This is an edited and abridged version of an an
article that appeared on Zero Anthropology.
Where does “progress” come from? What does
“progressivism” mean? Which cultural tradition
and ideological discourse makes “progressive”
movements or parties thinkable? If the idea of
“progress” cannot be sustained, what else might
fall with it?
The Ideology/Mythology of Progress
The perpetuation of progress as a master
discourse in the West is one that spans the 19th-,
20th-, and now the 21st-centuries.
historian Ronald Wright wrote in his book, A
Short History of Progress:
“Despite certain events of the twentieth
century, most people in the Western cultural
tradition still believe in the Victorian
ideal of progress, a belief succinctly
defined by the historian Sidney Pollard in
1968 as ‘the assumption that a pattern of
change exists in the history of mankind…that
it consists of irreversible changes in one
direction only, and that this direction is
towards improvement’”. (Wright, 2004, p. 3)
“Our practical faith in progress has ramified
and hardened into an ideology,” and Wright
argued that this has become, “a secular religion
which, like the religions that progress has
challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its
credentials”. Progress has become “‘myth’ in the
anthropological sense: ‘Myth is an arrangement
of the past, whether real or imagined, in
patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest
values and aspirations’” (Wright, 2004, p. 4).
This myth of progress is not just a capitalist
myth, but also a Marxist one: “In both its
capitalist and communist versions, the great
promise of modernity was progress without limit
and without end” (Wright, 2004, p. 6).
Progressivism in Hegemonic Anthropology
Rockefeller and similar foundations sought to
internationalize what Berman (1999, p. 194)
referred to as the Social Gospel of American
progressivism. As Berman explained, “the
foundations’ early twentieth-century
international programs clearly reflected the
Christian missionary fervor of the time” (1999,
p. 194). This Christian-inspired, though
secularized missionary project aimed at
reforming societies in order to pacify and
stabilize them, in the interest of maintaining
the capitalist global order, and to protect US
interests. The zeal “to do Good” was capitalized
by the Rockefeller Foundation, and one of the
accomplishments of the Rockefellers was “their
secularization of this religious enthusiasm in
an effort to build more perfect societies both
at home and abroad” (Berman, 1999, p. 194).
It was the Rockefeller group of philanthropies
that had the greatest impact in establishing US
and UK anthropology, especially in establishing
the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and
the University of Chicago itself (reconstituted
by John D. Rockefeller in 1892), in addition to
founding several key anthropology departments
around the planet. In the US, the Rockefeller
philanthropies designated Chicago, Columbia,
Yale, Harvard, North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Stanford, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania as “centers
of excellence,” funding them so they could
become “prototypical research institutions”—and
to this day, these are some of the key
institutions from which PhDs are sought to
better assure one of success in gaining academic
employment, especially as they hire from each
other. Overseas, the Rockefellers, through the
and the role of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial (LSRM), funded the development of
anthropology at the London School of Economics,
providing Bronislaw Malinowski with the capital
needed to exercise command over the discipline’s
development, and the Rockefellers also funded
the establishment of anthropology at the
University of Sydney (Patterson, 2001, pp. 72,
73).
In anthropology, the faith in progress was
reflected in Cultural Evolutionist theories,
which dominated US anthropology from the late
1800s through the 1960s (with some assumptions
lingering well beyond). Cultural evolutionism
has had multiple incarnations as Modernization
Theory and as the guiding doctrine of numerous
international development agencies and
international financial institutions. One can
summarize this paradigm with a simple
illustration, one that has virtually become the
logo for the West’s orthodox faith in progress:
In
North American anthropology, as elsewhere, there
has not been a shortage of critics of progress,
just as there has not been a shortage of
upholders of progressivist cultural
evolutionism. Treating cultures like organisms
in the natural sciences was a central part of
the ideology posing as scientific theory. And
the result has been a long litany of some of the
worst social and economic policies, some of the
greatest development failures, and a range of
predictions that never materialized.
