in which one piece of that messy constellation is some kind of commitment to progress. People will pick up this actually consolatory late Condorcet piece, project it back onto midcentury triumphalism, and say, “Look, this is what it looks like when you really take seriously the idea that we will be society’s Newtons, and we will discover how to learn about morality and science and progress.” 

Now, I do think that those moments of rhetoric in the eighteenth century spoke to something that’s true and that needs to be taken seriously in discussions of progress. That is, I think the scientific revolution is a break. It is true that Europeans in early modernity learned things about how to learn about the natural world. They were not the first people ever to do so. Advances in natural science had been made in some important ways in ancient Greece, in the Islamic and Arab intellectual world, in both China and India. And, of course, everyone who lives in the world learns about the natural facts that can help them or hurt them. There are sciences associated with indigenous ways of knowing that come of long accumulations of experience about what the natural world means. But there is something interesting that happens in early modern Europe that introduces the possibility of steady accumulation over historical time. The early modern Europeans, unusually compared to some of the more intellectual and abstract commitments to scientific knowledge in some of those other times and places, quickly and readily came to adapt scientific progress to applied technology. That is not the only reason for the historically unprecedented economic takeoff of early modern Europe. But it does play a role in the exponential increase of that economic takeoff starting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

The major economic consequences of all of this really become vivid in the nineteenth century, not the eighteenth, and so I don’t think we should treat that economic growth as the meaning of the Enlightenment’s idea of progress. But since that time, it has become, I think, undeniable that there is a meaningful sense of progress in the world tied up with science and technology, and partly as an ancillary of those, economic prosperity. Those are real. They are not morally simple in how we should think about them. They become all the less morally simple if we are facing the possibility of climate catastrophe as a long-run after effect of our technological and economic progress. But at least up until that happens, there has been a revolutionary change in the human material condition and knowledge of the material world over the last 200 years. And there are consequences of that transformation that are morally and politically good: It is good that extreme hunger becomes rarer. It is good that it becomes easier for people to feed themselves. It is good that it becomes easier for people to have families in which fewer of their infants die and in which they can then limit their family size through deliberate choice to the number of children they actually want, rather than having many extras in the sure knowledge that infant and child mortality will take so many of them. Those are all progress. Nothing that I will say is meant to deny that. 

What I do think I deny is that there is a separate dimension of inexorable moral-political cumulative progress once you control for our increasing wealth. I do not think that the basics of our moral relationships to each other, to the state, to the law, to justice are susceptible to the same kind of accumulation of knowledge. And insofar as the Enlightenment story was built on an analogy between what Galileo to Newton had done with science, and what we will now do with morality and politics, I deny that, too. 

And indeed, we are capable of great, technologically advanced evils as well as great, technologically advanced goods; technological progress simply doesn’t yield moral progress. That thought, I had for a long time believed, was all but universally shared after the horrors of the “short” twentieth century (1914–1989). Francis Fukuyama’s famous The End of History and the Last Man was such a sensation in part because it was so startling to reach the end of the twentieth century and recommit to an old doctrine about the inexorability of moral and political progress: the idea that now that we have found the true solution, that liberal capitalist democracy is the form of human social organization that represents the culmination of all possible moral, social, and political knowledge, leaving behind only some problems of boredom and anomie in paradise for the psychologists to clean up afterwards. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, in the immediate aftermath of seventy-five years of world wars, of genocide, of the beginning of a new form of government in human history—totalitarianism and the mass murdering one-party state—it was, I think, a commonplace by that point that we could no longer take seriously the so-called Enlightenment narratives about political progress. The claim that progress had been operating, and indeed that it had just culminated, seemed strange indeed. Despite the novel horrors of the twentieth century—world wars, the Holocaust, the phenomenon of totalitarian rule, the rise of nuclear weaponry and the associated threat of human extinction hanging over the head of political life—Fukuyama was struck by what he took to be the reality of an underlying moral-political progress through history up until that point. He intended to startle readers with the strangeness of it, and he succeeded.

Fukuyama’s partial optimism has been exploded, not only for his readers, but for Fukuyama himself. The era of the emerging post–Cold War liberal capitalist democratic utopia, the era of ever-expanding union in the European Union, standing as a symbol of the future peaceful integration of all of humanity, is long gone. It no longer seems credible. Even so, even now, the idea of progress still has a powerful hold on political imaginations. In part II of this lecture, I will turn to the more defensible version of the Enlightenment’s narrative about progress, which is Kant’s.

Image credit: Evelyn de Morgan, “By the Waters of Babylon” (1882-3), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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