The Myopia and Arrogance of Directional Theories of History
Regress characterizes history as much as progress; the only consistency is unpredictability
One of the commonest claims is that there’s no better time to be alive than the present. While this assertion is probably true, proponents have a tendency to presuppose an additional contention, namely that today is better because history is progressive. According to those who hold this view, history is directional and therefore humanity’s state improves over time as a result of inevitable technological and moral progress. Some may provide a narrower definition and specify that this view postulates a linear direction to history, but the last century seems to indicate an exponential trend in terms of technological advancement. The directional interpretation of history appeals to a varied range of thinkers from those on the left, such as Martin Luther King Jr. who famously declared in the words of Theodore Parker that “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice” to conservatives who extol the decline of poverty in the last half century as evidence of the capacity for capitalism to generate material prosperity. One of Barack Obama’s favorite methods of morally shaming geopolitical opponents was to assert that they’d end up on “the wrong side of history.” Remember, if you seize Crimea after being told it won’t matter once Obama’s reelected, Obama won’t do anything but there will still be consequences because you can rest assured that you’ll be remembered like Hitler. The problem with this thinking is that it relies on an interpretation of history that only accounts for the last several centuries at most, and even then, it manages to ignore the moral deterioration observable within that narrow window.
Theories Need More Data
Karl Marx’s dialectical materialist theory of history was meant to be a scientific account of sociopolitical evolution which could be reduced to changes in the relations of production and would culminate in a stateless and classless society wherein everyone is provided for, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. Steven Pinker has made a more measured formulation of the directional theory of history in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature which presents statistics on infant mortality and deaths from war among others to demonstrate the decline of violence and explains it in terms of modern institutions. Yet the most (in)famous progressive theory of history remains Francis Fukuyama’s as articulated in his magnum opus The End of History and the Last Man.
When I read that book in high school, I realized Fukuyama’s critics had attacked a strawman version of his thesis. He didn’t claim that liberal democracy and capitalism would imminently supplant every other regime-type everywhere within his lifetime on the grounds that capitalism produces wealth which leads to demands for political accountability and participation. Rather, he borrowed Plato’s theory of a tripartite soul—the view that human nature has a rational, appetitive, and spirited aspect—and made the case that only liberal democracy could satisfy the spirited or thymotic aspect. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic supposed that we have a desire for recognition of our freedom, which would result in a contest for dominance that would eventually be resolved, according to Fukuyama, through liberal democracy. While liberal democracy can evolve and come in different variants—after all, American democracy differs from German democracy—its essential features would remain. It’s similar to how a sword can be constructed out of bronze at one time and steel at another. It can be in the shape of a gladius, a claymore, or a katana but remain a sword. Fukuyama has compared his theory to Marx’s and denounced the neoconservative architects of Bush’s Freedom Agenda as akin to Lenin for aiming to force history forward through the brute force of the state.
In retrospect, I realize Fukuyama’s detractors were doing him a favor by misrepresenting his argument. It wasn’t a strawman but a steelman. This article from an insightful public intellectual last year attempted to revive Fukuyama’s theory by arguing that China’s zero-covid incompetence and Russia’s unimpressive start to Putin’s “Special Military Operation” proved that there’s no viable competition to liberal democracy. The problem with both Fukuyama’s argument and (perhaps even more so) with the article is how myopic they are. In fact, every progressive interpretation of history suffers from this fallacy. It would’ve been more plausible to assert that liberal democracy would dominate the political zeitgeist of the post-Cold War world. This is arguably true considering that aside from monarchies in the Arab world, every country labels itself a democracy. However, Fukuyama instead remains convinced that liberal democracy is the ultimate form of human government and that no other can emerge to replace it because only liberal democracy assuages human nature’s yearning for recognition. Anyone whose historical dataset includes more than the last several hundred years can immediately see how implausible this claim is, and it’s a shock that someone with an undergraduate degree in classics would be responsible for it.
There’ve been neuroscientists who’ve argued that people have an ingrained need for belief in the divine, and most civilized peoples were governed by theocracy in the Bronze Age, some of which lasted for thousands of years (e.g. ancient Egypt). The notion that most of the world would one day have secular governments and that there’d be entire continents, such as Europe, where most people don’t even believe in the supernatural would’ve been quite literally unbelievable for the majority of recorded human history. The knowledge that Europe would transition from a series of polytheistic societies, the most advanced of which would actively persecute Christianity for several centuries, to a civilization defined by its allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to the bastion of secularism that it is today would’ve been impossible to even conceive of at most points in history.
