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The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth

J.B. Bury

Section 11 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER IX

WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX

1.

The optimistic theory of civilisation was not unchallenged by
rationalists. In the same year (1750) in which Turgot traced an
outline of historical Progress at the Sorbonne, Rousseau laid before
the Academy of Dijon a theory of historical Regress. This Academy
had offered a prize for the best essay on the question whether the
revival of sciences and arts had contributed to the improvement of
morals. The prize was awarded to Rousseau. Five years later the same
learned body proposed another subject for investigation, the origin
of Inequality among men. Rousseau again competed but failed to win
the prize, though this second essay was a far more remarkable
performance.

The view common to these two discourses, that social development has
been a gigantic mistake, that the farther man has travelled from a
primitive simple state the more unhappy has his lot become, that
civilisation is radically vicious, was not original. Essentially the
same issue had been raised in England, though in a different form,
by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the scandalous book which aimed
at proving that it is not the virtues and amiable qualities of man
that are the cement of civilised society, but the vices of its
members which are the support of all trades and employments.
[Footnote: The expanded edition was published in 1723.] In these
vices, he said, "we must look for the true origin of all arts and
sciences"; "the moment evil ceases the society must be spoiled, if
not totally dissolved."

The significance of Mandeville's book lay in the challenge it flung
to the optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature
is good and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas
he had formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of
our nature were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and
amiable; he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be
reconciled together, innocence of manners and worldly greatness."

Of these two views Rousseau accepted one and rejected the other. He
agreed with Shaftesbury as to the natural goodness of man; he agreed
with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the
conditions of a civilised society. He was an optimist in regard to
human nature, a pessimist in regard to civilisation.

In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious
splendour of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect
among the stars, and then goes on to assever that in the first place
men have lost, through their civilisation, the original liberty for
which they were born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands
of flowers on the iron chains which bind them, make them love their
slavery; and secondly that there is a real depravity beneath the
fair semblance and "our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts
advance to perfection." Nor is this only a modern phenomenon; "the
evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world." For it is
a law of history that morals fall and rise in correspondence with
the progress and decline of the arts and sciences as regularly as
the tides answer to the phases of the moon. This "law" is
exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to whose
civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of the
ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury,
dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in
which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological
doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.

Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces
specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a
declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes
concessions which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did
not establish even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and
suggestive, and attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful
discourse in the Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a
courteous expression of dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to
the Encyclopaedia.] and Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.

2.

In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the
effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it
came about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that
the strong were induced to serve the weak, and the people to
purchase a fancied tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So
he stated his problem; and to solve it he had to consider the "state
of nature" which Hobbes had conceived as a state of war and Locke as
a state of peace. Rousseau imagines our first savage ancestors
living in isolation, wandering in the forests, occasionally co-
operating, and differing from the animals only by the possession of
a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte de se perfectionner).
After a stage in which families lived alone in a more or less
settled condition, came the formation of groups of families, living
together in a definite territory, united by a common mode of life
and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but without
laws or government or any social organisation.

It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not
the original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been
the happiest period of the human race.

This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just
mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant
activity of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable
epoch. The more we reflect on it, the more we find that this state
was the least exposed to revolutions and the best for man; and that
he can have left it only through some fatal chance which, for the
common advantage, should never have occurred. The example of the
savages who have almost all been found in this state seems to bear
out the conclusion that humanity was made to remain in it for ever,
that it was the true youth of the world, and that all further
progresses have been so many steps, apparently towards the
perfection of the individual, and really towards the decrepitude of
the species.

He ascribes to metallurgy and agriculture the fatal resolution which
brought this Arcadian existence to an end. Agriculture entailed the
origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were
introduced by the man who first enclosed a piece of land and said,
This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him. He was
the founder of civil society.

