The Myth of Progress

[Thomas]

Which is your predominant idea: that the Abrahamic religions do or do not see history as redemptive?

Do. Without a doubt, I would have thought, do.

 

[Ahanu]

Drawn from from Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray,
(Chapter 2: "Secular Humanism: A Sacred Relic", Penguin, 2019, p23-27)
My comments in blue

"While rejecting monotheism, the belief that humans are gradually improving, a central article of faith of modern humanism, is founded on pseudo-Christian monotheistic idealism."

For the ancient world, time was seen as cyclic, and the rhythms of humanity were not essentially different from those found in the rest of the natural world – in none of its literature is any prospect of indefinite improvement. Civilizations flourish, but they will eventually decline, such is the natural order of things; cycles cannot be overcome, and if and when the gods intervene, often the result is a world more unpredictable and treacherous.

In the fifth century BC, Herodotus has the gods acting to punish wrongdoing, but there is no suggestion that they were interested in shaping the course of history. Thucydides has been called the father of ‘scientific history’. But for him there were no laws of history, only the fact of recurring human folly – a succession of mishaps in which human will and reason are confounded by human flaws.

In the Abrahamic monotheisms, and Christianity in particular, a definite end of the passage of time was in sight – Christ would return in glory and establish a New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of God on earth, but this speaks of the end of one cycle and the start of another, and furthermore never presupposed any idea of human progress towards the parousia, rather if anything it is the other way round, it would seem at the moment of humanity’s lowest ebb that this end will come about.

When in Europe religion began to be replaced by secular creeds, the Christian myth of history as a redemptive drama was not abandoned, but renewed in another guise. A story of redemption was replaced by one of progress through the collective efforts of humanity.

Apocalyptic mythologising fuelled the millenarian movements of medieval times, and emerged again in the millenarian movements in America, and is still around today with the idea of The Rapture. The country that put a man on the moon is also the place of origin of such materialist revisions of mystical ideas as Creationism and the Flat Earth Theory.

That sense of foreboding that gave rise to 'superstition' in the ancient world is present in secular 'conspiracy theory' today – it's the same impulse.

Seventeenth century Protestantism recast this myth as human-centred. The belief that evil would be destroyed in an apocalyptic endtime was supplanted by the conviction of the march of Enlightenment that would diminish the darkness of history and the darkness seemingly inherent in human nature.

Indeed, the Enlightenment saw itself as the triumph of the rational (masculine) mind over reckless (feminine) nature – a creature to be tamed by science and put to work for the greater good (of the same class of entitled and privileged ol white men).

Emptied of its mystical and transcendental content, this myth is the source of modern meliorism – the idea that human life can is is gradually improved. It underpinned The Prosperity Gospel, the American Dream, and was the engine that drove colonialism.

Another element derived from Gnosticism – the belief that salvation was achieved by acquiring a special kind of knowledge.

In the classical philosophies of the ancient world this knowledge was a type of insight acquired through the practice of contemplation. In modern times it was knowledge gained through science. In each case it was believed that knowledge could bring deliverance from evil/darkness.

The modern myth of progress is a fusion of pseudoChristian faith and Gnostic thinking. Progress is linear, and science was the knowledge that would unlock the shackles of ignorance, open the doors to utopia, and set us free.

The idea of linear progress has never been examined as a possible falsifiable hypothesis. There just seems too much evidence. Evolution, as it still generally and mistakenly understood, means that everything is moving inexorably towards its own perfection. Likewise our technologies – agriculture, biology, cosmology, and so on march on apace.

For those who believe in progress, any regression is only a temporary halt in an onward march to a better world.

Yet if one looks at the historical record of the human species – as human – outside of the chimera of its technological achievements – it is hard to detect any continuing strand of improvement.

While there was nothing in the pagan world of the liberal concern for individual freedom, pluralism in ways of life was accepted as a matter of course. If heresy was introduced by monotheism, that mantle has been taken up by social media, by ‘cancel culture’ where threat and persecution abounds.

The secular world is forever reminding us, the medieval and early modern world was wracked by wars of religion. But faith-based violence has not faded away with the arrival of modernity. From the French Revolution on, Europe and much of the world has been caught up in revolutions and wars fuelled by secular creeds such as Jacobinism and communism, Nazism and fascism, and today a belligerently evangelical type of liberalism.

It is true that slavery and torture were flaws of premodern societies. But these practices have not disappeared. Slavery was reintroduced in the twentieth century on a vast scale in Nazi Germany and the Soviet and Maoist gulags. Slavery was outlawed after a civil war America, only to be replaced by the penal system in which the ‘underclass’ works for nothing to underpin the economy. Whole nations are enslaved to western economies to cater to the fad, fashions and fancies of the privileged few.

