Clearly, humans have been making progress in many fields for many thousands of years but I suspect that no one really considered ‘progress’ in a general sense - as something that the whole of humanity was making until some time in the last 500 years.
At what point did it occur to some group that humankind were making progress on any number of fronts and that that process would be continuous until, or until just before, their extinction?
My guess would be sometime in the Renaissance did this concept of human advancement become wide spread. Before that I think a lot of folks saw time more like a wheel and less like a linear advancement.
I think Cecil did an article on something similar to this. If I have time later I’ll see if I can dig it up.
-XT
At some times in the past there was an idea of human regress, going backwards from a past golden age, so the idea of progress has not always been around.
As late of the 18th Century, I believe, European scholars assumed humanity had degenerated – not just culturally, but physically and mentally – from the days of the Roman Empire, when all those amazing monuments and roads and aqueducts were built.
I’m aware that people though this and, in many fields, people think the same today.
But I’m not sure that’s relevant to the question as people may well have been thinking about regress, almost forever (there’s a very interesting translation of, IIRC, Plato, talking about the degeneration in the behaviour of teenagers that could just as easily have been written today, or at any point in the past).
Despite this there must have been a time when progress as a general effect entered the human consciousness. For example, I doubt if the change from bronze to iron caused people to think that said change was part of a general progression in human knowledge.
I would peg it much later. The Renaissance refocused European intellectual and artistic culture’s attention from the next world to this world, but only by rediscovering what the classical Greeks and Romans had already done; the realization that it was possible to add new things to ancient achievements came much later, probably in conjunction with the scientific revolution of the 17th Century.
And it’s purely a thing of Western origin. The world’s other great civilizations, China, India, the Islamic world, had no such notion of progress until the West thrust it under their noses with extreme force. To the Chinese, the best possible outcome of history was preservation of ancient Confucian ways, forever. Indian intellectuals were mostly otherworldly and ahistorical. To Muslims the unfolding of history meant the ever-greater triumph of Islam, but little else (see Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary).
Probably the change would have been too gradual to be noticed. E.g., the iron-using Hittites would not say, “We have progressed beyond our ancestors because we have learned to work iron.” They would say, “We Hittites are superior to other nations because we can work iron.” As if the knack were in their blood.
This was something else I was interested in - where such an idea took hold.
I had thought either the renaissance or the industrial revolution.
Probably the industrial revolution because that was the time at which everyday things started changing somewhat rapidly for a great many people and it would have become obvious to the more intelligent members of society that the change was something that was going to continue, probably indefinitely.
Thucydides, 5th century BC, began his history with the argument that the events he described were of the greatest moment of anything that had yet happened, because the ancients were not so developed nor so widespread as (then) moderns - and those that were in Greece lived according to the manner of barbarians (and were thus inferior).
I would put it after the Renaissance and before the Industrial Revolution – i.e., in the Enlightenment.
The first time a 13-year-old spear chucker wrapped his spearhead differently than his Dad did, and then told his buddy: “Hah! See? We can do things better than the old farts did!”
The industrial revolution, agricultural revolution and enlightenment were probably the birth of our society of endless progress (I mean that non-sarcastically).
The ag. and industrial revolution increased standards of living and created divisions of labor, so more people could work in fields other than basic survival. Plus the enlightenment seemed to change cultural attitudes towards authority.
The human race really didn’t change much in most 300 year periods. The period of 900BC-600BC saw few changes. Nor did 800AD-1100AD. Neither did 200AD-500AD. But the period of 1710-2010AD saw an amazing level of changes in politics, industry, science, culture, etc. The period of exponential progress started in the 18th century from what I can tell, which was when the ag revolution, industrial revolution and enlightenment all occured.
Yes, every 13-year-old boy thinks his spearhead is the greatest thing ever . . .
Well…ok. I was going to argue, but you know what? I agree.
-XT
Both the Fall and Redemption are present as theological concepts in the writings of Paul. Redemption is unquestionably an ideal of human progress.
The Fall, of course, is a much older concept. In so far as it’s a concept of regress, it implies at least the theoretical possiblity of its own reversal, which would be progress. So the Jewish tradition had the notion of human progress as a possiblity, even if they didn’t necessarily believe that it was happening in their own time, or that it could happen absent divine assistance.
It began, really, with the printing press and the explosion of information that occurred in the century or so following it. People had to be first educated about the past before they could compare it to the present, and while there were many Europeans who at first believed that the past was a Golden Age and the re-discovery of ancient Greek writings would help raise Europe to the level of thought given by the philosophers (after all, that’s what the Renaissance is named for), by the time of Newton’s death most educated Europeans had lost their overwhelming respect for the past.
The notion of progress is much deeper than the Renaissance, however, and there the Christian heritage is decisive. To quote Oxford historian J.M. Roberts, who says it much more concisely than I can:
Classical Greece was a special case – a culture that developed a creative, intellectual civilization suddenly enough that it still retained the cultural memory of more primitive times. That was highly unusual in the pre-Renaissance world. E.g., the Chinese ascribed the most brilliant elements of their civilization to their earliest legendary sage-kings; it might never have occurred to premodern Chinese historians that the Chinese of the sage-kings’ time and for long after had only stone-age technology and very primitive culture. Even Confucius never claimed to be giving Chinese civilization anything new; he was only trying to restore and preserve the ways and rites of the ancient days of Yao and Shun – who almost certainly would have appeared as barbarians in Confucius’ eyes if he had actually met them.
Beer is believed to have been invented 11, 000 years ago.
Point taken, but we need to set a lower bar for “progress” if this discussion is to have any meaning.
I’ve heard that in the 1500s when the general solution for cubic equations was found, it was recognized as remarkable, because it was known that the Greeks and Romans had not solved that problem (Cubic equation - Wikipedia)