Progress

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Is your conception of recent history (say the last 30 years) one of progress or decline?

I'm also fascinated by the way humans have always created cosmologies which are basically narratives of decline, rather than promising progress, and I wondered why that was too.

― Tom, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Declines usually are more quick and drastic, relatively. Reminders of decline are usually the greatest motivators of progress.

Or at least I think I know what you mean. Do I? Maybe I don't. What do you mean by "narratives of decline"?

― donut bitch, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Immense uniform ongoing self-sustaining PROGRESS.

― Graham, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

It is still too soon to tell.

― Dan I., Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

sort of both, like progress downwards? as if people strive to make things suck more. (and generally meet with some degree of success)

― Ron, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

do you mean like "we once walked with the gods and have since fallen from grace" or some such

― Ron, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Who else thinks Ron is drunk please raise the hand. I cant be alone on this one

― Chupa-Cabras, Thursday, 1 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

do you mean like "we once walked with the gods and have since fallen from grace" or some such

- Yeah I really elaborated on that shiznit on Tom's intelligence thread.

― V, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I've never understood the "decline and fall" narratives seemingly everyone enjoys projecting on history, recent or not. But when you isolate it to the past thirty years, it basically comes down to the following logic: since most everyone on Earth is doing things wrong (i.e. not the way I want them to), we are obviously fucking everything up, and my views will eventually be vindicated by the complete collapse of everything good and pure. (This reasoning will work for basically anyone apart from a military dictator of the entire planet.)

― nabisco, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

(And for the western world it tends to be conservatives saying "culture has gone liberal thus everything is collapsing" versus liberals saying "the inhuman machine of capitalism only extends its reach thus we are on a path to disaster.")

― nabisco, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

isn't a decline and especially a fall predicated on progress of some type? moving away or forward causing us to lose some valued pathway. variations on luddism. which is crap as anyone kno since prior to 2002 there was no such thing as possible future versions of handwriting recognition systems.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I think we are getting into a process of stagnation disguised as progress (cf theory of micronisation). I mean technology goes on and on, and we create alot of waste, and we sustain systems, and the world is still inequitable. So, true progress for me would be measured at a more basic 'spiritual'/social level, and I don't really see it happening. The advancement of technology it seems is an unfair measure of progress, as it appears to me to be too unfocused, no one really knows where we are going.

― jel --, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

What we see now are the growing pains of the next step of evolution which involves humans becoming closer to machines. This is a good thing. Perhaps.

― dave q, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I've never understood the "decline and fall" narratives seemingly everyone enjoys projecting on history, recent or not

Um, what about the Whig interpretation of history, which until recently was fairly popular.

― RickyT, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

How much closer can I get to a machine. I touch a computer all day.

― Pete, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

You'll have microchips inside your head.

― jel --, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

decline/fall narratives only apply to v narrow threads in a larger story of "mere change" and require some sort of standard to say this is better than that. Tom says that humans create narratives of decline, but a lot of the time historians have been fighting the self- justifying historical narratives -- Whig histories celebrated revolutions after the fact that the revolution is decided to be a good thing). Also think on the fight against the image that evolution leads to "improvements" and "better" lifeforms. which is rubbish.

― Alan Trewartha, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

How much closer can I get to a machine

You'll have microchips inside your head

Mind control: the future is now! (NB link requires 'Shockwave')

― Jeff W, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

By cosmological narratives I meant the sort of stuff Vic was talking about on the other thread - the Graeco-Roman idea of the ages of Gold/Silver/Bronze/Iron, the Hindu Kali-Yuga, even the Christian narrative of the Fall and then a slide (interrupted but not stopped by Christ) towards the last days - the first stories people told about themselves involved locating themselves in an environment which was bad and (ahem) showed every indication of worsening. Why is this? It works as an explanation for the wickedness of the world but why the suggestion that things will get worse not better?

In historical terms the notion of progress has had a better deal since the Enlightenment - even then as someone pointed up above writers and activists of all strands invoke decline-stories to justify their ideas. Cultural ideas of decline are almost always linked to the morals of the young.

― Tom, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

ah right. we are just the sparks from the original broken vessels. compare and contrast "big bang to heat-death of the universe"

― Alan Trewartha, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

the breaking of the vessels!! gershom scholem must stay!!

― mark s, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Both progress and decline have occurred, and are occurring. Sometimes one causes the other.

Most obviously, technological progress --> ecological decline, if not indeed catastrophe. Anyone who thinks that nothing ever gets worse in history should consider how many species become extinct every year, thanks to aspects of human progress.