There are far too many variables to begin even possibly to account for. It was impossible to know that Europe would become Christendom without knowing that Christianity would exist in the first place. Even when it did exist, it would’ve been impossible to know that after three centuries a Roman emperor would adopt it and that several decades after that another Roman emperor would make it the state religion. It was impossible to know that it would be embraced by Germanic tribes and therefore survive the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. Nobody could’ve foreseen the invention of the printing press and therefore the possibility for reformers to spread their message during the Reformation. No one could’ve known that the Reformation would produce wars so devastating that intellectuals would become committed to disestablishing religion in state institutions, much less that there’d be a new country formed on a continent an ocean away where this would occur. Whether you think it was beneficial for Europe to switch from polytheism to Christianity and from Christianity to atheism is a matter of opinion. Nonetheless, it’s not implausible to argue a pagan Europe was preferable to a Christian one or that today’s secular Europe is more desirable than Christendom. The possibility that any of these opinions could be right indicates that it’s at least plausible that history involves massive moral backsliding just as often as it involves moral progress.
The level of hindsight necessary to plausibly assert that a historical development was ineluctable is immense, and the hindsight required to know that such a development will never be supplanted belongs only to those in the future and to the omniscient. Whig historiographers, like Marxists, have built an eschatology on the pillars of sand that are their historical sample size. Nevertheless, this is only the beginning of the problem for progressive theories of history. Selecting a miniscule snapshot of human history to argue that it’s the story of the unfolding of moral progress also ignores periods of obvious regression and thus ignores the possibility that moral regression can return and be irreversible for generations. Petrarch, the father of the Renaissance, labeled the end of Classical Antiquity and the onset of the Early Middle Ages the “Dark Ages.” While historians may contest the appropriateness of this designation, it’s undeniable that the former Western Roman Empire experienced a noticeable downgrade in technology and quality of life. Infrastructure, such as the aqueduct system, was abandoned and its parts used to construct basic dwellings as knowledge of how to maintain such structures evaporated. The relative political stability of previous centuries, which had already declined during the third century with civil wars, eroded further with fiefdoms and principalities at constant war. If history is directional, this should’ve ended early or never transpired. Even further back in history the Bronze Age Collapse witnessed a breakdown in civilization across the Mediterranean basin, and it took centuries to recover. In our own time we can observe the contrast in the Arab world’s intellectual output today with its output during the Islamic Golden Age. If you ever read a text on philosophy in the Islamic world, most of it will cover the work of Arab and Persian philosophers in the medieval world rather than contemporary thinkers. This is not because of a bias in favor granting prestige to the antiquated and obscure but instead due to reduced production of philosophically compelling work.
Advocates of progressive historiography may respond that periods of regression don’t disprove their theory because civilization eventually recovered and surpassed its previous heights and society never regressed to its pre-civilized origins. Neither of these responses diffuses the criticism. It’s undeniable that history is pathway dependent and therefore nobody should expect a civilization with agriculture, written language, metallurgy, and architecture to become entirely stripped of these things and transform into North Sentinel. Nonetheless, there’s no guarantee that agricultural output won’t slip, literacy won’t plummet, craftsmanship won’t lose its sophistication, and complex engineering knowledge won’t disappear. This has occurred before and could occur again, which suggests that history’s movement isn’t linear but is instead complex and unpredictable. Sometimes regression happens and stagnation follows then there’s recovery and renewed progress. This isn’t to say that history is cyclical, only that it lacks any necessary pattern whether that be progressive or circular.
Technology as a Source of Moral Regression
Proponents of progressive history recount a simple tale in which humans evolved and after tens of thousands of years became civilized. Thereafter, humanity progressed technologically until the end of Antiquity when the classical civilizations of the (Western) Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Gupta Empire, and the Sassanian Empire vanished. At least in the case of the West, technology regressed for a period of time, as did morality courtesy of religious superstition’s newfound dominance. However, progress ultimately made its triumphant return in the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Age of Discovery, and Enlightenment. Since the culmination of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, there has been a steady march towards peace, prosperity, and inclusivity as war has declined, wealth has increased, and greater numbers of people have been enfranchised. There is nowhere to go but up. As noted above, this narrative glosses over the fact that so much of human history has involved regression or stagnation, but it also ignores the fact that technological progress can impede moral progress just as frequently as it advances it. The twentieth century’s track record is overwhelming with evidence of technological progress setting humanity back morally, and this fact is observable even as far back as the end of Antiquity. While technology has pushed us forward morally by some metrics, such as higher life expectancy thanks to vaccines, it has also set us back as in the case of automatic weapons enabling people to kill crowds in a short span of time. For clarification, when I refer to technological progress, I mean to include both mechanistic technology and political institutions.