Human trafficking flourishes throughout much of the world and finds its outlet in the supposedly civilised West. Torture was sanctioned in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in the face of every reasoned, rational and logical argument against it. The rendition flight are still in the air, and black sites exist in the most civilised states.

The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in human ethics or politics, philosophy or the arts. Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been. Gains occur from time to time, but they are lost after a few generations.

What progress believers cannot digest is the fact that gains in ethics and politics come and go according to expedience. They are not given. They are not embedded in, or even intrinsic to, human nature. Altruism is a secular invention to replace Christian agape.

When secular thinkers tell the history of humankind as a story of progress they point at technology and flatter themselves that they embody the progress of which that speaks. As if agriculture, or medicines or flying machines means the human person is covering a similar distance in the development and evolution of being – heading into a future that is morally and ethically as bright as it is technologically, that somehow technology is the proof of that, as if meaning and value and morality and ethics is derived from the lens, the lever or the wheel.

They forget that science and technology are void of ethics and morals – and will happily produce toxic nerve agents as it will vaccines; it will invent weapons of unimaginable, world-ending destructive power, without batting an eye or question for whom this weapon is being developed, or why.

Meanwhile, we live in a world of social media that evidences an ever-increasing militant intolerance.

Instead of being left behind, old evils return under new names. Nothing changes. So it goes.

I think John Gray needs to be introduced to Robert Wright's non-zero-sum games (which can lead to moral progress over time):

 

[Ahanu]

A few key quotes.

"The argument I make is basically that, well, non-zero-sum games have always been part of life. You have them in hunter-gatherer societies, but then through technological evolution, new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non-zero-sum games, involving more people over larger territory. Social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential, so you get cities, you know, and you get all the non-zero-sum games you don't think about that are being played across the world. Like, have you ever thought when you buy a car, how many people on how many different continents contributed to the manufacture of that car? Those are people in effect you're playing a non-zero-sum game with. I mean, there are certainly plenty of them around."
-Robert Wright

"2,500 years ago, members of one Greek city-state considered members of another Greek city-state subhuman and treated them that way. And then this moral revolution arrived, and they decided that actually, no, Greeks are human beings. It's just the Persians who aren't fully human and don't deserve to be treated very nicely.

But this was progress -- you know, give them credit. And now today, we've seen more progress. I think -- I hope -- most people here would say that all people everywhere are human beings, deserve to be treated decently, unless they do something horrendous, regardless of race or religion. And you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been, OK. This was not a prevalent view, few thousand years ago, and I attribute it to this non-zero-sum dynamic. I think that's the reason there is as much tolerance toward nationalities, ethnicities, religions as there is today. If you asked me, you know, why am I not in favor of bombing Japan, well, I'm only half-joking when I say they built my car. We have this non-zero-sum relationship, and I think that does lead to a kind of a tolerance to the extent that you realize that someone else's welfare is positively correlated with yours -- you're more likely to cut them a break."
-Robert Wright

 

[Sen McGlinn]

Do. Without a doubt, I would have thought, do.

OK - but in message #3 you seemed to say that it was not in the Abrahamic religions themselves, but only in modern misinterpretations of their texts.
I think neither view can be sustained: the religions are too varied. Even in Evangelical Christianity, you have postmillennial and pre-millennial, the first expecting humanity to get better and build the Kingdom, the latter expecting depravity to increase and the world to go to hell in a handbasket. Only the Bahai Faith has an unambiguously optimistic view that humanity progresses morally and spiritually, as well as in material terms, in its texts, but if you listen to Bahais talking to one another, you find the same two strands mixed up inconsistently. [plan A] We (the Bahais) are engaging in all sorts of ways with society, for example supporting the United Nations, to create a world government with justice, peace and prosperity etc., AND [plan B] at some point as the world deteriorates it will get so bad that there's a great catastrophe and the people of the world turn to the Bahais, whose system supplants the failed system of the governments -- which the Bahais were working so hard to support! So if that is plan B, why work on plan A?
So far as I know, plan B was never what the Bahai founders wanted, but it has infiltrated into Bahai from the pre-millennial wing of Evangelical Christianity. But that narrative of moral decline is part of each of the Abrahamic religions. And so is the faith in progress.

