....Finally, I think it's actually an crucial question, how the US is both more civilized than it used to be, and how it is not, because the question is really about how has the left succeeded, and how have we failed...'' Liza Featherstone
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I wrote an answer to this thread a few days ago and decided somebody would make the case, but the thread wondered into the manzanita and never came out the other side. Reading through some other post tonight, some of the points below are not mentioned, so...
First of all whatever Chomsky said, he was wrong. It is simply the wrong question so it can not have a right answer or even an answer that means anything no matter how it is answered. Chomsky of all people should know better. Wasn't he one of the social scientists who maintained there was no such thing as `advanced' languages; that all were relatively speaking equivalent in their cognitive capacity to embrace, extend, and express human experience; that their differences were those akin to sensibility and not `intelligence' or `civilization'? Oh, well maybe not. Maybe is was Levi-Strauss or Cassirer.
One of the more profoundly critical contributions of the modernist elites of the 1920-60s was the understanding that societies no matter how technically sophisticated or technologically unsophisticated are neither `better' nor `worse' in some non-relative way in their fundamental cultural and social arrangements. We may like or dislike them, admire their contributions to the world's cultures and loath their living realities. They may be rich or poor as totalities, and they have well distributed common wealth or poorly distributed common wealth. Their populations may work in an office to earn a living or go fishing. None of these sorts of variables in and of themselves can be used as a hierarchical measure of social, ethical and moral standards or `progress' that `we' possess. And finally because we share a particular set of standards about how to conduct the affairs of our society, this shared consensus does not constitute a non-relativistic and therefore absolute set of measures of other societies and cultures which diverge from us in time, place, and circumstance.
I am going to apply that general idea to us and to this question. In other words the question itself is unanswerable. It is completely possible to be critical of current arrangements and past arrangements within their respective contexts. But it appears to me now that the idea of translating these sorts of critiques across time, doesn't make much sense. The only exception I can think of is asking the question would I rather live in Los Angeles or Iowa City 1964 or Berkeley 2004? I am not sure even this makes any sense. I am not even sure I would rather be twenty-one rather than sixty-one, which seems odd. Sure I could use a twenty-year old body, but the rest of it, no thanks.
I was fully conscious of what was intended by this sort of question forty years ago when I was first exposed to the controversies of a relativistic model of social science and the human world. My exposure to this view was through a series of three anthropology classes. When I first came across these sorts of ideas I thought they were bullshit. I was absolutely certain there was such a thing as progress and that the future was the place to be. It was only a question of how to get there. On the other hand, I would have preferred to run around outdoors with less clothes on at least during the summer, than sit in a classroom and look at slides of other people running around outside with less clothes on. Hmm. Even back then I had my doubts. Who's to say?
Well, here I am, back from `there' of forty years ago, and I can honestly say, I think my old anthro teachers were absolutely correct. For every positive achievement that I can locate, there is another, a reciprocal of some sort that has a negative. The sum of these taken together seems to be zero. On the other hand there have been some overwhelming technological advancements measured within their own isolated material contexts in transportation, communication, and medicine---all with a negative tag---provided you can afford them.
Basically what it comes down to in my view is a network of complex relations that have been shifted around on a horizontal plane. The configurations are different than they were. Whatever these differences, they have little to do with the old fashioned 19thC concept of `progress.' On the one hand, in terms of access to various technological benefits, more people have such access. On the other hand, their old ways of life, their traditional societies which were already in dire trouble forty or fifty years ago, have almost collapsed or have disappeared altogether.
Even at the top of the heap, I am not sure what progress would mean. On the one hand, the rich and elite have of course more wealth and a greater share of common wealth and certainly weald more power than they did half a century ago. On the other hand, these same elites seem to me a much meaner spirited lot, less generous, and less well educated in humanistic ideals than their father's generation. It seems to me that they have absolutely less interest in the plight of common people below them, less interest in the arts and sciences and seem to at the very best to achieve a perfect zero in all measures of altruism. In fact most seem to me to have strikingly negative scores. However, if Joseph Conrad's Kurtz is any measure of where such altruism ends, perhaps we are better off as enemies.
Now, back to the point. Social movements have succeeded in the last forty years in moving around various relations that they attempted to influence. On the other hand reactionary counter-moves have succeeded in nullifying a great many of these changes, and they have most spectacularly succeeded when these counterforces were wedded to particular interests of corporate culture, or capital. For example, there have been a great many improvements in the social position of women, but most positive changes have been traded for an increased economic demand for work. And work, while increasingly open to women, remains always on second rate pay scales to men of the same rank, education, background, etc.
You can pretty much lay out a similar zero sum picture for black, hispanic and other traditional US minorities. In this context, sure there is more integration, opportunity, and economic shifts up for some, but there are also larger prison populations. Being Black is still probably the number one killer of African Americans. Well, it is in Oakland anyway. Even discarding lead poisoning by neighbors, relatives, and police, the rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and other disabilities must be soaring. But I have a jaundiced view, since I work almost exclusively with disabled minorities.
The one thing I will say that is positive. If you are smart, have been paying attention, and lucky, you can put together a better life for yourself than you had. But this almost entirely depends on how you define `better'.
Qualitatively, I have a better life (I think) than my father, but what I earn quantitatively would never support a wife, two kids, two cars and house---as his middle class wage did for more than twenty years. In any event I am quite sure he would not like my life, any more than I liked his.
The distinction between my father's values and mine seems to mask another distinction, which is that my ideas of what constitutes progress have changed over time and have become incommensurate their former versions. What I might have intended as progress forty years ago doesn't commute with what I now think---and a significant amount of that difference is because we live in a different world. So even ignoring the qualifications noted above, this shift in the underlying meanings with the same general label makes such concepts deeply suspect.
What does this mean for progressive movements? I don't know. Almost all the improvements in the quality of living are the results of technological developments and various rearrangements by capital in their interests, not ours. Improvements in medicine for example have been made accessible en mass only if these could be distributed through profit making market systems. Those who can not afford them, don't get them. On the other hand, many older perhaps less desirable means to the same health end are more available. The tactic amounts to reverting to older systems and resuscitating them. You can see this going on in wheelchairs or HIV/AIDs drugs in non-western countries where current improvements are skipped or less sophisticated variants are generated for the sake of cost.
Forgetting all the above for a moment. I think the single biggest way to effect change is still through legislation and law. I am afraid that makes me a statist. In any case, the state isn't going to disappear and it is certainly the primary tool for managing the organization of capital and mass society. Yes government is dominated by capital, but the definition of capital and its rules are entirely set by state power, which is the obvious reason capital dominates state power against the interests of labor. But in any case, most of what I consider progress at the moment can be achieved by legal reform and legislation.
It's just a damned shame that we have to out vote something over 60% of the clinically brain-dead to get that progress started.
CG
BTW. Yes there was garlic back then, but it was smaller. On the other hand it had more flavor...