Progress: The Last Superstition

 

Christopher Lose/3

either liberalism nor Marxism, its principal

competitor, seems to hold out much hope

for solutions to the mounting problems that
threaten to overwhelm us. Hence the search for some
third position, as evidenced by recent interest in civic
humanism, communitarianism, and other submerged
traditions of social criticism that have been over-
shadowed by the dominant traditions deriving from the
Enlightenment. The search for a third way, neither
MarxiSt nor liberal, reflects a growing fear that people
are no longer in control of their lives.

\Whether it is possible to imagine a convincing alter-
native to the ideologies that have shaped the modern
world and what such an alternative would look like
depend on our understanding of just where the old
ideologies went wrong. My own view is that the roots
of the dif?culty lay in their common commitment to
the idea of progress?which is why I am so deeply
opposed to an attempt to stake out a new position that
continues to define itself as ?progressive.? That way,
nothing but confusion lies.

The ?rst thing we need to understand is that hope
does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a
belief in justice: the conviction that the wicked will
suffer, that wrongs will be made right. that the underlying
order of things is not ?oured with impunity. Hope
implies a deep-seated trust in life, which appears absurd
to those who lack it. But hope serves us better, in
steering troubled waters ahead, than a belief in progress.
Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst. On
the contrary, the worst is always what the hopeful are
prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth
much if it had not survived disappointments in the
past, while their knowledge that the future holds further
disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for
hope. Believers in progress, on the other hand, though
they like to think of themselves as the party of hope,
actually have little need for it, since they have history
on their side. Still, their lack of hope incapacitates
them for intelligent action. Improvidence, a blind faith
that things will somehow work out for the best, serves

 

Christopher Lesa/?9, a professor of history at the University of
Rochester; is a contributing editor to Tikkun. He is the author
of The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979) and The Minimal
Self (Norton, 1984), and is currenth writing a book called
Hope Against Hope: Progress and Its Critics.

as a poor substitute for the disposition to see things
through even when they don't.

This fatalistic optimism, this con?dent assumption
that history works on the side of enlightenment, equality,
and individual freedom, was the source of Marxism?s
nororious indifference to the morality of means and
ends?the issue that troubled those who believed that
progress was a mixed blessing at best. For Marxists, the
choice of means was simple: whatever hastened the
proletarian revolution. The ?natural laws of capitalism,"
Marx said, worked ?with iron necessity towards inevitable
results.? This did nor mean that every nation had to go
through a bourgeois phase on the way to socialism.
\When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they could
cite Marx?s statement that Russia might be able to ?obtain
the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched
humanity without passing through the capitalist regime.?
\Without a bourgeois revolution, however, the socialist
regime would itself have to do the work of capitalism,
beginning with the expropriation of the peasantry;
eventually this logic became the rationale for Stalinism
in the Soviet Union. The upshot of the Marxian scheme
of history was that certain things had to happen in
sequence, whether they happened under bourgeois or
?proletarian? auspices: the destruction of the old landed
aristocracy; the rise of a new ruling class in its place;
the ?annihilation? of small-scale production; the trans-
formation of peasants and artisans into wage workers;
the replacement of communal, patriarchal, and ?idyllic?
arrangements by contractual arrangements; the rise of
a new individualism in personal life; the collapse of
religion and the spread of scientific habits of thought;
the demysti?cation of authority. Some such series of
developments had to take place whether anyone wanted
them to or not, and no matter what groups happened
to be in charge of the state at any given time. Marx ?s
theory of history, political philosopher Jon Elster writes,
was ?strangely disembodied.? By ?working backward
from the end result to preconditions,? it ?could dispense
with actors and their intentions.? Because it dispensed
with actors, we should add, it could also dispense with
questions of politics and morality.

According to Marx, socialism would reconcile the
individual and society. It represented a ?higher 
between individualism and ?organic unity.? Elster, a
sympathetic critic, finds the indiscriminate solidarity?

