Anyone who is so “progressive” as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God; whoever remains in the teaching has the Father and the Son. (2 John 1:9)
ORIGIN OF PROGRESS
At first glance, Biblical text would be the last place to find mention of the word progressive, especially since the notion of “progress” did not appear in English until the fourteenth century of the Common Era. [The word “progressive” would come later.] (See below.) Progress came into vogue in a century that included the plague known as the “Black Death”; the “Great Papal Schism” of the Avignon captivity that elected not just two popes, but three simultaneously; and endless wars of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions fighting under the banners of the Papacy and Holy Roman Emperor, respectively. This does not mean there was no scientific, moral, or social progress in England or elsewhere prior to the fourteenth century. It has always been widely held that, like empires and civilizations that rise and fall, societies go through cycles of advancement and retrogression.
The English word ‘progress’ is derived from the Latin progressus—“going forward; taking a step to walk forward; to advance.” The Greek word for progressive, as used by the author of 2 John, is understood to mean, “Anyone who goes ahead.” Going ahead meant taking a step forward into doing something that no one has done before; or to build upon the work of others, as the path of advancing or improving society.
PROGRESS IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
By the sixteenth century, Europe was evolving from Christendom into a continent of nation-states characterized by strong monarchies. Germany, though not yet a nation of centralized rule, led to the first cracks in Christendom. Martin Luther, a relatively unknown Augustinian monk in one of the Saxon regions of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, published his ninety-five theses at the University of Wittenberg in 1517. Before the century was to conclude, sola scriptura and individual conscience trumped ecclesiastical institutional authority. In 1534, King Henry VIII of England, by royal enactment, severed papal authority over his kingdom. France, Poland, Sweden, and other monarchs enacted their own separations of church and state. By the end of the sixteenth century, England, under Elizabethan rule, “progress” had evolved from ‘going forward’ into a “movement towards something better … in an advancement or growth to higher stages … along the line of development or improvement.” As this time became known to historians as the “Early Modern Period,” in reflection of greater state control over religious matters, progress acquired a larger meaning beyond growth and advancement. By the time James I acceded to the English throne in 1603, progress became a “state journey by royalty.” This definition fit agreeably with royal concepts such as the Divine Right of Kings, as memorably expressed by French King Louis XIV (r.1643-1715) in the statement “I am the state.”
With the censure of Galileo (1564-1642) by papal authority, confidence heretofore in the scholastic tradition that reason can be applied to all endeavors – both earthly and heavenly – sublunary and spiritual – began to wane. With the rise of Isaac Newton (1643-1727), accounting for the supernatural had no place in Newton’s mechanistic universe governed by the natural laws of celestial mechanics. Not only was church authoritative teaching increasingly rejected in the temporal and spiritual realms, but also the pious Protestant interactivity with scripture became overshadowed by a metaphysics of mechanism, of forces and counterforces, that obviated the supernatural to a stark, passionless Spinozian universe, bereft of petitionary requests to a personal God.
REASON AND REVOLUTION
The eighteenth century is widely acknowledged as the historian gazetteer’s guide to locating the seminal moments that gave rise to the Age of Reason. The rise of Masonic Lodges; the secret society of Bavaria Illuminati; the skepticism of Voltaire; the growth of empire and the rustlings of revolution—all were waymarks in the historian gazetteer’s chronological trek through the eighteenth century.
The Life of Reason was supposed to be a natural reaction in opposition to obscurantism, superstition, relics, miracles and, in general, religious influence over public and private life. In addition, these rational philosophs railed against the abuses of power by monarchs, churchmen, and a landholding nobility. Their objective was the overthrow of existing government – to liberate reason from the dominating authority of Church and State, substituting republican forms of government for monarchical institutions.
The Life of Reason did not turn out as intended. Reason did not supplant belief, but subsumed it. Reason itself was a “belief” in that reason was assumed to be applicable to all human endeavors. Reason is itself a matter of faith. The French Enlightenment was a heresy, and its appeal to Reason was an act of faith that admitted no criticism. Deists and materialists shared the belief in the transcendence of Reason, and the inevitability of intellectual and moral progress, though there was nothing in their premises to warrant such assumptions. While the Middle Ages were an age of faith based upon reason, the eighteenth century was an age of reason based on faith.
