Does history progress? If so, to what?

This is another Question of the Month from Philosophy Now. The last two I submitted weren’t published, but I really don’t mind as the answers they did publish were generally better than mine. Normally, with a question like this, you know what you want to say before you start. In other words, you know what your conclusion is. But, in this case, I had no idea.

 

At first, I wasn’t going to answer, because I thought the question was a bit obtuse. However, I couldn’t help myself. I started by analysing the question and then just followed the logic.

 

 

I found a dissonance to this question, because ‘history’, by definition, is about the past and ‘progress’ infers projection into the future. In fact, a dictionary definition of history tells us it’s “the study of past events, particularly in human affairs”. And a dictionary definition of progress is “forward or onward movement to a destination”. If one puts the two together, there is an inference that history has a ‘destination’, which is also implicit in the question.

 

I’ve never studied history per se, but if one studies the evolution of ideas in any field, be it science, philosophy, arts, literature or music, one can’t fail to confront the history of human ideas, in all their scope and diversity, and all the richness that has arisen out of that, imbued in culture as well as the material and social consequences of civilisations.

 

There are two questions, one dependent on the other, so we need to address the first one first. If one uses metrics like health, wealth, living conditions, peace, then there appears to be progress over the long term. But if one looks closer, this progress is uneven, even unequal, and one wonders if the future will be even more unequal than the present, as technologies become more available and affordable to some societies than others.

 

Progress infers change, and the 20^th Century saw more change than in the entire previous history of humankind. I expect the 21^st Century will see more change still, which, like the 20^th Century, will be largely unpredictable. This leads to the second question, which I’ll rephrase to make more germane to my discussion: what is the ‘destination’ and do we have control over it?

 

Humans, both as individuals and collectives, like to believe that they control their destiny. I would argue that, collectively, we are currently at a cross roads, which is evidenced by the political polarisation we see everywhere in the Western world.

 

But this cross roads has social and material consequences for the future. It’s epitomised by the debate over climate change, which is a litmus test for whether we control our destiny or not. It not only requires political will, but the consensus of a global community, and not just the scientific community. If we do nothing, it will paradoxically have a bigger impact than taking action. But there is hope: the emerging generation appears more predisposed than the current one.