Progress

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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!!

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.)

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.

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)