The Enlightenment’s pursuit of reason and liberation from religions of the past paradoxically led to new forms of domination through instrumental rationality—turning human beings into objects of control. Traditional forms of authority, such as religion and hierarchy, critique the Enlightenment ‘project’ for reducing life to calculable systems, enabling totalitarianism, mass culture, and the dehumanizing oppression of the “dark, satanic mills” of the industrial revolution. Was this a step forward on the path to progress?
Besides being an expression of faith, domination, and the will to control, defenders of reason overlooked the role of the passions—and especially the will—in directing the passions, rationally, to choose freely and wisely. The imperatives of avarice, desire, and power are the passions to which reason is slave. Under these circumstances, passion will override reason every time. Reason is powerless to correct our passions. All reason derives from a set of principles that serve as a foundation upon which to “buildeth up” a society.*
*The term “buildeth” is an archaism from the King James Version of the Bible. “Buildeth” signifies the act of constructing physical structures, edifices, or foundations. Besides physical structures, “buildeth” is used metaphorically to describe the edification of the spiritual life. This act of building is likened to a wise man who “buildeth” his house on a rock, ensuring stability and endurance. The concept of “buildeth” underscores the importance of intentionality and foundation in both physical and spiritual endeavors. Building is not merely an act of creation, but also an act of faith. “Buildeth” serves as a reminder of the enduring call to build wisely and faithfully in accordance with some divine blueprint.
The foundation serves as the bedrock upon which societies can be constructed. Upon the bedrock can be erected a new structure or order for the ages. The building of a structure of such magnitude requires a strong, internal ‘skeleton’ that holds together the entire edifice, such as steel girders holding a building together, or a Gothic cathedral’s superstructural balancing of weight, mass, and materials mutually resisting and counterbalancing the “forces” of each.**
**Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) elaborated the roles of culture and education within Marx’s theories of economy, politics, and class, focusing on the sociology (i.e., institutions) of culture, and cultural studies, esp. the cultural and political significance of mass media. He called ‘hegemony’ the control of the liberal worldview over the superstructure — especially culture, education, philosophy, political economy, and the genealogy of moral values.
The application of reason in a society cannot be done in a vacuum. Every society in every part of the world builds upon reasonings from earlier generations without having to scrap first principles or reinvent the wheel. Symbols, institutions, hierarchies, and sacred texts—all provide hard-won victories over ignorance up to the present moment. Prudent societies do not cast off, like worn-out clothing, hard-earned knowledge. As Gramsci noted, one cannot invent his own superstructure, but must, at least initially, rely on what is available in existing traditions, to apply the cunning of reason in a phenomenal world.
To discover, invent, or apply Reason outside the parameters of an authoritative tradition, is a form of insanity. No man is an island. To reason as Robinson Crusoe had, is to reason without root, to reason in the void.
Getting off of the wrong foot by the scrapping of first principles under revolutionary fervor became a kind of rational suicide by explaining itself away through the irrational developments of the twentieth century. The enlightenment project is still struggling to explain away the failures of socialism, modernity, and the idolatry of ideologies. Thus, the age of reason has ended in the disillusionment of progress.
PROGRESS AS JOURNEY
“He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
By the eighteenth century, progress was transformed into a journey. This type of journey was not necessarily a ‘step forward’; nor being original; nor advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Stirrings of this corruption of the meaning of progress as gradual deformation was first applied to a series of paintings known as William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress“, published in 1735. The series of paintings do not depict an advancement, improvement, or step forward—presumably to something better. Rather, The Rake’s Progress portrays the decline and fall of a spendthrift who goes to London and wastes all his money on luxurious living, prostitution and gambling. The end result of his dissolute living is imprisonment and consignment to a mental institution.***
*** Hogarth’s Rake was not the first, and certainly will not be the last man to “progress’’ from sanity to dissolution to madness. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) carved out his path to progress not in a London-like cosmopolitan tantalizing milieu, but through the aloof life of a reclusive scholar and self-proclaimed prophet. He never married and renounced his Prussian citizenship as a young man. In essence, he did not belong anywhere; he was stateless. For a person who spent a lifetime writing in a series of boarding houses in Switzerland and Italy, he did not live up to the characters and archetypes he wrote about. His works encompass the following themes: master-slave morality; the will to power; nihilism; pessimism; pity and compassion as weakness—all beseemingly unworthy of an overmastering Übermensch. He regarded pity as a spiteful, transvaluative moral inversion born out of the ressentiment of slaves. Progress meant that the superior type of man is an exceptional person who should follow his own “inner law.” He recognized that such self-pride often cometh before the fall. Nietzsche wrote: “All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad.”
