A Critique of mere “Progress”: Considering Values orthogonal to Time

From Progress to Madness, analysis of an illusion

Any right thinking person wants the world to be a better place tomorrow than it is today. None the less, it would seem that the conflation of time and value is at the root of many, perhaps most, of the false ideologies projected into the world during the course of Western civilization. Today it has come to the point where any and all cancellation of past values are automatically sanctioned on the basis of a teleology of social progress. This ideology has attained the de facto status of a dominant orthodoxy in the secularized Westernized world, although it scrupulously avoids official designation as a religion. Sympathetic observers and critics alike have suggested apt labels, such as Progressivism, Futurism, Secular Messianism, and so forth. One of the most acute critics, Eric Voegelin called it “Gnosticism” which highlights the essentially religious fervor of the various movements arrayed under the banner of modern secularism. It was Voegelin who summarized the overall tendency of modernity with the mordant phrase “immanentizing the eschaton.” As pithy as Voegelin’s phrase might be, in the interests of intelligibility it could stand reduction to a simple schema. Moreover, Voegelin’s “Gnosticism” implicates a class of ancient dualistic cults in the sins of modernity, which may not be totally fair or accurate. If I were to quibble, I would say that what we are dealing with today is not Gnosticism in general, but something closer to Zervanism, the ancient Iranian cult of time-worship. Here I am not offering “Zervanism” as an alternative to “Gnosticism.” Rather I wish to contrast heretical beliefs about the relation of time and value to the primordial order of value implicit in the cosmos.

Progressing beyond rationality?

To the extent that the time-value conflation gets any recognition, it is usually in the form of G. F. W. Hegel’s slogan “the real is rational and the rational is real.” Translated into the logic of a temporal sequence, one might interpret this as “whenever there is a change in a society’s values, the later values are always intrinsically superior to the prior values.” This would not have been Hegel’s own interpretation, since Hegel was a stickler for reason. Post-Hegelian thinking has stripped history of reason, mind, spirit, and much else, leaving time as both bare of qualities and bearer-in-itself of values. For the style of thinking which calls itself “post-modern” irrationality becomes superior to rationality when irrationality follows rationality in time.

In our search for the name of this secret religion, and before looking at “Progress” let’s begin with “Secularism” a term which is both suggestive and misleading. By suggesting the rule of time, it calls forth the specter of humanity trapped in the coils of successive events. Yet, to the extent of being cognate with “cycle”, the term carries no nihilistic connotations, since it hearkens back to a simpler age when time, space, and values had not yet been decomposed. In those days it would have been astrologers competing against philosophers for the allegiance of the wise, the likes of ibn Ezra against the likes of ibn Rushd. Whatever the upshot of the matter, both sides in the dispute believed in a golden chain linking the visible universe with the invisible world of values. After the European enlightenment the chain was broken, and all that remained was an infinite universe delineated by Cartesian coordinates. Time now burst the bonds of its cycles and was represented as an infinitely extendable vector. The optimistic tenor of the age endowed this vector with the title of “progress” and filled it full of the hopes and sentiments of enlightenment intellectuals; justice and prosperity joined and flourishing in a realizable future.

In itself this was admirable and desirable. Yet in the post-Hegelian predicament of Europe, and by extension the world as a whole, it became clear that “progress” (as originally conceived) was by no means an automatic outcome of the passage of time. There were various responses to the persistence of tragedy in the modern world. There were the romantics who simply wanted to upend the eschatology of progress, and see the progression of time as a degenerative process. At the other extreme there were realists who felt that the notion of progress needed to be stripped of unrealistic idealism, and narrowed down to a core of empowering principles unleashed by the rise of science and industry. Ideological differences aside, both Marx and Bismarck represent this realist camp. Between these two extremes were those who wished to retain the idealism of the enlightenment and the prospect of social improvement without subordinating ethics to the logic of power politics. These latter tended to rally around the banner of Kantian philosophy, or in some cases a revival of Aristotelian ethics.

In these contests the idealists were at an ontological disadvantage due to the rise of materialism. Meanwhile Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” was emboldening the realists to throw away almost the entire ethical inheritance of human history, or at least Western history. In the end the only thing which these “blood and iron” realists would admit as as a coefficient over time would be power itself. This was the background to Nietzsche’s thinking. Yet this entire “dialectic” (if it even merits the name) is itself nothing more than an illusion spun out by the would be masters of humanity. It is based on the myopic exclusion of an entire range of values which, though invisible, are arguably the most real things that humans experience. It should be possible for the idealists to reclaim their moral inheritance, but it requires thinking about values and time more clearly.

DeEschatological Ethics

What then would be a valid method in ethics, an ethics based on something else than a vague sense that blind empowerment will save humanity at the end of time? It seems to me that a key to thinking about ethics is to recognize the orthogonal relationship between values and time. Let us pose the question of how to invert Voegelin’s negative estimate of progress/gnosis, and turn it into a positive criteria? Is the problem with an immanent eschaton the immanence in itself? Hardly, since the true test of a robust ethics is its ability to communicate ideals into immanent realities. Rather, the problem revolves around the whole notion of an eschaton, the fatal projection of a moral end state into the vector of time. An ethics, to be sufficient, ought to be realizable in the here and now, without reference to a historical future. The contrary to Voegelin’s nemesis is not a transcendental eschatology, but rather a de-estatological ethics, an ethics without an “omega-point” at which all problems are miraculously and conveniently solved.