I think there are grounds to believe in the moral progress of humanity, because our awareness changes. Historical awareness can be seen entering European thought in the art and literature of the time. Today, it is universal, but that was not always the case. We are at present going through a similar tipping point, as the awareness that humanity is one species and its home is one fragile and interdependent planet spreads. As the "us" gets larger, the scope for "them" and "Other" gets smaller.

 

[wil]

As @Thomas says .. you seem to only see "progress" in terms of $'s.
How sad

I see what this attitude is doing to the world eg. climate-change

Not $$ but equality (gender, racial, religious) equal justice under the law, freedom, ease to live thru life...

Climate? Give me a break, when I was a kid we had bad air days, ozone holes, rivers on fire, dams impeding salmon. Hundred years before that wood and coal soot.fell from the sky.amd regularly slogged folks in with lung issues.

Yes we have a long way to go...but we have come a long way baby!

 

[Thomas]

I think John Gray needs to be introduced to Robert Wright's non-zero-sum games (which can lead to moral progress over time):

Well, Wright's theories are not without their critics ... interesting he's described as having a Teilhardian view of humanity's progress towards the Omega Point.

Suffice to say, speaking generally, Gray's outlook, Philosophical Pessimism, is contrasted by Wright's optimism.

 

[Thomas]

OK - but in message #3 you seemed to say that it was not in the Abrahamic religions themselves, but only in modern misinterpretations of their texts...

Gray cites Christianity – Western Protestant Christianity – in particular as the progenitors of the idea of 'progress'.

I think neither view can be sustained: the religions are too varied.

OK. I can't speak competently for Judaism or Islam, but I'm on firmer ground with orthodox Christianity and Protestantism.

Even in Evangelical Christianity, you have postmillennial and pre-millennial, the first expecting humanity to get better and build the Kingdom, the latter expecting depravity to increase and the world to go to hell in a handbasket.

OK, but the issue is, once you factor America into the mix, then theological waters are muddied because nigh-on every imaginary variable becomes a potential if not actual confessional outlook. The 'Rapture' is a widespread phenomena in the US (and exported by it) but 1 Thessalonians 4 as the foundation of the Rapture dates from 1830 and is not considered a viable scholarly position.

But I'm not sure postmillennials speak in terms of spiritual evolution, rather it's more simply religious revivalism?

If one looks from the viewpoint of the Hindu 'Yuga' – the great cycles of time – we are in the Kali Yuga, the Fourth (and worst) World Age, which began in 3,102BC and has, as of today, 426,875 years left to run ...

But that narrative of moral decline is part of each of the Abrahamic religions. And so is the faith in progress.

Not in Christianity. I can't speak for Judaism or Islam.

0I think there are grounds to believe in the moral progress of humanity, because our awareness changes.

OK. Moral progress does not necessarily infer spiritual or religious progress – and morality can be set back, by design, by accident ...

Historical awareness can be seen entering European thought in the art and literature of the time. Today, it is universal, but that was not always the case.

As the fruit of technological developments, not necessarily in intrinsically human emergence.

We are at present going through a similar tipping point, as the awareness that humanity is one species and its home is one fragile and interdependent planet spreads. As the "us" gets larger, the scope for "them" and "Other" gets smaller.

Millennials see the tipping point round every corner.

 

[Thomas]

The point about the idea of a linear progress in time ...

As regards the 'Way of the World', then linear progress is evident and evolution is our best and most reasonable working hypothesis. Science, technology, etc., are all material things and therefore proceed in a material, linear manner – albeit with 'breakthroughs' that come 'out of the blue' and cannot be linearly determined.

When time took on a linear rather than a cyclic nature I'm not sure, but I would have thought tied to a separation from an overt dependence on nature (that idea in itself is an illusion) – our nomadic ancestors were bound to it, as were the first settled agriculturalists. It's not until we developed ways to store food did we break the cycle. The Bible speaks of linear time in some manner, but one can also locate linear time within greater cycles – the fat years, the lean years, etc.

When it comes to the 'Way of the Spirit', then in human affairs things are different. The measure is not a linear progression, but verticality, one of ascent. In all cultures, the spiritual, interior life, is spoken of in the natural symbology of ascent.

My point throughout is that God has been accessible to humanity from the get-go, as it were, and according to Genesis, moreso 'in the beginning' than now. From the Christian perspective, there was talk of 'Christians before Christ' from at latest the start 2nd century.

The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with prophets and others undergoing profound spiritual experiences. Both Enoch (Genesis 5:22–24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) were taken up into heaven and walk with God.

In Christianity and Islam, there are strong traditions of mystical experience – to list them is unnecessary – the point being these are not the fruit of a linear evolution of the spirit. There is no guaranteed path to mystical experience.