Among the leading critics of progressivist
evolutionism we could cite Stephen Jay Gould and
John H. Bodley. In particular, Gould was,
“a major critic of the biases that assume a
progressive nature to history and the
inevitability of the present. These biases
can be seen in the common view in
evolutionary theory that more recently
emerging species are superior to their
predecessors since surviving species have
won out in the struggle for existence. Given
human arrogance and the prevalence of
progressivist ideology, it is commonly
presumed that the emergence of Homo sapiens
is the inevitable apex of evolutionary
processes. Counter to this view, Gould
argued that, although natural selection led
to some degree of ‘progress’ on short
timescales in the limited sense that it
dialectically adapted creatures to their
environments, over longer scales of time
there was no deterministic direction to the
history of life”. (York & Clark, 2011)
Given Marxism’s own adherence to evolutionist
thinking, it’s not surprising to see a Marxist
publication pay such close attention to works
challenging older theories of evolution. As York
and Clark pointed out, Gould’s work does not
involve remote and irrelevant points: “questions
about the nature of history go to the heart of
assumptions buried in Western
culture”—specifically, progressivist,
unidirectional, teleological assumptions.
“Progress,” Gould said, “is a deep cultural bias
of Western thought,” and it is the hallmark of
deterministic evolutionary thinking, one that
can lead us to accept “survival of the fittest”
as doctrine, one that indicts those who failed
to survive as somehow being “failures”.
Colonialism, especially in the 1800s, was
justified on the basis that it spread progress
to backward peoples. As John H. Bodley
explained, many colonists assumed that
indigenous peoples would voluntarily reject
their own cultures after they came into contact
with “superior” cultures, and that they would do
so “in order to obtain a better life” (2008, p.
18). In addition, the right to exploit
indigenous peoples and their resources was
rationalized on the following grounds:
“Arguing for efficiency and survival of the
fittest, early colonialists elevated this
‘right’ to the level of an ethical and legal
principle that could be invoked to justify
the elimination of any societies that were
not making ‘effective’ use of their
resources”. (Bodley, 2008, p. 18)
Progress was an argument for dispossession,
casting others as inferior and thus deserving of
displacement in the name of efficiency. This was
constructed as if it were a process of natural
selection (Bodley, 2008, p. 18). Cultural
evolutionists equated colonialism and genocide
with evolutionary progress. Bodley also noted
that the basics of such thinking were
resuscitated in developmentalism (which he
rightly understood as ethnocentric) and in
neo-evolutionary cultural theory in US
anthropology in the 1960s. Specifically, he
cited the “Law of Cultural Dominance”:
“That cultural system which more effectively
exploits the energy resources of a given
environment will tend to spread in that
environment at the expense of less effective
systems”. (Quoted in Bodley, 2008, p. 19)
Imperial progressivism, or what Bodley calls the
“realist” school of ethnocide (joining
humanitarian imperialists, scientists,
missionaries, anthropologists), justified the
destruction of millions of indigenous lives as
an “inevitable” outcome of evolution, and then
extended the argument further by insisting that
all indigenous societies would therefore become
extinct. Myths of extinction, which I directly
challenged and reversed in the Caribbean case,
while acknowledging the real damage done to
indigenous peoples simply went too far in
backing what was ultimately an ideological
narrative. One of the more outlandish claims of
the progressive realists, from the Royal
Anthropological Institute, was that the mere
contact of races would generally lead to
extermination of one of them (Bodley, 2008, p.
255).
The Judeo-Christian Roots of Progress and
Progressive Movements
Far
from the product of secular thought, “moving
forward” as in progressing is rooted in the
Jewish biblical experience, which was then
adopted by Christians and then by secular
political thinkers in the Christianized, European(ized) West. The origin of the
progressive idea is the flight of Jewish slaves
from bondage in Egypt, otherwise known as the
Exodus story, as explained in a book devoted to
the subject (Walzer, 1985). As explained by
Michael Walzer, “the Exodus is a journey
forward—not only in time and space. It is a
march toward a goal, a moral progress, a
transformation” (1985, p. 12). The Exodus
account introduced linearity and it transformed
existing ideas of “revolution”. The classical
Greek notion of “revolution” (as in revolving,
returning) was about the restoration of a
previous order. The post-Exodus idea of
revolution became one about an abrupt departure,
a journey to a new place, which was also a new
condition of being. As Walzer argued, the Exodus
story is,
“A political history with a strong
linearity, a strong forward movement, the
Exodus gives permanent shape to Jewish
conceptions of time; and it serves as a
model, ultimately, for non-Jewish
conceptions too. We can think of it as the
crucial alternative to all mythic notions of
eternal recurrence—and hence to those
cyclical understandings of political change
from which our word ‘revolution’ derives”. (Walzer,
1985, p. 12)
The
Exodus story “became part of the cultural
consciousness of the West,” Walzer pointed out.
The story made it possible to tell other stories
and, “a range of political events…have been
located and understood within the narrative
frame that it provides” (Walzer, 1985, p. 7).