In spite of the purported atheism of modern secularism, its fanaticism should make clear the essentially eschatological and religious nature of its ideology. To take away the dream of the future from a “Progressive” is intolerable, even if this supposed future has no stable content whatsoever and is constantly up for revision. All that is necessary is that some hypothetical collective human will shall obtain its ends with the progression of time. While the manifestations of this vacuous and unstable futurism cause disharmony and pain within the context of contemporary politics, its very vacuity clarifies the deep structure of modern ideology, which has been stripped bare of all notions apart from power and linear time. This is perhaps the most perfect of opium-eating religions, a faith in which the mere passage of time becomes identical to transiting a horizontal scale of goodness, every succeeding increment superior to the one before, and continuing on to infinity. This may be described as a horizontal hierarchy of values, in which futurity is good and everything prior is inferior. Since all viable systems of thought require some form of asymmetry, this allows us to understand the working of modern Egalitarianism as a teleological structure. The notion of hierarchy, which is requisite for teleology, has simply been displaced onto the horizontal, temporal, dimension.

This is, of course, abnormal. More fundamentally, any chilliastic or millenarian system of thought is parasitic on a prior state of affairs to which it stands as a negation. Strictly speaking, all change implies deficiency, and hence must result in a restoration to an original state or to increased perversion away from the original state. Admittedly, statements such as the foregoing are ripe with potential misunderstandings, and furthermore lead away from the main line of our inquiry, which we hope will result in illuminating the correct understanding of the relation between values and existence, a understanding of which “progress” or “secularism” are perverse counterfeits.

The situation where the schema of “up” values can no longer avail itself of the analogy of the Heavens, as it could in pre-Copernican times is nothing more than an educational inconvenience. If we take a hint from Max Scheler (who has not been so much refuted as ignored by contemporary philosophy) we might say that values have an essence which is independent of their existence. Granted that such an objective hierarchy of values is hard to see, but it is certain to be more real than the crystal spheres of Aristotelian astronomy. While the correction of ancient astronomy was eventually attained by better observational techniques, the observation of values is rendered vastly more difficult due to the disorders of the human emotions. Hopefully behind this seeming chaos of human motives there is a discoverable order, a vertical order ranging from base to noble values. In the early part of the 20th century Scheler himself mapped out a universal and objective order of human sentiments, an ordo amoris, which manifested itself in a ranking of human ideal types, from the bon vivant (value=pleasure) at the lower end to the saint (value=holiness) at the top. This was a bit much for his critics, then and now, to accept, and Scheler himself never provided the kind of proof which would have satisfied skeptics. Admittedly, under actual historical conditions there is always a great deal of confusion and disorder in human sentiments. Particularly applicable to the discussion at hand are the two complementary illusions which trap the historical imagination, the reification of time in the image of “progress” and the invisibility, and hence purported relativity, of values.

Yet even without the general acceptance of a universal and trans-temporal scale of values, the notion that values can be conceptually distinguished from their embodiment in history liberates the moral imagination from a unidimensional and fatalistic subserviance to “evolution” or “progress.” Conceptually speaking, the liberation of values from the tyranny of time involves nothing more than positing an x-axis against the y-axis of time. At the risk of a bad pun, we might call this value-axis the axiological axis in contrast to the historical axis. Instead of the vector of linear time, we now have an inverted T with time on the bottom and the hierarchical scale of values perpendicular to the temporal base. Of course the attainment of ends requires time in the sense of duration, such that any kind of action or purposeful construction, whether of artifacts, capital structure, education, or character requires a finite degree of time. All values require time for their realization, but the segments of time set aside for the realization of values function as tools. Alternatively, and speaking in the more relaxed idiom of psychology, moments in time serve as stations in the sojourn of the spirit during its journey in this world. In contrast, time as construed by the eschatological vector ceases to be a tool or a resting place and becomes an idol. Thus one can envision how the hierarchy of values subsists in a dimension independent of time. End of story. Well, except that like all good stories it requires quite a bit of interpretation.

The Interpretation (courtesy of Euclid and Max Scheler)

In the modern world the notion of hierarchy was vehemently contested. Beyond this both modernity and post-modernity, have challenged the ideal of objectivity as well. To assert, along the lines of Max Scheler or anyone else, that there is such a thing as an objective hierarchy of values universal to all human, indeed to all rational beings, is to make a controversial statement. I am not here concerned with defending the principle of objective values, although I embrace the concept. Rather, I have sought to show that even the post-modernists themselves adhere to a system of objective values, albeit a hierarchy disguised by temporal progression in substitution for moral elevation and endeavor.

Most importantly, it is best to look to the future with hope. However the overall historical future, unlike limited projects, cannot result from the intentions of human power and desire. This is because any such overall outcome will result from that which is beyond human agency.