In Our Time - Progress

Episode Date: November 18, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss progress. As man has grown in years and knowledge, has he also progressed in terms of happiness and a true understanding of the human condition? It was the Enlightenment which gave birth to the idea of the possibility of progress. The biblical account of time which had held sway until the eighteenth century was replaced by a conceit which put Man, not God, at the centre of the story of progress. But do we still believe in that story? Have we reached the end of history and the culmination of man’s evolution? Was the Argentinean writer Jorge Louis Borges right when he said “We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is!”. Can our moral progress keep up with our material progress, be sober in a technologically inebriated world, be in any way more than a fig leaf covering the untameable old Adam whose tragedy - more Greek than Christian - has made and marred this century? Is there such a thing at all as moral progress, or have Darwin and Freud between them cut it out of the conceit of homo sapiens? With Anthony O’Hear, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bradford; Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Darwin’s Worms.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the end of the century approaches at a gallop now. We can hear the trumpets tuning up. But as man has grown in years and knowledge, has he also progressed in terms of happiness

and a truer understanding of the human condition. There are those who argue that it was enlightenment which gave birth to the idea of the possibility of progress, The biblical account of time which had held until the 18th century was replaced by a conceit which put man, not God, at the center of the story of progress. But do we still believe in that story? Have we reached what's been called the end of history and the culmination of man's evolution? Was the Argentinian writer George Louis Borquez write when he said, we've stopped believing in progress, what progress that is? With me to discuss this is Anthony Here, professor of philosophy at the University of Bradford, an author of

after progress, finding the old way forward. And the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, who's author of Darwin's Worms, which has also been published recently. Antony here, can we define terms a little here? Progress is such a huge concept. Do you want to differentiate between material progress and moral progress? Yes, I mean, obviously over the past few centuries,

there's been immense progress in science, in technology, in medical developments, material comfort generally, and also in peaceable and democratic arrangements. And I think in a way, the Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment, has developed and extended this idea of progress so that it moves into other areas where I think it's more questionable. According to the Enlightenment, negatively, what we have to do is to get rid of superstition, repression, religion,

old traditions and allegiances. positively, if we have rational, modern, political, social arrangements starting from scratch, we can then produce a society, which is to some extent ideal. And more fundamentally, if we see human beings demythologised in scientific terms, people will be able to pursue happiness untrammeled and unrestrained. Do you see material and moral progress as being bound together? Can you see that people's material progress will make them kinder to each other, less likely to be insane with vengeance and cruelty?

It may do, but I think that the sort of image of mankind, which comes out of this enlightenment notion of progress, basing it on scientific thought, leads to an image of human beings which is not flattering to ourselves, which actually undermines our ideals. And if you think of Goya's famous picture about the sleep of reason, bringing forth monsters,

I would say, if you're thinking of enlightenment reason, it's reason which brings forth monsters in the sense that it shows us not to be creatures with high aspirations and able to reach them, but simply scientifically determined beings determined by forces of society and by Darwinian explanations just having to survive and reproduce and so on.

We brought force monsters way before the age of reason. I've just been reading Ted Hughes' translations Valsestis and the Oristaya and there are monsters there all right. Genghis Kano is a bit of a monster, reason or not. I don't think we needed the age of reason to teach us to be monsters, Anthony. But I think what we have to do is to look the particular nature of the monsters, which reason is bringing forth. But let's get back this idea of progress.

Now, do you think, and you're not giving it, I mean, people say, look, if you're better fed, better off, better clothes, house, roof over your heads, you don't have to worry about a living, you have material progress in that simple diurnal sense, then you're in a better position to behave less badly. Do you agree with that? In some ways, of course, you're not going to, struggle and fight and kill people,

but it may not actually produce satisfaction or happiness. And, well, I was just going to say that we're told that in quantitative terms, more and more people are now feeling that they lack self-esteem. How can you possibly measure that? What quantitative terms do we have to compare with the 17th century or the 14th century? Where are the statistics? And actually, throwing happiness into the balance, It's like throwing a goblet of air in balance against a sort of a ton of grain.