His nihilism and pessimism were not indicators on the path of progress, but a sign of general decay. He ‘progressed’ from being a classical philologist tenured at age 24 to a deeply disturbed troublesome isolate who, at age 44, descended into madness, collapsing in a mental breakdown that institutionalized him for the rest of his life.
Spurred on by ‘progress’ in the belief of the perfectibility of man, French ‘commoners’ stormed the Bastille in 1789 to ‘accelerate’ a new order for the ages into being. From this impulse arose the Romantic movements that sprang up all across Europe. The early nineteenth century gave witness to a new form of personal expression—in art, culture, dress, and manner, resulting in the birth of an affective cult of worship to the authentic self. To these “Romantics,” progress was no longer reckoned as an effort or movement towards truth or ‘understanding reality’;**** rather, romantic ‘progress’ consisted of indulging one’s feelings with a touch of sentimentality to take over and submerge the soul, so long as one is sincere. As long as one was sincere in his authenticity, it was not considered a sign of weakness. But the test of sincerity is that it must always be subject to proof. Sincerity thus becomes a mere performative assertion, without an envisioned end-in-view that could be a stepping-stone for the march of progress onwards.
****French philosopher Henri Bergson’s (1859-1941) ‘dynamic’ religion left him with a subjectivized, William Jamesian variety of religious experience reduced to feeling and a vague, anarchic mysticism left open to occultist influences. His “dynamic” religion takes no account of a search for truth; instead, he focuses on understanding “reality”. It does not occur to him that his ‘reality’ may be a world of shadows, which he mistakes for ‘true’ reality, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave. His reality may be, and is likely to be, a contrived consensus reality, built on propaganda and fake news.
Romanticism, a movement that extolled freedom of the sovereign individual to push to the limits, sometimes with reckless abandon, was, first and foremost, a quest for authentic experience, which found expression in the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Edgar Allen Poe, Joseph Hayden, and others. These litterateurs’ and composers’ passion was to attain inner mastery which would manifest itself in outward expression. America, at this time, in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, were busily journeying on the open road. These ‘journeying’ Americans associated progress with exploration, expansion, and the westward drive to empire, as found expression in the works of the American poet Walt Whitman and the New England Transcendentalists. This “Era of Good Feelings” was gradually overtaken by a gathering storm that soon burst upon the face of America and, in Europe, by a new wave of revolutions.
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
As romanticism was petering out due to its inherent, self-referential solipsism, the early-to-mid nineteenth century witnessed to a darker side in the onward march to progress and empire. For example, the July Revolution in France (1830) saw French cities roamed by street-fighting gangs, in which two anti-monarchial, republican movements came into being. The movements were named as socialisme (socialism); and communisme (communism)—when these terms first came into use on their long march through history.
The ‘march to progress’ continued on in 1831 through three events related to slavery: William Lloyd Garrison’s publication of the Liberator, an antislavery newsletter; the revolt of Nat Turner which resulted in close to a hundred men, women and children being slaughtered or sent to the gallows; and, in 1832, the British Empire, possibly in reaction to the moral sentiment as expressed by Garrison, and the very real fear of a Nat Turner like episode taking place in British colonies, Great Britain abolished slavery throughout the Empire. Polemics, insurrection, and abolition were not the only reckonings on the free labor/slavery question. Europe had to deal with the “specter” of communism. America had the luxury of filling up its newly acquired territories. The former were concerned with the security of capital; the latter with regulating the freedom and flow of labor into the territories. Progress, in each case, reflected a conflict of visions: Will capital be assured an adequate return? Can an economy built on communism “work”? Can economies consisting of slave labor and serfdom tied to the land be compatible with mobile capital? We shall see.
