Information AboutSocial Progress |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT SOCIAL PROGRESS | |
| sociology | |
| ethnology | |
| anthropology | |
| political philosophy | |
| social philosophy | |
| theories of history | |
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When it was conceived, the notion of social progress was extremely Radical . The reason is that previous to that time, the Social Order was viewed as unchangeable and immutable, often Divine ly ordained. In other words, ultimately God had created the Social System , and that system as well as the place people had in that system was eternal, constant and permanent (but cyclical, like the seasons). Nothing really changed, and the more it changed, the more it stayed the same; the emphasis was on seeing the constant, Eternal aspects in human life. This interpretation of society was very Conservative , because even if Change occurred, this was merely a Superficial aspect of an underlying social order which was eternal. In turn, this way of seeing things was based on a way of life in which very little changed (except seasonally, as with the weather, or ''the stages of a man's life''), and in which people stuck to their station in life, not having or ''expecting'' the option or chance of moving out of it to a different station in life. ENLIGHTENMENT The big breakthrough to a new idea in Europe came with the Enlightenment , when Social Commentators and Philosopher s began to realize that people ''themselves'' could change society and change their way of life. Instead of being made completely by God, there was increasing room for the idea that people themselves ''made their own society'' - and not only that, as Giambattista Vico argued, ''because'' people practically made their own society, they could also fully comprehend it. This gave rise to new sciences, or Proto-sciences , which claimed to provide new scientific knowledge about what society was really like, and how it could be changed for the better. In turn, this gave rise to Progressive opinion, in contrast with conservative opinion. The conservatives were skeptical, critical and cynical about Panacea s for social progress - believing that ''any'' scheme of social amelioration was doomed, given that people just are as they are, and nothing changes very much except the Rhetoric of change; try what you like, it was impossible to change human circumstances, and the more things appeared to change, the more they stayed the same anyhow. The only progress there could be, is if people could only understand the eternal conditions of human life, and stopped fighting against that reality. By contrast, the progressives focused on real changes actually occurring, and introduced the concept of Choice . Life did not have to happen in a pre-ordained way; people could make choices, and on the basis of those choices, ''there would be different outcomes''. Ethically, this implied a human Responsibility for what happened to people, rather than seeing it just as God's will. THE NOTION OF FREEDOM This new idea implied a new concept of human of 1789, which inspired a lot of new philosophical thought. In the philosophy of the German thinker Hegel , history is radically recast as the continual development of humanity towards ever greater freedom, continually extending the limits of freedom. This philosophy is still religious and mystical however, insofar as Hegel sees history as culminating in the unity of God with the world, but at the same time, Hegel also affirmed and imputed a Logos or Teleology to human history, and fully recognised that both evolutionary and revolutionary transformations took place in history. This was a Hope ful philosophy, which in a Rational way sees real progress occurring in history. It was possible to detect human advances, as well as human regressions to an earlier state. In Hegels' view, if something existed, it was rational; if it passed out of existence, that was because it had become irrational. This contained a very important idea, however poorly expressed, namely that history was not a fluke of fate (a Kismet ) but that it could at least in principle be ''rationally understood''. MARX'S RADICALISM This trend of thinking is powerfully developed in the thought of Karl Marx (a student of Hegel's thought) and his secular Historical Materialism . With splendid rhetoric, Marx describes the mid-19th century condition in the Communist Manifesto as follows: "The Bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind." The capitalist era in history is understood here very radically as a process of ''continual change'', in which the growth of markets dissolve all fixities in human life. This is an almost absolute rejection of the conservative ethos, according to which nothing really changes in human life. MODERNISM This kind of idea is also the radical harbinger of Modernism , a trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their society, with the aid of Scientific Knowledge , Technology and practical experimentation. It reaches its extreme limits with the Russian Revolution and the third Chinese Revolution , inspired by Marxist ideology. Here, people claimed such Confidence in the ability to change their world for the better, that they thought that, in a relatively short time, largely illiterate peasants could begin to build a just, Egalitarian and Socialist order in a conscious way, armed with Science and Technology . POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIAL PROGRESS In the Postmodernist thought steadily gaining ground from the 1980s, the grandiose claims of the modernisers are steadily eroded, and the very concept of social progress is again questioned, relativised and scrutinised. In the new vision, revolutionaries like Stalin and Mao appear as mad, murderous Totalitarian maniacs, whose vision of social progress appears totally deformed. What progress is made, if new industries are stamped out of the ground by state directives to supply consumer goods, but peasants are pressed into Forced Labour , and any Dissent from the state's decree results in imprisonment or death, while even the most ordinary human requirements like Tampon s are in short supply? What is progress if people are afraid to speak their mind, for fear of persecution? How do these so-called "revolutions" honour the striving for human Freedom and human Dignity ? It is one thing to argue that the existence of human freedom requires a certain level of material Productivity as its basic prerequisite; it is quite another to silence or kill masses of people in its pursuit. Thus, the contemporary culture of Postmodernism leads to a more or less critical re-evaluation of social progress and human progress. This re-evaluation takes many different forms. In its most extreme form, the very notion of social progress is rejected. How are people better off, if they have all modern consumer goods, but they are hopelessly unhappy and alienated? How can we validly say, that people are better off now than they were hundreds of years ago, if they cannot even make sense of their own lives? What can we truly change, beyond changing our individual lives? Even if things change, how can we say that they really change for the better? FOUR RECENT TRENDS OF THOUGHT ABOUT SOCIAL PROGRESS In the present time, this trend of thought about social progress leads to four main kinds of responses:
REFERENCES Barrington Moore , ''Reflections on the causes of human misery and upon certain proposals to eliminate them''. Barrington Moore, ''Moral Purity and Persecution in History''. Barrington Moore, ''Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience & Revolt''. Barrington Moore, ''Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world''. Barrington Moore, ''Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays''. SEE ALSO
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