THE IDEA of progress is perhaps the least valuable weapon in the liberal arsenal. Often criticizing conservatives for trying to live in the past or refusing to accept today's world, liberals use the word "progress" in a way that betrays a deep naiveté about the world and their beliefs. As someone who sympathizes with the liberal worldview, I see no place in our lexicon for the vague and condescending term "progress." Using examples of race relations and technology, I will attempt, in constrained space, to articulate some of the many problems inherent to "progress."
One of the easiest ways to claim that today is better than 1906 is race relations. In the past one hundred years, African-Americans have secured the rights guaranteed to them by the 14th and 15th Amendments. An awe-inspiring mass movement delivered blacks from mob-justice to a world of expanded opportunity, a world in which a primary contender for the 2008 presidential election is black.
However, the term progress obscures the complexity of today's race problems and plays into the hands of conservative-minded individuals. Progress implies a linear movement from worse to better. Reality is infinitely more complicated, and paradigms based on linear movements only distort this reality. Specifically, while the condition of blacks has undoubtedly improved (hence the inclination to use the term progress), there are still many unaddressed problems. Schools today are about as desegregated as in the 1970s, with blacks suffering the worst public school conditions in the Western world. The same 2008 presidential candidate is also only the third black senator in U.S. history and the only black senator serving currently. Implicit Attitude Tests (IATs) designed by psychologists indicate that many people, including blacks, harbor negative attitudes towards blacks. In the most extreme form of continued racism, Omaha last year tried to re-segregate their schools into predominantly black, Hispanic and white districts.
Immediately, one will respond that despite all of those facts and more, conditions for black people in the nation have progressed. Yet this would avoid the point that progress in that context is a vacuous term. The human condition develops in many ways and in many directions concomitantly, and in the example of race relations, many of those directions were favorable, and many others were not. Therefore, when we speak of "progress," we understate the racial problems currently facing our country.
Progress is also a misleading term when referring to technology. Oftentimes people will herald corporate progress or technology simply in the name of "progress," without ethical concern for the environment or the ramifications of such "advancements." One such field was eugenics before World War II, a rarely discussed blemish on our nation's track record. Eugenics developed out of a distorted version of Darwinism, and premised itself upon the notion that progress required weeding out the weak. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in Buck v. Bell, when upholding eugenics in the name of progress, "Three generations of imbeciles is enough."
Even less controversial technologies cannot be described accurately by the term progress. For example, the epitome of progress was the Industrial Revolution, where the means of production were revolutionized by several key technological discoveries. However, by-products of this "progress" were numerous: mass destruction of the environment, initiation of the (still ongoing) most drastic extinction period in world history, subjugation of workers to inhumane conditions, urbanization, etc. The list could go on.
I am not arguing that the Industrial Revolution was bad. Such simplistic analysis of our complicated world is both meaningless and dangerous. It is meaningless because it fails to address the totality of our condition. It is dangerous because in failing to do so, it severely understates the problems we face today. These problems have become all too easy to rationalize with words like "progress," words that imply that our linear travels through development will inevitably solve issue after issue, until one day delivering us into a state of repose. This "salvation through progress" paradigm almost implies the existence of a secular heaven. And in fact, ironically, the idea that salvation (or betterment) comes through hard work and progress is distinctly related to Protestant thought. Thus, except for a change in rhetoric, it seems then that what conservative thinkers like Bill O'Reilly chastise as "secular progressivism" is really nothing new at all.
The religious analogy is arguably a stretch, though a fun experiment. Nevertheless, progress is both a complicated word and a complicated phenomenon. People who use it tend to think in elitist terms: The world would be better if everyone just jumped aboard the Progress train. And when people are understandably reluctant to do so, those chanting "progress" unleash condemnations of backwardness. This paradigm is dreadfully oversimplified. One example seeps through the common approach (by liberals and conservatives) to the third world, best described by one question: Why aren't these countries progressing? They see the mullahs and the chavistos as backward or confused people, rather than products of our much esteemed progress.
I acknowledge that the topic I chose to address here is cramped by the limited space available to me. But as someone who sympathizes with liberal causes, I would celebrate the day when my fellow thinkers will drop their simplifying, often condescending notions of progress, and replace them with a more nuanced understanding of our world. Only then can we gain a more angled and ultimately a more sagacious perspective.
Sina Kian's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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