27

 

envisioned by Marx and Engels both unconvincing and
a little ominous. People need a ?narrower focus of
loyalty and solidarity than the international community
of workers,? Elster argues. Altruism ?ourishes in ?small,
stable groups? and ?declines as the circle of individuals
expands.? ?Free-floating benevolence? is incompatible
with ?personal integrity and strength of character.? But
Marx could not have acknowledged the value of small,
stable groups without sacri?cing his unilinear theory of
progress, according to which history moves inexorably
in the direction of more and more inclusive forms of
solidarity.

The liberal theory of progress, on the other hand, is
less rigid and therefore more easily reconciled, it seems,
with evidence that history does not always move in a
single directiOn. It was not the secularization of the
Christian belief in Providence that gave rise to the
eighteenth-century idea of progress, as is so often alleged,
but the more specific assumption that people?s appetites,
formerly condemned as a source of social instability
and personal unhappiness, could drive the economic
machine?just as people?s insatiable curiosity drove the
scientific project?and thus insure a never-ending expan-
sion of productive forces. The moral rehabilitation of
desire generated a new sense of possibility, which an-
nounced itself most characteristically not in the vague
utopianism of the French Enlightenment but in the
hardheaded new science of political economy. For Adam
Smith, it was the self-generating character of rising
expectations, newly acquired needs and tastes, and new
Standards of personal comfort that broke the old cycle
of social growth and decay and gave rise to a form of
society capable of inde?nite expansion.

The decisive break with older ways of thinking came
when human needs began to be seen not as natural but
as historical and constantly changing, hence insatiable.
As the supply of material comforts increased, standards
of comfort increased as well, and the category of neces-
sities came to include many goods formerly regarded as
luxuries. For Smith, the ?uniform, constant, and un-
interrupted effort of every man to better his condition?
became the ?principle from which public and national,
as well as private opulence is originally derived.? Smith?s
defense of high wages, unusual for its time, tested on
the premise that ?a person who can acquire no property
can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to
labor as little as possible.? The hope of improving his
condition, on the other hand, would encourage Smith?s
working man to spend his income on ?things more
durable? than the ?hospitality? and ?festivals? preferred
by the wealthy; and the accumulated effects of this kind
of expenditure, even though they might reflect a ?base
and selfish disposition,? would maintain a whole nation
of industrious workers.

28 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 3

he history of liberalism, for our present pur-

poses, can be seen as the periodic attenuation

and abandonment of these ideas, on the one
hand, and the periodic rediscovery of them, on the
other, by a long line of thinkers, culminating with the pro-
ponents of Keynesian economics, who made the most
refined attempts to link social progress to the inde?nite
expansion of consumer demand. The conCEpt of pro-
gress, as the most aStute liberal theorists have under-
stood, can be defended against intelligent criticism only
by postulating a never-ending expansion of desires, a
steady rise in the general standard of comfort, and
(most important of all) the continual incorporation of
new groups into the culture of consumption. It is only
in this form that the idea of progress has survived the
calamities of the twentieth century. More extravagant
versions of the progressive faith, premised on the per-
fectibility of human nature?on the unrealized power
of reason or love?collapsed a long time ago, but the
liberal version has proved surprisingly resistant to the
shocks to easy optimism administered in rapid succession
by twentieth-century events.

Liberalism was never utopian, unless the democrati-
zation of consumption is itself a utopian ideal. It made
no difficult demands on human nature. It presupposed
nothing more strenuous in the way of motivation than
intelligent self-interest. It assumed that almost everyone
had a stake in increased productivity, higher wages,
shorter hours of work, and a more creative use of
leisure. Capitalism, said Horace Kallen, the political
philosopher of consumption, had .. raised the general
standard of living,  transformed scarcity into abun-
dance, awakening wants where none had been before,
multiplying few into many, bringing more and more
varied goods to more people at lower prices, so that
what had been formerly, if at all, available only reach of many of those who had produced
much and consumed little.? It remained only to complete
the capitalist revolution by making the ?blessings of
leisure? available to all. No improvement in mental
capacity was required in order for the desirability of
this goal to be generally recognized; nor did the realiza-
tion of the goal require altruism and self-sacri?ce?only
a willingness to subordinate short-term pleasure to long-
term peace and prosperity.

