CHAPTER VI

THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

I

It is perhaps true that "the fundamental task of the sociologist is to furnish a theory of social progress." But it is not a task to be rushed at light-heartedly. Indeed, we approach it much as Huxley screwed himself up for his famous Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. He wrote jocosely to his friends calling himself an egg dancer and applying other epithets indicating the difficulty and delicacy of the undertaking. The attempt to formulate a theory of progress meets precisely the accumulated store of misconception, prejudice, and half truths which Huxley had to face in his application of the evolutionary formula to ethics. For we must remember that there are three very well-marked classes of opinion regarding this whole matter of progress. There are the impressionistic optimists who know from the general 'feel' of things that God's in his heavens and all's progressively better for the world. They erect a particular into a universal and generalize a good digestion or personal good fortune in love or business. There are the pessimists who insist that retrogression or decadence, not progress, is the law of social life. Note that pessimism, like its opposite, is frequently a generalization of states of health or luck. And there are the cynics who laugh and tell us that like squirrels in a cage, or convicts on a tread-mill, we go through the motions

but get nowhere. Perhaps history can decide which is correct. But in order to read history aright the student of sociology must reject all three of the attitudes just exposed; he must attain the scientific and critical mind which rejects all mere impressionism and goes after concrete facts and tests. Surely the stream of history is no more vague than the stream of individual consciousness. Consciousness can be tested, measured, and compared. The history of human society should likewise yield to measurements of depth and composition, ebb and flow.

2

But to make history really mean anything we must somehow or other grasp the time element, we must get some kind of cosmological perspective. Only by getting a glimpse of the enormous span of years through which humanity has traveled can one have the remotest hint of the evolutionary process, whether you call it drifting or stream headed for some vaster deep. As a suggestive mechanical device I should recommend the History Clock as sketched on the opposite page or in the form adapted by Professor Robinson.

"Let us imagine," he says, "the whole history of mankind crowded into twelve hours, and that we are living at noon of the long human day. Let us, in the interest of moderation and convenient reckoning, assume that man has been upright and engaged in seeking out inventions for only two hundred and forty thousand years. Each hour on our clock will then represent twenty thousand years, each minute three hundred and thirty-three and a third years. For over eleven and a half hours nothing was recorded. We know of no persons or event; we only infer that man was living on the earth, for we find his stone tools, bits of his pottery, and some of his pictures of mammoths and bison. Not till twenty minutes before twelve do the

EVOLUTIONARY TYPES OF MAN ARRANGED ON A 24-HOUR CLOCK EACH HOUR OF WHICH REPRESENTS 25,000 YEARS

Modern Man (including the Iron, Bronze, and New Stone Ages)

(Estimates based on Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age.)

earliest vestiges of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization begin to appear. The Greek literature, philosophy, and science of which we have been accustomed to speak as “ancient,” are not seven minutes old. At one minute before twelve Lord Bacon wrote his Advancement of Learning . . . and not half a minute has elapsed since man first began to make the steam engine do his work for him. ... Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Lucretius — are really our contemporaries.” 1

In order properly to estimate whether humanity has progressed or not, we must assume the possibility of movement, then set up a starting point from which to measure our movement, if there has been any, and its direction. Only by setting a line of stakes from bank to bank of its mountain channel and by noting that the line became bowed in the middle could Tyndall prove the flow of an Alpine glacier. We must, then, take a look at certain phases of very primitive life and use them as our stakes for determining whether we have moved onward, or whether, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, we have been running and running, gasping for breath, through centuries upon centuries, only to find ourselves at the last under the very tree from which we started.

To establish man's complete pedigree, to relate him properly to his fellows in the animal world, we must presuppose a state of culture far below any now existent on earth. To conceive his primeval condition one must strip away bit by bit almost everything that constitutes what we know as the arts, refinements, and comforts of life. The earliest men we have any traces of stalked naked even in rough weather, were without the arts of spinning, or cutting and fastening together of skins, or pottery, or agriculture, or fire; with no weapons but perhaps spear and

1 J. H. Robinson, The New History, 239–40; cf. Ward, Pure Sociology,