In the early days of civilization, tribes would go to war with small armies led by a champion. In some cases, the belligerents’ respective champions would fight one-on-one and the outcome of that two-person brawl would determine the result of the battle, hence why David and Goliath face off in the Hebrew Bible. While the soldiers of the victor’s side took it upon themselves to pillage their vanquished enemies’ settlements in ways that would most certainly be banned under Geneva conventions today, the scale of destruction was humble next to modern wars. The world used to have more wars, but their damage was relatively small. Modern wars involve far more carnage and are far more impersonal. Hundreds of thousands have probably perished at this point in the Russo-Ukrainian War in the last two years. The American Civil War killed over 600,000 combatants. The two World Wars were the most destructive in history. Progressive history proponents will point to the decline in violence today compared to a century ago but won’t compare war in the last several hundred years to war millennia ago. Yes, war was more prevalent back then, but its scale was more contained due to less advanced technology.
Furthermore, even if we took the parochial dataset that such people use when they restrict the sample size to the last several centuries, there’s no reason to believe that the twenty-first or twenty-second century will be less destructive than the twentieth. There were undoubtedly fewer wars in the twentieth century than in most preceding centuries, but they were deadlier and, in some ways, more horrific, which shows that a decline in the number of wars doesn’t necessitate moral progress. As technology has become deadlier, war has become costlier. Thus, technology has likely had a deterrent effect, but devastation follows when deterrence fails. There hasn’t been a war between great powers since 19451, and it’s probably because of the costs that modern weapons would incur. If there were to be one, however, it could be worse than any witnessed before just as the World Wars were during their time, the Napoleonic Wars were during their time, and the Thirty Years War was at its time. If anything, it seems there may be a tradeoff between more common but less destructive wars and less frequent, costlier wars.
As I hinted earlier, you might retort that even though more people die in modern wars, there’s at least more restraint on how wars are waged. Julius Caesar ordered his soldiers to chop the hands off of Gaulish children so that they’d never take up arms against Rome. The Romans turned Carthage to a wasteland. Soldiers defending castles during a siege in the Middle Ages poured boiling water over the attackers. The Byzantines burned enemy ships and sailors alive with Greek fire. Genghis Khan forcibly spread his seed across Eurasia after butchering entire armies. There are several rebuttals. First, the fact that Genghis Khan is a relatively recent figure in the thousands of years of recorded history suggests that there may be moral deterioration over time. Secondly, I’m not sure that being captured by the Wagner Group or Hamas would necessarily be better than surrendering to earlier armed forces or that being killed by cluster bombs is preferable to being killed with a crossbow.
Finally, and most importantly, modern weapons are in some ways more chilling than the worst weapons of the past. While being drawn and quartered is among the worst fates I can imagine, there’s an even more unsettling quality to a city being instantaneously vaporized and poisoned with a single bomb. I’ve had many discussions over the ethics of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those on the pro side tend to give a utilitarian defense and proclaim that nuking the two cities was necessary to avoid the further carnage that would’ve occurred in an invasion of the home islands (never mind the possibility of a negotiated settlement). They also tend to point out that the firebombing over Tokyo killed more civilians than the atomic bombings. Putting aside whether this argument is correct, both contentions aim to justify the bombings on the grounds that a weapon that can swiftly annihilate far more within its radius than any other should be used if the alternative is protracted warfare whose length will cause the carnage at some point equal and then surpass of the superweapon’s. Neither option is agreeable, but one may be more acceptable than the other. While this might be sound ethical reasoning, it fails to do justice to the intuitive sense of an almost divine power being weaponized. As disturbing as the firebombing campaign was, it took a lot of firebombs and sorties for the death count to equal one atomic bombing. The same applies to the death tolls of most battles. The fact a single weapon can be deployed once and annihilate the surrounding area and subsequently poison those who survive makes me doubt that war has necessarily become more humane.
Political Progression and Regression
As noted earlier, technological progress in a broad sense includes the development of more advanced institutions in addition to more advanced engineering. While some institutional technology, for example the rule of law, has benefitted society at large, others have been detrimental such as greater state capacity enabling the police state. Still others, such as the nation-state, have had both beneficial and adverse consequences. The rule of despotic monarchs for thousands of years was manifestly harmful to the populations such rulers governed. The only source of accountability in many cases seemed to be either revolution, coup d’état, or conquest by an external power. Fortunately, the number of such regimes today is lower than at virtually any other point in time. However, the oppressive governments that have existed in the modern world have been more repressive and draconian (a word referencing an ancient despot) than any before. As arbitrary as the use of violence by the state was for most of history, the weakness of the state always imposed a limitation on its application. Even if Alexander the Great or Shi Huang Di wanted to surveil each one of their subjects, this task would’ve been impossible because the ease and speed of communication across distances and the level of centralization necessary were insufficient. Even Ivan the Terrible could only live up to his epithet so much over the course of his reign.
