The 2004 CHRISMAS LECTURE

Organised & chaired by Victor Suchar

Prof. John Gray

London School of Economics

10 December 2004

The Chairman introduced Prof. Gray as a leading British political philosopher and historian of ideas. He is Professor of European thought at LSE, and prior to this appointment he was Professor of Politics at Oxford. Prof. Gray is the author of numerous essays and of several influential books on political thought including: Enlightenment's Wake: Politics & Culture at the Close of Modern Age; Beyond the New Right: Markets, Governments & the Common Environment; False Dawn: the Delusions of Modern Capitalism; Two Faces of Liberalism; and Heresies: Against Progress & Other Illusions.

Questioning the idea of progress at the start of the 21^st century is a bit like casting doubt on the existence of the Deity in Victorian times. The stock reaction is one of incredulity, followed by anger, then moral panic. It is not so much that belief in progress is unshakeable as that we are terrified of losing it. The idea of progress embodies the faith? for it is a faith, not the result of any kind of empirical inquiry? that the advance that has occurred in science can be replicated in ethics and politics. Science is a cumulative activity. Today we know more than any previous generation, and there is no obvious limit to what we may come to know in future. In the same way, we can indefinitely improve the human condition. Just as human knowledge continues to increase beyond anything dreamt of in earlier times, the human condition can be better in future than it has ever been in the past. This is a very recent creed. Nothing like it can be found anywhere before it emerged in Europe around two centuries ago. Yet today it seems to have become indispensable. No one imagines progress to be inevitable. Even so, to deny that it is possible seems tantamount to snuffing out all hope. In terms of mass killing of humans by humans, the 20^th century was the worst in history; but surely? it will be objected--we must believe that such horrors can be avoided in future. How else can we go on? To reject the very idea of progress must appear extreme, if not wilfully perverse. Yet it is found in none of the world's religions, and was unknown among the ancient philosophers. For Aristotle, history was a series of processes of growth and decline no more meaningful than those we observe in the lives of plants and animals. Early modern thinkers such as Machiavelli and some of the thinkers of the Enlightenment shared this view. David Hume believed that history is cyclical, with periods of peace and freedom being regularly followed by war and tyranny. For the great Scottish sceptic, the oscillation between civilisation and barbarism was coeval with human history; in ethical and political terms the future was bound to be much like the past. The same view is found in Hobbes, and even Voltaire was at times inclined to it. These thinkers never doubted that some periods of history are better than others. None of them was tempted to deny the fact of improvement, where it existed; but they never imagined it could be continuous. They knew there would be times of peace and freedom in the future, as there have been in the past; but what is gained in one generation will surely be lost in another. In ethics and politics there is no progress, only recurring gain and loss. This seems to me to be the result of any view of the human prospect that is not befogged by groundless hopes. Progress is an illusion? a view of human life and history that answers to the needs of the heart, not reason. In his book The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, Freud argued that religion is an illusion. Illusions need not be all false; they may contain grains of truth. Even so, they are believed not because of any truth they may contain but because they answer to the human need for meaning and consolation. Believers in progress have identified a fundamental truth about modern life? its continuous transformation by science; but they have invested this undoubted fact with hopes and values inherited from religion. They seek in the idea of progress what theists found in the idea of providence? an assurance that history need not be meaningless. Those who hold to the possibility of progress insist that they do because history supports it. In fact they cling to it because it is it allows them to believe that history can be more than a tale told by an idiot. In his great poem ‘Aubade’ Philip Larkin wrote of religious faith as ‘that vast moth-eaten musical brocade’--a system of falsehoods contrived to shield humans from their fear of death. His description may once have had some validity, but it is better applied nowadays to the secular faith in progress. Whatever their faults, traditional religions are less fantastical. They may promise a better world beyond the grave, but they do not imagine that science can deliver humanity from itself. Can modern men and women do without the moth-eaten musical brocade of progressive hope? I think not. Faith in the liberating power of knowledge is encrypted into modern life. Drawing on some of Europe's most ancient traditions and daily reinforced by the quickening advance of science, it cannot be given up by an act of will. The interaction of quickening scientific advance with unchanging human needs is a fate, which we may perhaps temper, but cannot overcome. In time, no doubt, the religion of progress will disappear, as the way of life it animates fades from the world. Other faiths will appear, more or less remote from human realities, but equally irrational. Who now remembers Mithraism, or the curious faith of the Gnostics? These religions sustained and consoled millions of people over many centuries, only to vanish almost without trace. Yet those who hold to the possibility of progress need not fear. The belief that science can remake the world is an integral part of the modern condition. Renewing the eschatological hopes of the past, progress is an illusion with a future.

John Gray