This is the main reason why I am suspicious of progress. If we bracket it, then I am quite ready to believe in various kinds of progress - most obviously of scientific knowledge, medical advances, and hence the improvement of human living conditions and the alleviation of suffering. Anyone who thinks that nothing ever gets better in history should probably ponder that.

― the pinefox, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Man/machine interface foreshadowed by 'Happy Days' scenes when Fonzie snaps fingers and Coke machines give up free cans etc. In the future everyone will be able to do it.

― dave q, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Ron: you don't see "social progress," however small, over the past thirty years? Try to imagine yourself as female, black, gay, or a citizen of one of the dozens of nations to gain independence during that period.

― nabisco, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

There are narratives of progress too, Tom, some based on complete misunderstandings. You will find plenty of people who think evolution is some sort of arrow pointing towards humanity as the pinnacle of creation. Societies construct their own narratives similarly - perhaps America is the most obvious example of that so far. I'm not trying to impose ideas of social evolution, but I think they have things in common: changes happen and adjustments are made and for all sorts of reasons some thrive and some die. Some last longer than others or burn more brightly, but times change. The Romans had a firm idea of their being the successors of previous great civilisations, as we do, more or less, and it is no guarantee of lasting success.

I guess I'm more or less saying that I think it's a category error, as it is in evolution, a temporary illusion rather than anything real.

― Martin Skidmore, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

n- sure, i wasn't even thinking of that aspect. surely there has been less progress than is generally thought, however. "isn't it great that racism was ended with the civil rights movement" i was more thinking about how the generally held (in western capitalist etc) notions of progress give me the willies. building, constructing, buying, selling.... i guess i have some lloyd dobbler in me: "I don't want to buy anything sold or processed, etc."

― Ron, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

progress=http://www.blogfucker.com/9622/spidey-n- friends.gif

― RJG, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Martin - the impression I get from most surviving Roman texts, though, is not one of 'progress' being a motor of society. The Empire always had to contend with the notion that the Republic (particularly when ppl couldnt remember the Republic) was better/fairer/juster. Tacitus (I think - maybe Livy) is big on how everything was grebt when he was a lad but now the youth are out of control and morals are declining. There is certainly no sense - apart from in ultra- political texts like Imperial inscriptions - of "now is the best time to be alive", let alone "in 100 years it will be even better", which are the basic ideas of a 'progressive' interpretation.

Of course progressive narratives have existed. I was thinking about The War Of The Worlds yesterday - one reason it and other disaster-stories were so popular is that to the educated Late Victorian mindset there was no way other than a science-fictional catastrophe that the march of progress could be halted.

― Tom, Friday, 2 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I wouldn't argue with you on that, Tom, because you certainly know more about it than me, but I have gathered the impression from various texts that the Romans had a sense of being the natural and noble successors of the great Greek civilisation they saw wither: it's not so much a narrative of continuing progress as a construction of themselves as the peak of a kind of evolution (obviously not a concept that then existed). But as now, there would be competing narratives, and as a good Postmodernist I decline to privilege any particular one. My point was that I think we are deluding ourselves by trying to turn anything as messy and confused and irregular as the history of societies into anything resembling a narrative of either decline or progress.

― Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

tom and martin have either of you read EMPIRE by michael hardt and antonio negri? i am 3/4s of the way thruogh it and i think it is TERRIFIC despite occasional walks through fields of pomo buzzwords which i HATE and ph34r (oh no!! deterritorialization!! OH NO!!)

The first book I ever read where I thought (for more than a page at a time): this is in the same space politically as me.... k-blimey-o!!

― mark s, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

I've not read that. Has it made it to remaindered bookshops yet, because I almost never buy full-price new books? (Yesterday I bought a complete collection of Sophocles' plays (7) for £1.99: I am not interested in anything that is less good value than that.) I'll try to remember to seek it out at a library (East Ham is a bit rub, but UCL might have it.)

― Martin Skidmore, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

In the case of Rome, having Goths, Vandals and whatnot harrying at/steadily eroding their frontiers surely didn't encourage a 'narrative' of progress. Having said that, Mark S will probably pop up shortly and tell me that there were no such thing as Barbarians.

― David, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

b-b-but the barbarians are on TV on channel 4 as we speak, so they must exist!! (except it's on monday not tonight)

i think the romans had stopped writing histories of themselves by the time the goths and vandals swept into town: earlier barbarians were not just part of the narrative, but proof of the progress (one of them even got quoted as saying THEY MAKE A DESOLATION AND CALL IT PEACE, which is one of the all-time great critiques of the concept of imperialism-as-progress)

― mark s, Saturday, 3 August 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

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