From the time of Great Britain’s abolition (1832) until America’s ending of civil war that finally abolished slavery (1865), the labor question for mid-century became the focal point of debates on progress. Just societies required resolution to the distribution, compensation, and migration of labor. The pressing domestic issue for several national economies of the mid nineteenth century was the matter of serfdom (a form of slavery that, like a restrictive covenant, “runs with the land).” And a related issue was how should economies be structured to minimize conflict and foster cooperation between labor and capital? The Revolutions of 1848 throughout Europe first attempted to address this issue. All socialist and communist uprisings failed. But, instead, they acquired a revolutionary fervor for self-identified ethnic and cultural groups to aspire to independence, autonomy, or unification. Matters of culture, blood, and soil appear to triumph over political economy every time.
While Europe was in turmoil, the United States in 1848 manifested its destiny to rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. With the acquisition of the southwestern New Mexico territories and California, the United States and its extensive, contiguous territory soon to be carved up into states, now numbered more than three million square miles. As luck would have it, in that selfsame year (1848), gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California, leading to a stampede of fortune seekers and ne’er-do-wells seeking riches to be scooped up and minted into gold coinage for circulation. By mid-century (1850), California became a state, America’s territorial expanse covered more ground than all of Europe, in what had been an already rich nation, became even richer. Abraham Lincoln seemed not to be far off the mark, referring to Americans as “an almost chosen people.”
Besides the well-worn expression “progress westward ho!”, America was also redefining the word progress itself. With America now fully expanded from ocean to ocean, and the discovery of gold in California, the word progress itself took on more nuances in meaning. The denotation of progress as advancement, improvement and forward movement now acquired connotations of staying a course; a course underway; continue onward in a course—all in the name of progress, in the onward course toward empire and expansion.
The achievements of 1848, the rush of “49ers” to the gold fields of California, and what to do about settling and carving out new territories to admit as new states into the union, brought on new problems, on whether these new states should be admitted as slave or free states. Fast-growing California quickly qualified for statehood, and was admitted into the Union as a free state in 1850. Minnesota, Oregon, and Kansas soon followed. Like California, all the foregoing states were admitted as free states.
The United States, by 1861, had grown from a sliver of thirteen colonies hugging the Atlantic coast to a nation now numbering 34 states—19 free states; and 15 slave states—all ‘sectionally’ in the south. The divide that led to southern secession had little to do with states’ rights, and even less to do with the economies of agrarianism versus industry, nor with the effect of tariffs on trade. The fundamental difference was on the question of labor—whether labor shall have free movement to go where the ‘new’ jobs are springing up, especially in industry; or to go where free land is available for homesteading; or whether slavery and serfdom can persist in an era of vast expansion of railroad building, the acceleration of inventions, and automation of southern agriculture.
Since the year of revolutions of 1848, through 1861, the international community witnessed an acceleration of countries that abolished slavery or ended serfdom. Austria, Denmark, and Hungary quickly ended serfdom, followed by Russia’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861—four years before the United States outlawed slavery through passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
The outlawing of slavery and the will to enforce it is one of the crowning achievements in the annals of progress. Having now resolved the labor question, from the era of the American civil war, humanity entered a new age of nationalism in which progress was associated with the well-being and the strength of state and nation, especially its people.
Progress attained a social, societal dimension—it was not just for the advancement of some, but for all—without leaving anyone behind. Progress was determined along lines of advancing the community as a whole. The progress of the nation produced new offspring, taking on communal properties such as socialism, labor unions, and distributism. The advocates for these social movements would come to be known as progressives, a form of progress that fits Nietzsche’s notion of Beyond Good and Evil. His Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future became the age of robber barons, sweatshops, child labor, human trafficking, and attacks on the family—all advocated in the language of human rights – and all of which came to carry the label of being “progressive.” Progressivism, the progressive movement, and how it evolved into its modern meaning in opposition to conservative tradition, will be the subject of a future post.