Western political thinking has been deeply
imprinted with the pattern of events laid out in
Exodus: “the pattern has been etched deeply into
our political culture” (Walzer, 1985, p. 134).
Exodus is to be found almost everywhere in the
Western language of progress and liberation (Walzer,
1985, p. 4).
The very idea of calling a collective social or
political organization a movement is a product
of Exodus. As Walzer explained, “the movement
across space is readily reconstructed as a
movement from one political regime to another”
(1985, p. 14). Walzer added that, “change of
position is a common metaphor for change of
regime,” and that “much of the political
language of the left has its origin in that
metaphor” (1985, p. 14).
Exodus history is a linear one. Linearity is
progressive. This linearity forms the basis of
our ideas of progressive politics. Linear
progress is at the root of political “movement”.
Though not a theory of revolution, Walzer held
that Exodus has become “a paradigm of
revolutionary politics” (1985, p. 7). Walzer
noted that we can find the Exodus notion about
change of position in space as liberation
embedded in “articles and essays about progress,
progressive parties, advanced ideas, vanguard
politics, revolution (in its current sense),
movement itself, as in ‘the labor movement’”
(1985, p. 15). “Exodus is a literal movement,”
he adds, “an advance through space and time, the
original form of (or formula for) progressive
history” (Walzer, 1985, p. 15). As mentioned
before, secular political thinking is not immune
to cultural conditioning derived from the Bible:
“Thus, when utopian socialists, most of them
resolutely hostile to religion, argued about the
problems of the ‘transitional period,’ they
still cast their arguments in familiar terms:
the forty years in the wilderness” (Walzer,
1985, p. 134).
At least we now have some partial answers to
three of our opening questions: Where does
“progressivism” come from? What does
“progressivism” mean?
Progress:
Eurocentric Development Ideology
E. Bradford Burns’ 1980 book, The Poverty of
Progress, is a historian’s critical account
of the work of 19th-century liberal
elites in Latin America, who sought to
mimetically transform their societies—which
deeply embarrassed them—into replicas of western
Europe and the United States. At the helm of
government institutions, the arts, commerce,
banking, and agriculture, varied elites sought
to forcibly impose capitalist modernization on
Latin American societies, in order to replicate
European and American models (Burns, 1980, pp.
5–6). Indigenous societies and local cultural
traditions were among the prime targets of the
modernizing liberal elites (the progressives).
Progress was equated with Europeanization, which
under the tutorship of Britain, France, and the
United States, also meant urbanization and
industrialization. The result was increased
foreign penetration of local economies, and
dependency. Politics became authoritarian: “The
governments of the elites had selected the North
Atlantic model for their countries to follow and
forced the opposition to bend to that decision”
(Burns, 1980, p. 7). Embracing Enlightenment
ideas, the elites adopted liberal political
theories without much concern for their
applicability or relevance to local social and
economic conditions: they essentially copied the
French and US constitutions; they ended
restrictions on trade; they emphasized
individualism, competition, and the pursuit of
profit (Burns, 1980, p. 8).
“The elites spoke constantly of ‘progress,’”
Burns tells us, “perhaps the most sacred word in
the political vocabulary,” and certainly a
heavily loaded one (1980, p. 8). Often
“progress” was used interchangeably with
“modernization,” and both implied an “admiration
for the latest ideas, modes, values, inventions,
and styles of Europe and the United States and a
desire to adopt—rarely to adapt—them” (Burns,
1980, pp. 8–9). “To progress” for the elites
meant “to recreate their nations as closely as
possible to their European and North American
models” (Burns, 1980, p. 9). The drive to
replicate was also responsible for a greatly
expanded capitalist penetration of Latin
American economies (Burns, 1980, p. 10). As
proof of “progress,” Latin American elites were
keen to boast of the outward signs of
development: “railroads, steamships,
electricity, machinery, Parisian fashions, and
English textiles” (Burns, 1980, p. 10).
Modernization was synonymous with progress and
both were represented by Europeanization,
specifically the mimesis of Europe (Burns, 1980,
p. 13). Meanwhile, the majority of the
population experienced persistent or worsened
poverty.
