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Progress and perfection

高永光 老師

A.THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

No ideas ever are; but in the case of the idea of progress, differences of view led to a notable literary and philosophical controversy, most strikingly in England and France, which continued vigorously for many years.

In England the controversy was referred to, apparently with some irony, by the title employed by Jonathan Swift, as ‘the battle of the books.

The Renaissance era, as it rediscovered the works of art, literature, and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, quite naturally found it difficult to believe that those achievements could ever be matched, let alone exceeded.

The contention that the 'ancients' were superior to the “moderns” might be argued even today if one were restricted to comparing the arts. But there is at least one area of human accomplishment where such a view is clearly untenable: knowledge of the laws that govern the phenomena of nature.

From the sixteenth century on it was becoming evident that men were learning things about the natural world that no one had known before. The outstanding feature of this knowledge is that it was cumulative, new discoveries being added to the old, building a structure that is the work of many minds and is available to men of varied talents.

Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke, made the famous remark: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Newton was not noted for modesty, or for generosity to other scientists, but in this statement he captured the most essential feature of progress: if it depends on the appearance of superior persons it may not be possible, but if it depends on incremental cumulation,then moderns can easily surpass the ancients.

The Renaissance, which could have initiated a new period of stagnation in Western civilization, became instead the beginning of its most remarkable development.

In this respect, a notable feature of Western thought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the growth and spread of the idea of the worth of mundane benefits: more food and housing, better health and clothing, and suchlike.

In addition, it is quite clear that the social scientists were equally inspired by belief in the possibility of social progress and the hope that social scientific knowledge could contribute to its promotion.

One of these streams of thought, whose antecedents go back well before the rise of the idea of progress in the seventeenth century, is the discussion not of progress itself but of its ultimate, so to speak, the perfect society.

B.THE IDEA OF A PERFECT SOCIAL ORDER

According to one prevalent point of view, the notion of a perfect social state is a necessary constituent of the idea of social progress. Since the concept of progress involves change or the better, how can we know when a change constitutes progress without judging it according to some ideal?

In this view, a perfect social order must be described by the social philosopher for the pragmatic purpose of informing our judgments, and perhaps also for guiding our action, since if we know what would be perfect we can try to propel the course of change in the direction of the ideal.

One encounters this view of the relation between progress and perfection in very diverse areas of social thought.

In Thomistic theology, for example, there is the idea that the laws promulgated by governments may be judged by reference to a body of “natural law” which God has established in the realm of human relations and morals, just as he has established the laws governing physical phenomena.

One of the most important difficulties of this view of the relation between progress and perfection is that, when used to make simple judgments of particular changes, it implicitly assumes that the imperfections of the real world are independent, of one another.

If they are independent then we may be certain that any change that improves a particular feature of society by altering it in .the direction of the ideal contributes to general social improvement.

Another problem in the notion that one must employ a conception of perfection in order to determine whether a change should be regarded as progress is that it must assume that one thing at least is unchanging: our conception of what constitutes a perfect social order.

One further complication must be noted. A strong and recurring theme in the literature of social thought is that change is, itself, the desired state.

In Western civilization the earliest delineation of the , characteristics and conditions of a perfect social order is, of course, the description of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. Since then, literally thousands of books have been written for the purpose of describing various visions of a perfect social order.

Some Utopians believed that the social order of perfection had already been established on the planet by a Christian priest who had gone far away from Western Europe to perform his mission.

The idea of a perfect social order took on at once an air of practical possibility that appealed to the Western European empiricist outlook. Thomas More called his imaginary society “Utopia”, meaning, in Greek, “nowhere,” which suggests that it does not exist in this our world.

In brief, the era that gave birth to the disciplines we now group under the general heading of “social science” was also one that witnessed a reinvigoration and modernization of ancient speculations concerning the characteristics of a perfect social order.

In the literature of the social order of perfection there is some ambiguity towards both ends, so to speak, of the economic process: work and material wealth. Many Utopias are pictured as lands of such great material wealth that all citizens live in a state of repletion, all desires fulfilled.

On one important point with respect to work there is a notable difference between the orthodox strain of social science and the perfectionist literature: the question of division of labour.

Marx, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, said very little about the characteristics of communism, the ideal society that, in their view, was the natural result of the laws of historical development.

As we proceed with our history of social science we shall see that the issue individualism versus communalism punctuates the scientific literature as it has social philosophical thought generally, since Plato and Aristotle.

The social order of perfection is constructed without any constraints imposed by empirical facts or laws of nature. From the epistemological standpoint this is the very opposite of a scientific model.

The idea that the new social order of perfection would be based on scientific knowledge is traceable to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). His associated idea, that the new order would be under the governance of scientists, can be traced back to Plato, though, of course, Plato placed “philosophers” at the top of the hierarchy of the ideal community.