Two Cheers (or Maybe Just One) for Progress
By Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. Her book "One Nation, Two Cultures" will be published by Knopf later this year.
If one idea imposes itself upon us as we consider the past thousand years, surely it is the idea of progress. One can hardly begin to take the measure of the extraordinary advances in science, technology, medicine, transportation and communication in this past millennium; or the vast improvements in living and working conditions, health and longevity, education and cultivation, travel and recreation; or the political and social reforms that have brought democracy and liberty to much of the world, making the privileges of the few the rights of the many.
One need not go back 1,000 years to register this spectacular evidence of progress. A century, or half-century, or even a few decades will do. It is not a delusion of contemporaries that we are living in an age of unprecedented change. It is a demonstrable fact, as we have moved from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a national to a global economy, from a modernist to a postmodernist culture, and, most recently, from a technological to a "hypertechnic" world of seemingly limitless potentialities, where almost anything thinkable becomes possible and almost everything possible probable.
Our present situation brings to mind another period that was intoxicated with the idea of progress. For the Enlightenment, it was not science or technology that was the warrant of progress; it was reason. Reason did not have to await the discoveries of science, because it was innate both in man and in nature, and had only to be liberated from the tyranny of religion, government and tradition. This idea of progress was encapsulated in the utopias of William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet.
While the American Founders were developing a "science of politics" to ensure the stability of the republic, Godwin was developing a "science of morals" to ensure the perfectibility of man. The first principle of Godwin's science was reason. Human beings who were perfectly rational would be perfectly moral, hence free and equal. Thus there would be no need for all the oppressive institutions that make up society: laws, contracts, property, religion, marriage, family, schools, armies, prisons.
Almost as a byproduct, perfectibility would bring with it the "total extirpation of the infirmities of our nature"--disease, sleep, languor, anguish, melancholy, resentment, even death itself. Godwin did not commit himself to the idea of immortality as a certainty, only as a probability; what was certain was the infinite prolongation of life. This happy state of affairs would not lead, as one might fear, to an onerous overpopulation, because men, being perfectly rational, would be liberated from emotion and passion. Thus there would be no sexual desire and no propagation. "The world," Godwin was pleased to report, "will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years."
This was surely the utopia to end all utopias--until our present utopia. Today, by means of genetic and embryonic engineering, organ replacement, and, now, cloning, we can look forward to a time when we will be able to create individuals to specification and, in principle at least, sustain them indefinitely. "This is the first time we can conceive of human immortality," says the head of a thriving biotech company, who is a respected scientist but clearly no historian. Even those of us who do not conceive of immortality aspire to a degree of perfectibility, a control over ourselves and our progeny, an ability to manipulate mind, body and nature, that no longer seems utopian because it is the practical agenda of scientists and technicians rather than the fancy of philosophers and visionaries.
While "ethicists" debate the implications of all this, the rest of us reread Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and marvel at his prescience. We may take comfort in the fact that our brave new world, unlike his, is not totalitarian; indeed, it is eminently free and uninhibited, catering to the wills and desires of individuals. It does, however, share with his the overriding idea of progress. "Progress is lovely" is the mantra endlessly repeated for the edification and indoctrination of the inhabitants of Huxley's world. In the heady atmosphere we live in today, it threatens to become our mantra as well.
Yet progress is not always lovely. Sometimes it is notably unlovely. The perfect can be the enemy of the good, as the old adage has it. Immoderate desires and aspirations make us impatient with the frailties of human nature and the contingencies of social institutions, prompting us to try to overcome these imperfections by creating a new man, a new society and a new polity. Such enterprises, history remind us, are fraught with peril. We recall that Godwin's work, greatly admired by the English enthusiasts of the French Revolution, appeared precisely at the moment when Robespierre's "Reign of Virtue" mutated into a Reign of Terror. And Condorcet's "Sketch of the Progress of the Human Spirit," celebrating the rationality of man, infinite progress of mankind, and unlimited extension of life, was written while he was hiding from the revolutionary police (he supported the revolution but opposed the execution of the king) and was published only after he had died in prison.
This is the great advantage of religious utopias over secular ones. Religious utopias are otherworldly; they preserve the transcendent vision of perfection without seeking to actualize that vision on earth. Secular ones seek to create a utopia on earth, an act of hubris that is almost always fatal, if not to the perpetrators of the utopia, then to its innocent victims. Contra naturam, the defiance of nature, used to be a sufficient argument for those who were not persuaded by contra deum, provoking the wrath of God. But what does it mean today, when we have defied, even violated, nature in so many ways, for good as well as bad? If cloning is against nature, is not also artificial insemination, or in vitro fertilization, or, for that matter, the pill? If we approve of embryonic and genetic research to remedy birth defects, why not cloning to create the perfect child, or the perfect replica of oneself, or of another loved one, or of a much-admired celebrity?
Objections to biotechnology are commonly couched in pragmatic, empirical terms. Cloning, it is argued, may lead to incest and thus to the deformations associated with inbreeding. Or embryonic research may encourage abortions to provide the embryos for experimentation, or even encourage pregnancies intended to be aborted. These, and a host of similar objections, are serious enough to give us pause.
But the ultimate question is how far we may go in defying nature without undermining our humanity. What does it mean to create human beings de novo and to specification? What does it mean for human beings, who are defined by their mortality, to entertain, even fleetingly, even as a remote possibility, the idea of immortality? It is at this point that contra naturam rises to the level of contra deum.
To raise these questions is in no way to reject science and technology or to belittle their achievements. It is not contra naturam to invent labor-saving devices and amenities that improve the quality of life for masses of people, or medicines that conquer disease, or contrivances that allow disabled people to live, work and function normally. These enhance humanity; they do not presume to transcend it.
But science and technology, like progress itself, can be morally equivocal. It was not a millennium ago but in this very century that we experienced one of the most monstrous events in human history, the Holocaust, and discovered, not for the first time, that both science and technology can be put to the most heinous uses. We have also been obliged to reconsider the Enlightenment, which bequeathed to us many splendid achievements but also some dangerous illusions. In our post-Enlightenment world, we have had to relearn what ancient philosophy and religion had taught us and what recent history has brought home to us: that material progress can have an inverse relationship to moral progress, that the most benign social policies can have unintended and unfortunate effects, that national passions can be exacerbated in an ostensibly global world and religious passions in a supposedly secular one, and that our most cherished principles (liberty, equality, fraternity, even peace) can be perverted and degraded--that, in short, progress in all spheres, not only in science and technology, is unpredictable and undependable.
This may be the lesson of the millennium. Progress, yes, but a modest, cautious, amelioratory progress, chastened by the experiences of history and guided by a sense of human limits as well as possibilities.