By contrast, the despotic regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been able to monitor virtually every citizen and have been able to enact top-down genocidal plans. Absolutism in the eighteenth century was bad, but totalitarianism, an invention of the last century, was far worse. It would’ve been unthinkable for any ruler for millennia to have a surveillance state comparable to East Germany’s or to contemporary North Korea’s. The Islamification of the Middle East and North Africa took centuries of incentives and persecution to succeed just as the Christianization of Europe and the Americas did. Pol Pot’s ideology took only a few years to butcher up to two million people. The Turkification of Anatolia under the Seljuks happened over centuries of back-and-forth warfare, and the indigenous Christian population had to be respected so as not to provoke a challenge to a relatively weak state. The modern genocides of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians by the Young Turks was deadlier in a shorter span thanks to a higher capacity state and stronger accompanying institutions streamlining such plans’ implementation.
The nation-state, a modern political technology, has had costs and benefits. On the one hand, it has provided boundaries within which rule of law and republican government can take place, which has allowed for the existence of the free market and resultant prosperity. On the other, the formation of nation-states has been violent since borders tend to be consolidated through warfare. Perhaps the reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict captures so much of people’s moral imagination is because they see Israel’s military actions as another instance of national boundaries forming through state-sanctioned violence. This might be a sign of moral progress in that there’s now a bit of a taboo against the kind of violence involved in the creation of earlier nation-states, but the fact that we inhabit a world of countries forged through analogous (and arguably more gruesome) acts of state violence hints that moral progress may be more accurately framed as an end that retrospectively justifies the means.
Conclusion
The fundamental problem with directional theories of history underlying both of my critiques is that it’s pseudoscientific. Such narratives aim to provide a mechanistic explanation of how we arrived where we are devoid of human volition and contextual fortuity on the basis of an insufficient and selective sum of information, all in the service of ideology. Proponents should be reminded of the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton who wrote:
If there is no legitimacy to be found in the idea of progress, then let us renounce those forward-looking attitudes which make such use of it, and study things as they were and are. A small dose of philosophy will persuade us that people have always been wrong to look to the future for the test of legitimacy, rather than to the past. For the future, unlike the past, is unknown and untried. A host of respectable thinkers were aware of this fact and tried (against the pressure of half-educated enthusiasm) to remind their contemporaries of it: Burke, for example, Coleridge, Tocqueville, even Hegel. The modernist adulation of the future should be seen as an expression of despair, not of hope; and the postmodernist irony is merely an attempt to recapture an ingredient in all true philosophy – in all philosophy that recognizes that we are both subject and object, and that between these two lies an impassable barrier through which at every moment we must nevertheless pass.2
I recall a brief essay in a book by Peter Singer asking whether there is moral progress. The answer, as I remember, was affirmative and pointed to reduced levels of various -isms and phobias. At risk of sounding repetitive, I’ll note that this fits more neatly into a complex rather than a directional picture of history seeing that racism, for instance, was probably less prevalent before the Columbian exchange than before it and that society was more accepting of homosexuality in ancient Greece than in modern Iran. Nevertheless, I concur with proponents of a progressive interpretation of history in reaffirming my preference to be alive today in the West than in having to endure life in any previous era.
I simply find it naïve to argue that there’s nowhere to go but up. If history can teach us any lesson, it’s that it’s always possible for ethical norms and material conditions to regress and for retrograde conditions to persist for centuries, even millennia, until civilization reascends. This basic observation is inconsistent with any theory that posits an end point to moral or political development. While Fukuyama now emphasizes the possibility of backsliding, his modified theory continues to ignore the unpredictable effects of unforeseeable historical contingencies. The peace and prosperity of the present could be vaporized in a war whose destructiveness surpasses any previous one. The factors necessary to uphold our current infrastructure could disappear in future centuries due to resource depletion or declining cognitive ability. There could be an entirely unknowable future event or idea that could transform the world to become more prosperous than it currently is or to become less so. These are all lottery propositions, and I don’t pretend to know that any of these possibilities has any likelihood of occurring. I only suggest that any theory of history that fails to even account for them presupposes ruling out what, in principle, can’t be ruled out. After all, there’s a reason that forecasters speak of the “foreseeable future.” We happen to live at the best time in history, and it’s possible that this will forever be the best time.
Some people might cite the Korean War as a great power war since China and the US fought each other, but I reject classifying China at the time as a great power. It had yet to acquire nuclear arms, lacked power projection capabilities, and lacked economic leverage over other countries. Although Soviet pilots participated in the conflict, they did so under cover, and the Soviet Union didn’t officially intervene.
See Sir Roger’s book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, page 163.