History shows that human progress is a myth

There are two different kinds of stories.

The first is the linear story. The characters start at position A and end at position B, having beaten all the baddies, and married the right person. The real story is about the transformation that happens along the way. This is a story about direction. Mostly, it’s about progress. We move from naïve to wise, raw to cooked, NPC to hero.

In terms of philosophy, the linear-progressive story is best represented by the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel argued that history is measured by a series of resolvable battles. One side represents red, the other represents blue. The two struggle over days, years, decades, or centuries until eventually they bleed so much they bleed into each other. Red and blue become purple. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Movement, countermovement, resolution. And so, for Hegel, we move forward in a constantly improving run. Each battle makes us better and wiser.

Over the summer, I spoke with the philosopher John Gray about this idea of “progress,” at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival. And Gray doesn’t think much of it.

Progress is not inevitable

A lot of us born into the Western intellectual tradition often assume the idea of progress is just the natural way to view history. Everything’s getting better, right? We’re wiser, stronger, more knowledgeable than ever before – around the next bend will be a painless, dancing utopia. But, as with a lot of assumptions, this is mostly a projection. This is how Gray put it:

“If you go back to Greek drama or Shakespeare, or Hinduism or Buddhism none of these assumptions are made about the future of mankind being potentially better than it’s ever been in the past. It’s a modern Western myth, and I would say it’s a kind of neo-Christian myth, because it comes about by secularizing certain Christian assumptions about sacred time, about human history being meaningful.”

Gray argues that progress is a kind of illusion – a myth dizzily jumbled together up in a Judeo-Christian hangover. But anything we might call progress is quickly undone and often taken for granted. This is how Gray argues his case in premises-to-conclusion form:

1. Progress is not the same as improvement. Progress means a cumulative advance that does not unwind over generations or centuries.
2. In technology, we do make progress. The gains are cumulative and retained over millennia.
3. In ethics and politics, though, gains are not cumulative — they unwind depressingly often.

Therefore: There is no such thing as progress in ethics and politics.

It’s a persuasive argument, and much does depend on Gray’s definition of progress as something that’s basically permanent. If we accept that, well then it doesn’t take a macrohistorian to point out that almost all civilizations do tend to unwind over time. We oscillate between periods of peace and war; order and madness; security and terror. Politically, history is a pendulum. So, too, ethically. For all our talk of human rights, liberty, and universal love, we still kill and destroy each other with Neolithic ease. And here we have the second kind of story: the cyclical one. The pendulum one. This story sees history as oscillation, and we just happen to occupy a certain position on the swing.

The end of history

So, what about those Hegelian ideas of progress? For example, what about Karl Marx’s idea that our systems of governance are moving forward? Marx argued that we can see a movement from something like despotism to feudalism to capitalism to socialism. Each was different from the one before, each a step better, and there was no “unwinding,” as Gray put it.

Gray doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t think there will be any “end of history” in either the Francis Fukuyama or Marxist sense. Rather, Gray sees things in terms of revolutions and countermovements. In politics and ethics, nothing stays still long enough to be called progress.

On an individual level, most people are only one or two catastrophes away from utter moral ruin. If you murdered my children, threw me into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and gave me a gun, I have little doubt I’d become unrecognizable to who I am right now. We are all just a comic strip away from our villain origin story. As the Joker put it, “all it takes is a little push.”

On a social level, if you just look at how wildly irrational the crowd becomes in times of shortage or fear, I think you can appreciate how much things rest on a knife-edge. In March 2020, the UK went bananas near the start of the UK’s COVID lockdown legislation. It only took a few headlines of “there might be a supply problem with toilet paper” for the entire country to panic-buy the stuff. People get weird when things get bad. The next great revolution might come in one bomb, one virus, or one intergalactic threat. Or it might be the drip effect of constant deterioration and deprivation.

Either way, it’s easy to see the world with Gray-tinted glasses.

This article is featured on Big Think.