Likewise in Buddhism there are the Enlightened and time is cyclic and repetitive, not linear and progressive. The same applies in Hinduism – time is cyclic, and rebirth is drearily repetitive.

Indeed, the game of 'Snakes and Ladders' was a commentary on rebirth – one could amass a hundred positive rebirths, then blow it all, as it were, at the last moment, and end up back at the very beginning. There is no guarantee of progression.

We are no 'more mystical' nor 'more spiritual' than were our ancient forebears – there are no records of contemporary spiritual insight or experience that indicate any idea of progress – ideas, yes, but then it's likely that had those ancient forebears had the data at hand that we have today, they conclusions are not beyond their capacity to comprehend.

 

[muhammad_isa]

Climate? Give me a break, when I was a kid we had bad air days, ozone holes, rivers on fire, dams impeding salmon. Hundred years before that wood and coal soot.fell from the sky.amd regularly slogged folks in with lung issues..

What?
Are you claiming that climate-change is not as serious as we think?
Do you think that we aren't really on course for a catastrophe, as the scientists predict?

 

[Thomas]

Yes we have a long way to go...but we have come a long way baby!

Indeed, the question is whether we – by which I mean the rich and empowered economies of the world – are accelerating into some bright, blue-sky future ... or catastrophe.

Meanwhile 1 in 3 women suffer sexual violence at some point in their lives, which doesn't speak too highly of gender equality – its 1 in 26 men.
And the figure is worse among ethnic and minority groups.

We've come a long way, but the same old games are still in play.

 

[Ahanu]

Well, Wright's theories are not without their critics ...

Who doesn't have a critic?

 

[Ahanu]

My point throughout is that God has been accessible to humanity from the get-go, as it were, and according to Genesis, moreso 'in the beginning' than now.

"Moreso 'in the beginning' than now?" When was the beginning?

You can always "go back in time" as it were and live with a tribe on the Andaman Islands or the Yanomami people in the Amazon to encounter a way of life almost largely untouched by modern civilization. For the Yanomami people, an animistic worldview is still intact, shamans are central to their way of life, and more.

Why dwell in the spiritual poverty of modern civilization, in which God is "less" accessible, when you could get better access in the remote villages of the Amazon or the Andaman Islands since they represent a way of life closer to "in the beginning?" This is assuming you mean closer to the beginning of our species since you wrote "from the get-go" there.

Maybe you're referring to the resurrection of Christ, which was a new beginning. Not sure.

 

[Ahanu]

Well, Wright's theories are not without their critics ... interesting he's described as having a Teilhardian view of humanity's progress towards the Omega Point.

Their descriptions are wrong, because Wright acknowledges progress but avoids predicting a specific Omega Point. His views are grounded in game theory and self-interest.

 

[Thomas]

Their descriptions are wrong, because Wright acknowledges progress but avoids predicting a specific Omega Point. His views are grounded in game theory and self-interest.

Yes, I didn't mean a specific Omega Point – more the alternative models of the like of Steven Pinker.

 

[Thomas]

"Moreso 'in the beginning' than now?" When was the beginning?

That was a nod towards Genesis 1-3.

 

[Ahanu]

That was a nod towards Genesis 1-3.

So when was it?

 

[Thomas]

So when was it?

Pre-history.

 

[Ahanu]

Pre-history.

What does pre-history mean? Before writing? Was Adam a historical figure?

Let me be specific. For example, according to some Christians like Eusebius and Clement of Alexandria, it was around 5,500 years before Christ that Adam existed. Eusebius' estimates were somewhat similar. So were the estimates of Theophilus of Antioch and Hippolytus of Rome. Tertullian also held an early existence for Adam. Irenaeus of Lyon didn't provide an exact date, but he did suggest creation was relatively recent in a matter of a few thousand years old. Tatian, influenced by Jewish exegetes, offered a similar view.

 

[Thomas]

What does pre-history mean? Before writing? Was Adam a historical figure?

Yes, before writing. No, Adam is not an historical figure. Genesis is Scripture and metaphysics, rather than history as we understand it today.

Not all Fathers agree on a literal reading of Genesis.

 

[Ahanu]

Yes, before writing.

Mind elaborating? I am struggling to understand the following: "My point throughout is that God has been accessible to humanity from the get-go, as it were, and according to Genesis, moreso 'in the beginning' than now."

So you mean "moreso in 'pre-history' than now?" I don't get it. A significant portion of early Christians like Justin Martyr favored an early existence for Adam, so I imagine they wouldn't understand either if they were here in this forum with us.