ON PROGRESS
September15th 1998
The next issue, Number 28, will appear on October 15th 1998.
I have been asked recently "Are you against progress?"
On the face of it, this is a silly question rather like "Are you against
virtue?" It is simply a matter of definition - or at least of connotation -
that progress is to be welcomed and virtue is to be admired. Changes that
one does not think to be constructive do not count, in one's estimation, as
progress; behaviour of which one disapproves on moral grounds does not, in
one's estimation, count as virtuous. The problem is to identify which of the
various changes going on around us can reasonably be described as
progressive - that is, leading probably to the short term betterment of
human life without long term worsening of it.
Various people - Frederick Engels, Henry Ford, the early H G Wells - seem to
have had a Belief in Progress as did many others basking in the afterglow of
the Victorian zenith. It may well be the case that our species is
exceptional in that we are ever-hungry for knowhow as distinct from merely
possessing knowhow and simply taking it for granted. (Tigers, by contrast,
know how to hunt but they are not, it would seem, obsessed with the the
notion that they need to know how to hunt better and better; they do not, it
seems, Believe in the Inevitability of Progress In Hunting; they simply hunt
..... and natural selection may gradually result in more of this knowhow
being built into their species).
This Belief in Progress (the capital letter B is intentional) consists in
the conviction that there is an inevitable increase in human knowhow and
that such increase is necessarily good. This Belief seems to be on a par
with Belief in God(s) or the latter day Marxist Belief in the Laws of
Historical Materialism. Obstructing the will of God, obstructing the
workings of History, obstructing the march of Progress, are all seen
similarly, by the relevant Believers, as mischievous obstructions.
Of course, I believe in some things; I believe that I am not wasting my time
writing this essay (otherwise I would not be writing it). In other words, it
is merely my opinion that my doing so is, quite likely, time well spent and
, like many an opinion, I hold it in the full awareness that it may be a
mistaken opinion. The use of 'belief' as a synonym of 'opinion' is different
from from the use of 'Belief' as indicating an article of faith. Opinion is
where you arrive but where you do not necessarily remain but Belief is the
perceived certainty of where you start from. On any faltering journey
towards truth (perhaps only 'truth') that I may wish to undertake, I claim
the legendary Irishman's right to prefer to start from somewhere else. I
often wish I had!
The most I can say about starting points is that there are, of necessity, a
clutch of identifiable assumptions upon which I have to gamble if I am to do
anything practical whatever. Any first year student of philosophy can see
that these assumptions are indeed just that - assumptions. But students of
philosophy, of any number of years' standing, simply have to act on them in
their daily lives.
These assumptions, which we all driven to act upon, add up to what may be
called The Plain View: that there is a real material world 'out there', that
we can know about it, via our senses, 'in here', with sufficient
dependability, and can systematise that assumed knowledge, and derive
knowhow from it, to an extent that is practically significant. None of which
gives us warrant to assume, let alone Believe, that the unreflective
accumulation of knowhow is necessarily benign or necessarily independent of
our control. So, Belief in Progress, which depends upon assuming that
increasing knowhow is both necessarily benign and that it is necessarily
inevitable, is like any other Belief - I just don't believe it, it is simply
my opinion that these assumptions are not well founded.
The Believers in Progress often seem to be inconsistent. On the one hand
they often say that Progress is Inevitable - and that people who question
this article of faith are often likened to King Canute - and they often say
that we are responsible for the abuses of knowhow when such occur. It seems
odd to hold both that increasing knowhow is inevitable and that we can
choose, or not, to apply any given bit of it. If we can eschew a given piece
of knowhow then, presumably, we could have let slip the opportunity to
acquire it in the first place or can even, although admittedly with
difficulty, suppress it subsequently. People who think that dangerous
knowhow can be left unused, or even suppressed, are often called Luddites by
the Priests of Progress.
So the question "Are you against progress?" and the related question 'Do I
Believe in Progress?' have no point in my opinion. They arise from a species
of quasi-religious certainty that leaves me unmoved.
What does have point is an ongoing attempt to identify which of the many
changes that are going on around us are progressive, retrogressive or
neutral in their likely effects. The essential phrase is 'likely effects'
and these are not matters of faith or Belief but of fallible assessment of
limited data, matters of opinion.
Let us be clear; there is no Belief, on my part, either in data or in my
infallible powers of inference from data; it is simply that limited data,
perhaps none too well-founded, and fragile inference are all we have to go
on.
The basic claim made in this Atheist Thought website is that there is no
sufficient ground for Belief in God; the same goes for Belief in
God-Substitutes such as Progress. Religious people are right to see these
substitutes as false gods; my contention is that all gods are, in default of
sufficient evidence to the contrary, false gods. One such, a survival from
naive Victorian optimism, is Progress. A slightly more recent one is The
State; then there has been History; another has-been-god is expressed in the
phrase The Destiny of Our Nation; the currently most fashionable one is
Market Forces - especially Globalised Market Forces - but those are Other
Stories, other god-substitutes, other false gods, that are beyond the scope
of this article.
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