How can you measure happiness? One person's happiness is another person's own happiness. I don't think we would get anywhere with happiness. No, I quite agree. That's what I was going to say. I think actually our concentration on happiness is misplaced because, and that itself is a product of enlightenment thinking and utilitarianism. I think that the concentration on happiness itself produces discontents

and it takes us away from other ideals which we might have in our life, such as dignity, integrity, creativity, honour, fidelity, continents, proving a theorem, writing a book. That's enough to be going on with. Adam Phillips, how would you define progress? Well, I think one of the advantages of living in a pluralist culture is that you're going to have many competing versions of what progress might be. It would seem to me we're only going to have an idea of morality

and an idea of progress once we achieve a certain level of economic well-being, that people have to be fed, there has to be minimal conditions. Then people have some space in which they might begin to think about what kind of lives they want to lead. So that once people can economically survive, they can start having ideas and thoughts. I think the advantage of living the way we do now

is that there really are competing and conflicting ideals. We really are living in a multicultural society. People have very different ideas, both of what progress is and very interesting ideas about why there shouldn't be such a thing as progress. This must be historically unprecedented, I would have thought. Do you think for progress is possible, the moral progress is possible? Yes, I mean, I think that the platonic question can virtue be taught is a very interesting one. I think it seems to be clear that people learn things,

people are curious about being good and bad. And I think the reason the question is not generally answerable is because, as you've implied, people have very different ideas about what progress would entail. For me it would be progress to live in a culture in which there was less humiliation. It seems to be the best possible moral project for a culture would be to diminish humiliation. But you can talk about moral progress in sort of grand headline terms as well. I would consider that it was moral progress when largely inspired by British men and women, slavery was abolished. Now, I would say that is progress. Would you agree?

That's moral progress. For sure. That was also based on a certain level of material comfort. If you're a deeply cynical Marxist, you would say, excuse me, the Brits had made an awful lot of money out of the slave trade. Now they could afford to get rid of it and make everybody else get rid of it. Nevertheless, it's moral progress. Absolutely.

Would you agree with that? Yes, I think that the idea, the getting rid of slavery, was indeed moral progress, which to an extent was made possible by material comfort, material well-being, material progress. where I think things become more questionable on moral progress is that the images of humanity which science is presenting us with undermine the idea of man as something spiritual, something capable of higher aspirations.

What images are there? The images provided by Freud, Darwin, Marx. Which image? Can you just be specific? Yes. The listeners click in with this. Which particular images you talk about? Well, Darwin says that we are here on earth simply to compete, to survive and reproduce.

Freud tells us that many of our beliefs and practices are actually not as we think they are, but simply the engine of the unconscious. I think that they destroy our perceptions of ourselves as rational moral beings. As Adam Phillips's new book Darwin's worms is about Darwin and Freud and smack on this subject, would you come in on that? Well, it's very difficult, I think, to talk about mankind and images and so on. It seems, in some, it's rather abstract. If you read Darwin and Freud, you find a multiplicity of images of people. All the time, they're evolving stories about what they think people are.

I don't think that, I mean, it depends what one values. I don't feel that Darwin's account, even if we take it as starkly as you put it, that the project, as Nietzsche says, we're clever animals, the project is to survive and reproduce. That doesn't seem to be in and of itself diminishing. Neither does Freud's account of satisfaction seem in and of itself diminishing. Because I suppose I would want to know how our lives would be better without Darwin and Freud. I didn't you. Sorry, I wasn't interrupted.

No, I just wanted to ask Anthony this question. I mean, if you feel critical of them and you feel in some ways we're being given an impoverished view, I wonder how our lives would be better if there hadn't been a Darwin or a Freud. Well, it seems to me that Darwin may well be providing a correct account of biological evolution. The question that still remains is the extent to which human behavior and human culture allows us to transcend what Darwin himself calls the one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings. This is a quotation from Darwin, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Now, if you pursue Darwinian theory into the human realm, what we would be told, and to an extent we are told this by Darwin himself in the descent of man, is that our practices, our institutions, our behaviour is all designed to enable us to let the strongest live and let the weakest die. Now, it seems to me that this gives a completely false account of human life and human nature in particular areas which, I mean, I can go into in a minute, but maybe you want to come back on that. Well, I mean, there are two things occur to me.