The politics of Latin American liberal elites in
the 19th-century were also
“progressive,” and that further marked not just
their separation from urban workers, rural
peasants, and indigenous peoples, it marked
their opposition against such groups who
resisted the rule of progressivism. The
constitutions written by the liberal elites
emphasized individual rights (still championed
by North American and European human rights
activists today); they also emphasized “liberty”
and “democracy” (promoted as much by the left as
the right in North America today); and,
liberalism stood as an ideology that
rationalized exploitation (as it does today). As
Burns explained:
“the values the elites placed on abstract
liberties and democracy conflicted with the
values and experiences of the largest
numbers of the population, who understood
little of European theories and nothing of
the European experience that gave rise to
them….Not prepared for the values imposed by
the elites, the masses could not hope to
gain much from them. In fact, they did not.
Liberty and democracy as they took form in
nineteenth-century Latin America quickly
became a sophistic rationale excusing or
disguising an exploitation of the many by
the few”. (1980, p. 11)
Progress as an elite preference drew from
European sources, and stood against
“provincialism” with which all things “inferior”
were associated. As outlined by Burns in the
Latin American case,
“The Latin American elites of the nineteenth
century boasted of their European
heritage….England and France, in particular,
were their models….They readily understood
what was happening in Europe and ably
discussed the latest ideas radiating from
the Old World, which they welcomed to the
New. But European thought was no
intellectual spring; it proved to be an
ideological flood, which swept before it
most American originality. Generally
speaking, three major European philosophies
shaped the ideology of the elites during the
nineteenth century: the Enlightenment, the
ideas of evolution put forth by Charles
Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and Positivism.
The concept of ‘progress,’ perhaps the key
word for the understanding of
nineteenth-century Latin American history,
linked the three”. (1980, p. 18)
From the Enlightenment, these early
progressivists emphasized the “truth” which was
defined as the superiority of “civilization”
over “barbarism,” with civilization identified
with Europe. The elites’ “faith in science”
emphasized the value of material change. They
were especially attracted to the ideas of
Darwin, particularly the idea of development
over time through successive states progressing
toward perfection. August Comte’s Positivism
generated special interest among Latin American
liberal elites (Burns, 1980, pp. 18–19).
“Reason” was the exclusive claim of Eurocentric
political thought, as expressed by Latin
American elites. The elites who aped Europe and
sought to graft European institutions onto Latin
American roots, proclaimed themselves “gentes
de razón” (the peoples of reason).
“Democracy” therefore could not mean the masses
would rule, but rather those who owned “reason”
would be in control—the few would govern the
many, because the many lacked the inherent
capacity for “progress”. In the Latin American
case, the forces of reason, of enlightenment,
progress, and Europeanization, dominated in the
big cities and on the coasts; the interior, vast
rural plains or tropical rainforests, the
countryside generally speaking, were home to the
forces of “ignorance, barbarism, and
primitivism” (Burns, 1980, p. 22). The rural
“ignorant” were denounced by the elites for
their support of populist caudillos. If the
masses continued to refuse the civilization of
Europe, then the only solution was to
essentially breed them out of existence, through
immigration. Hence a number of countries began
to encourage waves of European immigrants
(Burns, 1980, p. 23).
The forces of reason also laid claim to time and
space: their condition was representative of
modernity, and only they could lead the nation
forward to the future. They were the conductors
of progress. The others? They were stuck in the
past (see Burns, 1980, p. 29).
Conclusion
First, there is no point in demanding that
westerners give up the ways of thinking that
they have cultivated for themselves as ways of
addressing the needs and demands of their own
cultural contexts and social histories; rather,
the objective ought to be a more realistic one.
Such an objective would include getting
westerners to realize that they cannot continue
to speak for the rest of the world; they cannot
continue assuming/asserting their values to be
universal; and, they should understand that
their experience is not representative of the
rest of the world’s. Again, this does not mean
that Europeans should reject European experience
and European philosophies. Second, the west had
a history of extensive internal cultural
self-criticism, and that should be rekindled so
that we can begin to think beyond some of these
extremely tired ideological straightjackets
which we have inherited, and which we maintain
as if we were in an inertial state heading
towards a dead-end.
References
Berman, Edward H. (1999). “Rockefeller
Philanthropy and the Social Sciences:
International Perspectives”. In Theresa
Richardson and Donald Fisher, (Eds.), The
Development of the Social Sciences in the United
States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy (pp.
193-209). Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Bodley, John H. (2008). Victims of Progress, 5th
ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Burns, E. Bradford. (1980). The Poverty of
Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth
Century. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Image: Extract from “March of
Intellect” by William Heath, and published by Thomas
McLean in 1829. From
The British Museum, and the
British Library, in the public domain.