Even this modest level of discipline, however, has
prdved dif?cult to sustain in societies propelled by the
imperatives of mass consumption. In American politics,
the kind of intelligent conservatism that reconciled the
business classes to the need for social justice is Clearly
on the wane, perhaps because demands for reform
voiced from below have grown increasingly faint. During
the age of reform, imaginative statesmen like Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt

could cite the radical pressures mounted by Populists,
socialists, and militant labor unions as an incentive to
implement more modest reforms. For a variety of reasons,
however, it has become more and more dif?cult for
popular demands to get a hearing. Third parties are
weaker than they used to be; the consolidation of the
press into a handful of giant chains eliminates small
papers and narrows the range of political debate; the
dominance of television further encourages this homog-
enization of opinion; the growth of the executive branch
of government at the expense of the legislature makes
of?cials less directly responsible to a popular constitu-
ency, while the courts, the least accountable branch of
government, have assumed an increasingly important
role in policy-making; and the system of direct primaries,
instituted in the hope of bringing government closer to
the people, has had the opposite effect, increasing the
?nancial resources necessary to mount a successful cam-
paign and transferring the selection of candidates from
party managers to the mass media more than to the
voters. The effect of these changes in making government
appear remote and inaccessible to ordinary people is
evident in the decline of voting, in widespread political
apathy, and in the distrust of \Washington on which the
New Right has played so effectively.

rom the beginning, liberalism placed less em-

phasis on the duties of citizenship than on the

right to enjoy the good things of life. The function
of the state was to guarantee those rights, not to provide
citizens with a political education or to interfere in
any way with the pursuit of private advantage. Democ-
racy (insofar as it was identi?ed with liberalism at all)
thus came to be identi?ed with an equitable distribution
of goods rather than with the widest possible participa-
tion in public life. A general improvement in the standard
of living seemed to justify the choice of distributive
democracy over participatory democracy. Recent experi-
ence, however, suggests that it may be impossible, in
the long run, to achieve one without the other. The
favored few cannot be trusted to consult the needs of
the many, even when, as Keynes and Kallen pointed
out, it is manifestly in their long-term interest to raise
the general level of consumption. If the many now
enjoy comforts formerly restricted to the few, it is because
they have won them through their own political initiative,
not because the wealthy have voluntarily surrendered
some of their privileges or because the market auto-
matically assures abundance for all. The decline of
popular initiative in politics, together with the decline
of intelligent c0nservatism, therefore wears a menacing
look; a steady progress toward equality, to put it mildly,
can no longer be taken for granted.

Liberalism ultimately presupposes the creatiOn of a
global market that embraces populations formerly ex-
cluded from any reasonable expectation of affluence.
But the prediction that ?sooner or later we will all be
affluent,? uttered so con?dently only a few years ago,
no longer carries much conviction. The global circula-
tion of commodities, information, and populations, far
from making everyone af?uent, has widened the gap
between rich and poor nations and has generated a
massive migration to the West, where the newcomers
swell the vast army of the homeless, unemployed,
illiterate, drug-ridden, derelict, and effectively disen-
franchised. Their presence strains existing resources
to the breaking point. Medical and educational facilities,

 

Hope does not demand a
belz'efz'n progress. It demands a
belief 2'72 justice.

 

law-enforcement agencies, and the job supply?not to
mention the supply of racial tolerance and goodwill,
never abundant to begin with?all appear inadequate
to the enormous task of assimilating what is essentially
a surplus or ?redundant? population, in the cruelly
expressive British phrase. The poisonous effects of
poverty and racial discrimination cannot be ghettoized;
they too circulate on a global scale. ?Like the effects of
industrial pollution and the new system of global ?nan-
cial markets,? Susan Sontag writes, ?the AIDS crisis is
evidence of a world  in which everything that can
circulate does??goods, images, garbage, disease. It is
not surprising that ?the look into the future, which was
once tied to a vision of linear progress,? has turned into
a ?vision of disaster,? in Sontag?s words, and that ?any-
thing . . . that can be described as changing steadily can
be seen as heading toward catastrophe.?