One is that, obviously, we are in a position to contest Darwin's account. And I think the risk is that the rhetoric, if this is very powerful, when one's talking about the strongest surviving, the risk is it evokes images of kind of supermen, something like this. It seems to me we could produce a political culture in which the strongest people were the kindest, for example, that all the time Darwin gives us space to work out what it is about ourselves that we want to value most and do our best to promote and back.

I don't think he's saying it's simply a question. question of the physically strongly survive. He's saying that certain qualities, and they're always historically indeterminate, are going to enable us to survive better in certain environments. I mean, I prefer the word fittest, because you can be fitter.

A sort of a gentle cunning can be the fitter way to survive, just as much as a bloke or a bloke as with a huge club, something people. I totally agree with Adam there. I don't think what he's saying actually necessarily gets in the way of characteristics and virtues more commonly associating with religious morality.

I don't see that they are at each other's throats. Well, I mean, the strongest was actually his word, and he hardly uses the word fittest, in fact. But if Adam's telling me that Darwin leaves plenty of space for other ideals, other activities, that's fine. So we'd be in agreement there. Then the question would be, where is one going to get the ideals of,

kindness, abolishing slavery, I say fidelity, courage, magnanimity, all kinds of things that don't seem in themselves to have much to do with survival and reproduction. Now the Darwinian account doesn't explain these. They could have everything to do with survival. Everything you've said there could have everything to do with survival depending on the society you construct. Every single example you gave there. You see if the question is where our deal is going to come from. The answer is they're going to come from us. That we as clever animals are going to achieve, on the basis of rhetoric and persuasion, some kind of consensus about what it is

we as a group, depending on how you define the group, are going to value. And that's then going to be promoted as an ideal. It doesn't seem to me Darwin tells us anything specific about what we have to do morally. It seems to me he leaves us a lot of room to work out exactly what it is, which values we want to treat as the most valuable in the fittings. for the kind of world we want to make. I don't think Darwin produces as simply a legitimation of global capitalism. Can we bring Freud into this now

and maybe bring the idea? Let's just explore a bit the ideas of where do, I was a bit abrupt about that before. I didn't say anything, I didn't believe it, but I was rather elliptical a couple of minutes ago. Where can these ideas, these ideas of magnanimity and so on?

Do these come because of the way we construct a society, Or is there something in us, which religious people, of course, believe profoundly that it has been revealed. What does Freud have to say about this, Adam? I think Freud believes that we are, in a sense, culturally informed, that we bring into the world what we would now think of as a genetic inheritance. And then this is like a set of predispositions. And these then are culturally formed,

and we can transform the culture through our genetic inheritance. So I don't think Freud is an anatist in some absolute sense. He doesn't believe that all the ideas are already inside us. What he does believe, I think, is that what is already inside us is some kind of biological and instinctual life, which then meets the culture we happen to be born into. You say in your book, if we ditched redemption or dreams of perfect happiness, then we might be less unhappy or more happy, I think so be more happy,

which seems to be not an attack on because you don't write in that way, but it seems to question the promises of organised religion. Yes, I think. that for me, one of the interesting things about Freud and Darwin in a different way, as I say in the book, is that they seem to imply that some of our ideals are in a way ways of not living in the so-called real world, that to have an ideal, to have an aspiration in some ways is to live in a kind of future state. One's never present. One's always aspiring towards something else. So one of the things that Freud is very interesting about is how we use ideals as refuges, as ways of protecting ourselves in the world as well as ways as we're making the world. So you're predicating a relativism about life all the time? Yes. And that relativism has more chance of catching onto some of the truths, any sort of absolutism.

Yes, that it's going to be less inclined, ideally, to produce marginal people. Well, Anthony, I mean, I'd like to take up two points, really. I thought it was interesting that Adam said that we will develop through persuasion and rhetoric. I would hope that we would develop through reason and perhaps in a general sense, piety. He also said that we are transforming our culture. And of course I agree with that, and that's part of my complaint about the Enlightenment view of man.

