The idea of progress

A Graphic Presentationby

Arthur Chandler

We see societies establishing themselves, nations forming themselves, which in turn dominate other nations or become subject to them. Empires rise and fall; laws, forms of government, one succeeding another; the arts, the sciences, are discovered and cultivated; sometimes retarded and sometimes accelerated in their progress, they pass from one region to another. Self-interest, ambition, vainglory, perpetually change the scene of the world, inundate the earth with blood. Yet in the midst of their ravages manners are gradually softened, the human mind takes enlightenment, separate nations draw nearer to each other, commerce and policy connect at last all parts of the globe, and the total mass of the human race, by the alternation of calm and agitation, of good conditions and of bad, marches always, although slowly, towards still higher perfection.

— Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “On the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” (1750)

A Vision of Progress in 1750

The idea of Progress means that civilisation has moved, is moving, and

will move in a desirable direction.

— J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920)

We shall find in the experience of the past, in the observation of the progress that the sciences and civilization have already made, in the analysis of the progress of the human mind and of the development of its faculties, the strongest reasons for believing that nature has set no limit to the realization of our hopes. 

—  Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794)

Progress is the application of technology for the moral and physical

improvement of the human race.

— 1855 Exposition Universelle Livre d’Or

[Note: in this context, moral refers to the prevention or cure of human suffering]

Views of Human CultureI. Decline from a Golden Age

II. Salvation and the End of History

III. The Illusion of the Real

IV. Endless Cycles

V. Progress

The Christian Version: The Fall from Grace

Fernand Cormon, “The Flight of Cain”After the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve and their children experience hunger,

treachery, and death

Other Views of Human Life as a Decline

“A man’s worth, like fruit, has its season.”

— La Rochefoucauld, Maxim #291* * *

Nativity, once in the main of light,

Crawls to maturity; wherewith being crowned,

Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,

And time that gave doth now his gift confound.

— Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Salvation and the End of History

Christ presides over the Last Judgment:The dead rise from their graves.

Some souls are saved; others are led off to HellSculpture over the main portal of Notre Dame de Paris

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment

John Martin, The Day of his Wrath

The Real World is Illusory

Buddhism: All things perceived by the senses — including humanity — are transient and composed of nothing (sunyata). Only eternal law (dharma) is truly real

Hinduism: All names, all forms, all history is Maya: illusion

Plato: the world we perceive is like the shadows on a wall: fleeting and unsubstantial projections of the truly real and eternal forms of the world of ideas

Human History Is Illusion

Seeing though the Illusion

Eternal Cycles“Time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.”

— Heinrich Heine

* * *“The law of conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Ouroboros, Ancient Symbol of Cycles

The Tytler Cycle of History

The Idea of Progress

In the Age of Technology

Axiom #1Mathematics is the key to Progress

Axiom #2Virtuoso control over inanimate forms of energy

is the primary force for Progress

Technical Progress in the Nineteenth Century

Antithetical Visions of the Future

“Civilisation has moved, is moving, and will move in a

desirable direction.”