The gist of my argument up to this point is that the
consumerist program cannot succeed without popular
participation in government and without a heightened
sense of civic commitment, both of which, however,
tend to be eroded by the consumerist emphasis on
private satisfactions [and by many other features of
consumerist culture as well). To this we can add a
second point: that consumerism requires a global market
and a continuation of the trend toward political central-
ization, whereas civic participation is far more effective
in small COmmunities where people feel directly respon-
sible for their actionsthis dilemma
except to choose one of its two horns, either equality or
economic growth, either citizenship or consumerism. We
can?t have both, and there is no point in pretending that

PROGRESS: THE LAST SUPERSTITION 29

 

we can somehow combine ?community? with large-scale
organization or civic revival with a continuing commit?
ment to a more and more af?uent standard of living.

conviction that our progressive society is

approaching the end of the road and that we

will have to face hard choices in the near
future is strengthened by another consideration, namely,
the mounting evidence that the earth?s ?nite resources
will not support an inde?nite expansion of industrial
civilization along its present lines. \Vhile the attempt to
maintain the existing standard of living enjoyed by
industrial nations without sharing it with the rest of the
world would be unconscionable, the attempt to export
\Y/estern standards would eventually mean the exhaustion
of nonrenewable resources, the irreversible pollution
of the earth?s atmosphere, the drastic alteration of its
climate, and the destruction, in short, of the ecological
system on which human life depends. Rudolph Bahro, a
leading spokesman for the West German Greens, writes:

Let us imagine what it would mean if the raw material
and energy consumption of our society were extended
to the four and a half billion people living today, or
to the ten to ?fteen billion there will probably be
tomorrow. It is readily apparent that the planet can
only support such volumes of production  for a
short time to come.

If Bahto is right, we have only two choices: to make the
\West more than ever an island of prosperity in a poverty-
stricken world, barricading ourselves against our neigh-
bors; or to accept a general reduction of our own standard
of living. Neither alternative, it hardly needs to be
pointed out, is consistent with the ideology of progress.

If there is any merit in the sketchy arguments outlined
here, they suggest a ?nal point: the need to clarify the
communitarian critique of liberalism and to face its
social, political, and cultural implications without ?inch-
ing. Communitarianism, if that is what we want to call
it, does not imply a return to the New Deal, the revival
of the progressive tradition in American politics. It
implies a repudiation of that tradition. It implies small-
scale production, workers? control of industry, and com-
munity control of education. It also implies, I think, a

30 TIKKUN VOLwillingness to undergo the risks of public controversy
about morality and religion. The exclusion of moral
and religious issues frorn politics has been one of the
hallmarks of liberalism and one of the preconditions,
in all likelihood, of economic progress. It was Only
when the separation of church and state put an end to
the wars of religion that the West was able to devote
itself wholeheartedly to the all-engaging task of increas-
ing productivity. Once the state ceased to be the guardian
of religious orthodoxy, it could assume what has since
come to be recognized as its primary function-?that of
keeping the economy in good working order.

The price of this policy, however, has been a certain
trivialization of public debate. One of the reasons people
take so little interest in politics today, aside from the in-
accessibility of the bureaucratic structures that dominate
political life, is that politics fails to address issues of
overriding moral importance. It won?t do, therefore,
for communitarians to call for a revival of civic spirit
while deploring the right?s attempt to put divisive moral
and religious issues on the political agenda. Liberals
can consistently argue that such issues are matters of
private choice and therefore do not belong in public,
but communitarians don?t enjoy that luxury. If they are
serious, they will have to engage the religious right on
its own terms, recognizing that a community is consti-
tuted by vigorous public debate about the issues that
really matter, not by universal agreement about those
issues. Orestes Brownson once said, always hold that
to be important truth, wherein I differ from others.?
One of the more farsighted of nineteenth-century social
critics, Brownson pointed out that the separation of
politics and religion actually led not so much to the
exclusion of religion from public life but to a bland,
nondenominational civil religion that helped to enforce
the socioeconomic status quo. When he criticized the
separation of religion and politics, he meant that ques-
tions concerning the ?destiny of man? ought to become
questions for public debate, not that a new religious
establishment should provide authoritative answers-
?Peace is a good thing, but justice is . Give us
the noise and contention of life, rather than the peace and
silence of the charnel-house.? Communitarians would
be well advised to take these words to heart.