If I can mention another figure who I think is a very significant commentator on all of this, it's Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche said that, In the past, people loved the Olympian gods more than they deserve to be loved. They loved the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob more than he deserved to be loved, and they loved the God of the New Testament more than he deserved to be loved. Nevertheless, in this loving, they gave themselves aspirations and structures,

which, according to Nietzsche, allowed us to escape chaos and ecumenical. and a situation in which we ceased to have genuine respect for each other. Now, it seems to me that it's a very open question as to whether in the absence of higher ideals, which I expect Adam will call refuges, it is going to be possible to sustain an understanding of the respect for the individual, which I'm sure we all want to...

I accept that. to. But I think there are two sides of this coin because I think the other side of this is that we know that terrible things have been done in the name of high ideals, that people are prepared to kill for ideas. This is absolutely astonishing fact. Big message of the century, isn't it? Yeah, that people will die and kill for ideas. Now, if this is the case, seems to me, we have to be very mindful of the kind of ideals we're willing to pursue and the cost of them. That we can't just simply say that we're going to be better off aspiring, say, to be Godlike. It seems to me that one of the things about a lot of Christian ideals,

and Nietzsche is very interesting about this too, is that they create guilt-driven people or shame-filled people. That is to say, compared to our ideals, we look really rather poor and pathetic. In other words, we're always failing. Now, this seems to me to be a rather diminishing way to live. It would be useful to have, as it were, realistic ideals for ourselves, not ideals that are always, in a sense, humiliating us, or that we use to diminish other people.

Well, you actually say in your book, Anthony, about ideas, you said it could be that notions of human rights and equality so prominent a future among consciousness fail to prepare people for the fundamental fact that we're not all equal, not all can achieve equality to leave us unable to cope with what is inevitably the condition in each of us. And you're going to say, maybe upbringing background in education or to confer privileges on those who have them to a degree that they're better able to decide and to rule. Those are quite big steps forward, aren't they? Yes. I slightly changed the subject. But it seems to me that at one level, we have to say that all people are equal. They're all equal before the law,

all equal in the sight of God, if you like. We have to respect everybody's individuality and personality up to a point in a formal, abstract way. But this does not mean that everybody is equally able to do everything. But has anybody ever said that they were? I think that that's the direction of a certain prominent amount of egalitarian rhetoric. I don't think it is. Where have you had this?

Sorry, Melvin. It seems to me that people are not saying everybody's exactly the same, but people are saying that a good society would be one in which people will. were equal before the law, for example, as you've said. It is manifestly untrue, the people are not, they don't look the same, they don't come from the same. They have different families, et cetera, et cetera. It seems to me this is a kind of straw dog. Well, I don't think it is a straw dog.

I think you only have to look at a lot of the way that people speak about education to see that what they're trying to do is to produce an equality which is actually unattainable. They're trying to produce an equality of opportunity, which is, which is not attainable wholly, but you can get further towards it than we've got towards it before. I think they're trying to earn equality of opportunity all over the political shop.

But they tend to define equality of opportunity in terms of equality of outcome. Do they? Yes. In education, they do in many cases. I'm a governor of a comprehensive school, and they don't seem to define it in that way when I read their papers, go to their meetings. I seem to me one can't give in a compelling account of this

without having some sense of the history of what's involved. There have been large, huge, numbers of people who have been educationally underprivileged. There is an attempt to write this. This seems to me to be an excellent thing. I don't think everybody is assuming that everybody's now going to be president of the United States as a consequence, but it does mean that people have the opportunity, more people have more opportunities and access to the things in the culture that are valued. But I think the means by which this is being achieved is actually undermining opportunities

for the best. I mean, I don't want to get too political about this, but I... I think we can't get too political about this. I want to know what the best is, you see. What's the best that you actually are promoting for all of us? Well, we're simply talking about educational opportunity. And it seems to me that the grammar schools are not the best for everybody, but they are the best for a certain group of people.

And I think that the destruction of the grammar schools has been extremely undermining of our culture. Now, this was done in all the... order to promote equality, in order to, quote, promote equality of opportunity. What I think it is, in fact, done is to deprive people from largely in a city and working class backgrounds of the opportunities they did have before. This is a different, I think we're going to erase on a political. All I know is that my contemporaries who stayed on Oxford and became Don's there,

tell me that there's a higher level of applicant now than in my day by a long way. that a lot of them come from comprehensive schools. When I was at this little grammar school in the north of England, we got two people to Oxford, we thought was great. They'd nine went to Oxford in Cambridge this year from that same comprehensive school and so on. I don't think it's an argument we should get into here up now. I think it's interesting, but it's not what we're talking.

