{"id":3127,"date":"2017-11-04T17:26:51","date_gmt":"2017-11-04T14:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aeneas.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=260"},"modified":"2017-11-04T17:26:51","modified_gmt":"2017-11-04T14:26:51","slug":"the-west-and-the-march-to-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3127\/the-west-and-the-march-to-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"The West and the march to progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

The notion of progress<\/em> is one that could very well characterize how modernity thinks of itself.\u00a0\u00a0Theoretically, this concept goes back to\u00a0the development in the sciences of the notion of evolution, particularily with Darwin’s conception of evolution through survival of the fittest. The law of nature became with Darwin one steady movement towards better forms of life which nothing could stop. It was, as Hannah Arendt\u00a0explains (see The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em>),\u00a0a law of movement<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the 19th century, as the ravages of the Industrial revolution were felt across both continents, with the rise of workers’ misery, long working hours and hard labor and, for the first time, the appearance of unemployment, Marx reacted with the theory of the class struggle. To caricature Marx’s view,\u00a0having moved from\u00a0a tribal to a feudal\u00a0to a capitalist society, the next, final stage would be a socialist society in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class, abolish private property\u00a0and usher in an age of equality and freedom. If we believe Engels, Marx was clearly indebted to Darwin for his conception of the progressive movement towards higher forms of social organisations. Engels indeed said of Marx: “As Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic life, so\u00a0did Marx discover the law of the development of human history.” As Darwin’s, Marx’s law of History is a law of movement<\/em>. History is seen as moving as if by itself, in a steady direction, which could only be a direction of progress towards the better.<\/p>\n

Marx’s law of history would become the dominant conception of History of the western world. In fact, his\u00a0hypothesis was rooted in the growing sense by Westerners, Americans as well as Europeans, of their modern\u00a0superiority. If we could assign a starting point for this growing sense of confidence, we would have to take the 18th century. Goethe already compared Europe to an adult surrounded by a pool of children (the “primitive” peoples whom Europeans were encountering in Asia, Africa and the Americas). This comparison of social and political\u00a0development with the stages of human growth is telling. As children\u00a0are to grow into adults, so are “primitive” societies to\u00a0develop into\u00a0politically-and technologically advanced societies, as the West has (even if that meant that they had to be coerced into it). Marx “only”\u00a0added the last stage to this conception of history, the socialist stage, and became the philosopher who best conceptualized modernity. But he went further than this and applied this teleological concept to political action: now, the goal of politics was to bring about this last stage of society. We know where this led: the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the others that followed after WWII in Asia (China and North Korea) and Africa. It is also such laws of movement which Stalin and Hitler followed in their respective totalitarian regimes (see H.Arendt in op.cit.).<\/p>\n

If, as we said at the beginning, the notion of progress as a law of movement\u00a0is the primary characteristic of modernity, it has not then disappeared at all, and in fact informs, consciously or not, most of our interpretations and views of the events surrounding us (which ultimately make up History) and, therefore, determines and shapes our political decisions. This is the case when we believe that human rights, democracy or the market economy are the goals towards which all societies tend and will (must) arrive at.<\/p>\n

Last year, before the last-minute\u00a0Russian initiative defused the tension surrounding the war in Syria, Western governments openly called for Assad to be removed. Among the various reasons given to support the rebels to oust Assad and his regime, one particularly \u00a0stands out.\u00a0The comment below\u00a0was made by\u00a0then Sec. of State Hillary Clinton in Paris in July 2012 (see article here<\/a>):<\/p>\n

“The only way that will change is if every nation represented here directly and urgently makes it clear that Russia and China will pay a price. Because they are holding up progress, blockading it<\/strong>. That is no longer tolerable.”<\/p>\n

That short sentence is particularly significant because it\u00a0makes manifest\u00a0the meta-logic of progress\u00a0directing western policies and, ultimately, the West’s concept of History. To the former Secretary of State, progress <\/em>is a force of history<\/em> that must not be blocked, implying thereby that it is the movement by which history moves by itself. The problem with this scheme of things is that\u00a0human politics then becomes irrelevant and meaningless as it is no longer free to act independently and to create something new. The best it can pretend to is to accompany this autonomous movement and make the way smooth for it to be implemented. We can draw the image of\u00a0a statue already fully sculpted inside a block of marble, for which the sculptor’s sole job is to remove the unnecessary material covering the statue. In such a case, the sculptor would clearly not be regarded as an artist, but as a mere technician or, perhaps,\u00a0janitor.<\/p>\n

It is clear here that Clinton’s view of politics and history, which certainly reflects American and more generally, Western\u00a0political thought, far from bringing freedom, as they claim, in fact negates and destroys it. In such a conception, human societies\u00a0become mere servants of the law of progress, and those that oppose this law become obstacles to be removed. All\u00a0other things\u00a0set aside, this is the ideology that drove the two\u00a0totalitarian movements of the 20th century. If the Marxian concept of History is an accurate description of modernity, then modernity leaves no room for human freedom, at least certainly not in the political sphere. Perhaps this explains the profound despair and endless search for freedom that we see daily. Is then our problem with modernity? We are certainly at a time we should start thinking about our place in history and, above all, about who we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The notion of progress is one that could very well characterize how modernity thinks of itself.\u00a0\u00a0Theoretically, this concept goes back to\u00a0the development in the sciences of the notion of evolution, particularily with Darwin’s conception of evolution through survival of the fittest. The law of nature became with Darwin one steady movement towards better forms of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[46,6,6613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}