Sorry, I only got to tell you. Yes, but yes. Well, you still haven't proved your point, it seems to me. Just the same old stuff comes out, which is, anyway, I'm not going to be insulting about that. Let's talk about science, and science and the idea of progress. in the time we've got left. There was a notion that science was, in many ways,

a new platform and certainly offered new solutions, which, because they were based scientifically, would be cleaner and better and more fertile than previous solutions. Where did that notion take us, Adam? Well, I think in a way there might be a simple point here, which is that all these cultural practices have paradoxical and equivocal outcomes. One's never going to know the consequence. I would seem to me an awful lot of people don't want to live in a world with a nuclear bomb,

but almost everybody wants to live in a world with anaesthetics. So that it's inevitable that this is going to be a mixed bag. So to be anti-science would be silly, it would seem to me, across the board. But it's inevitable that coming with what is loosely defined as a scientific view, and it seems to me, again, science covers an enormous number of different kinds of practices and methods. coming with scientific method has come a certain picture of what a person is. It's very different thinking of a person as a person as it was more like a tree than a car or more like an animal than a computer.

In other words, science throws up analogies of what we as people might be like and then we in the culture have to debate what we think about these. Would you agree with that, Anthony? Yes, I think I would. It seems to me though that science, Science itself is a product of a human aspiration, which itself is difficult to explain or understand in purely scientific, mechanistic terms.

I think it's a desire to know and to acquire wisdom for its own sake, not for the sake of any utilitarian end. And that seems to me to be a fundamental human aspiration that would be difficult to explain on Darwinian or Freudian terms. difficult to explain. It's undeniable that science has brought progress in many ways and also great dangers, the bomb is the most obvious and so on. But coming back to what we started with,

do you think that it is in any way helping people to achieve moral progress? In your book you talk that your theme is not progress but loss. Do you think that it's brought more loss than gain in terms of the way we behave? I think that if people think that the only considerations that should be brought to bear on, say, a question like euthanasia or cloning or using embryos for spare parts, which are all questions we're confronted with and which seem to me to be eroding the idea of the sacredness of human life.

If people think that the only consideration that should be taken into account there is a scientific consideration, then I think it is leading to moral loss. If they think that, but of course that's not an inevitable consequence of science. Why does life have to be sacred in order to be valuable? I think that we have to, in order to preserve a civilised society, we have to keep a sense of the respect for individual life. And I think that without some notion of it being sacred and without there being a notion of certain things that are off limits in dealing with other people,

we will erode that sense in a way that will be eventually disastrous. But it's very odd. Cloning you use in a sort of alarmist way, as if this is a sacred human life, but you wouldn't disagree with heart transplants, liver transplants, and so we see clones all over the place. They're called twins. So where do you stop there? I think this is indeed one of the major dilemmas of our age. One which I don't think, actually, we have the resources to solve, which is also one of the things I say in my book. what worries me is that drip by drip, drip by drip, step by step,

we're going down a slippery slope that may lead us to all kinds of results, which now we would find very unpalatable, but which we are quite likely to get to. Talking brutally, a hundred years ago, with a lot of the things in place that you seem to like very much, we started on a slippery slope

that sent us down one of the biggest, holds in humankind's history. Well, it was, but I must just say that the ideals which led to that slippery slope, namely communism and Marxism, were fundamentally godless idea. But think what people have done, no, but think what people have done in the name of God. I mean, this idea that somehow to believe in the sacred is to believe in the kind seems to me preposterous. Think of religious wars. People are killing, and have killed millions of people for the sacrile of life.

This is truly amazing. still going on in Europe. I'm not saying that all or any religious belief would be the sort of thing that I want, but I still think that we have to have a sense of mankind as somehow spiritual outside the material. How that's interpreted, of course, is another question. I think the religious dimension is important to bring in, but actually, and it's important to, I think the why question, and that's a huge thing to cope with, but I don't think that just by saying the sacred is something that governs everything,

I don't think we can live by that alone. I think we have to stop now. I'm very sorry about that. Thanks very much, Alan Phillips, and I'm here, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.