The general argument amounts to this: Man's faculty of improving
himself is the source of his other faculties, including his
sociability, and has been fatal to his happiness. The circumstances
of his primeval life favoured the growth of this faculty, and in
making man sociable they made him wicked; they developed the reason
of the individual and thereby caused the species to deteriorate. If
the process had stopped at a certain point, all would have been
well; but man's capacities, stimulated by fortuitous circumstances,
urged him onward, and leaving behind him the peaceful Arcadia where
he should have remained safe and content, he set out on the fatal
road which led to the calamities of civilisation. We need not follow
Rousseau in his description of those calamities which he attributes
to wealth and the artificial conditions of society. His indictment
was too general and rhetorical to make much impression. In truth, a
more powerful and comprehensive case against civilised society was
drawn up about the same time, though with a very different motive,
by one whose thought represented all that was opposed to Rousseau's
teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural Society,
[Footnote: A.D. 1756.] was written to show that all the objections
which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial religion
could be brought with greater force against artificial society, and
he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of
civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities.
[Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p. 89, Vaughan suggests that in
Rousseau's later works we may possibly detect "the first faint
beginnings" of a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the
influence of Montesquieu.]

3.

If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the
logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This
was the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole
theory out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to
destroy all the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to
put to death or silence all the savants, to pull down the cities,
and burn the ships. He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was
no more than a Utopian ideal, by the light of which he conceived
that the society of his own day might be corrected and transformed.
He attached his hopes to equality, democracy, and a radical change
in education.

Equality: this revolutionary idea was of course quite compatible
with the theory of Progress, and was soon to be closely associated
with it. But it is easy to understand that the two ideas should
first have appeared in antagonism to each other. The advance of
knowledge and the increase of man's power over nature had virtually
profited only a minority. When Fontenelle or Voltaire vaunted the
illumination of their age and glorified the modern revolution in
scientific thought, they took account only of a small class of
privileged people. Higher education, Voltaire observed, is not for
cobblers or kitchenmaids; "on n'a jamais pretendu eclairer les
cordonniers et les servantes." The theory of Progress had so far
left the masses out of account. Rousseau contrasted the splendour of
the French court, the luxury of the opulent, the enlightenment of
those who had the opportunity of education, with the hard lot of the
ignorant mass of peasants, whose toil paid for the luxury of many of
the idle enlightened people who amused themselves at Paris. The
horror of this contrast, which left Voltaire cold, was the poignant
motive which inspired Rousseau, a man of the people, in constructing
his new doctrine. The existing inequality seemed an injustice which
rendered the self-complacency of the age revolting. If this is the
result of progressive civilisation, what is progress worth? The next
step is to declare that civilisation is the causa malorum and that
what is named progress is really regress. But Rousseau found a way
of circumventing pessimism. He asked himself, cannot equality be
realised in an organised state, founded on natural right? The Social
Contract was his answer, and there we can see the living idea of
equality detaching itself from the dead theory of degradation.
[Footnote: The consistency of the Social Contract with the Discourse
on Inequality has been much debated. They deal with two distinct
problems, and the Social Contract does not mark any change in the
author's views. Though it was not published till 1762 he had been
working at it since 1753.]

Arcadianism, which was thus only a side-issue for Rousseau, was the
extreme expression of tendencies which appear in the speculations of
other thinkers of the day. Morelly and Mably argued in favour of a
reversion to simpler forms of life. They contemplated the foundation
of socialistic communities by reviving institutions and practices
which belonged to a past period of social evolution. Mably, inspired
by Plato, thought it possible by legislation to construct a state of
antique pattern. [Footnote: For Mably's political doctrines see
Guerrier's monograph, L'Abbe de Mably (1886), where it is shown that
among "the theories which determined in advance the course of the
events of 1789" the Abbe's played a role which has not been duly
recognised.] They ascribed evils of civilisation to inequality
arising from the existence of private property, but Morelly rejected
the view of the "bold sophist" Rousseau that science and art were to
blame. He thought that aided by science and learning man might reach
a state based on communism, resembling the state of nature but more
perfect, and he planned an ideal constitution in his romance of the
Floating Islands. [Footnote: Naufrage des isles flottantes ou
Basiliade du celebre Pilpai (1753). It begins: "je chante le regne
aimable de la Verite et de la Nature." Morelly's other work, Code de
la Nature, appeared in 1755.] Different as these views were, they
represent the idea of regress; they imply a condemnation of the
tendencies of actual social development and recommend a return to
simpler and more primitive conditions.

Even Diderot, though he had little sympathy with Utopian
speculations, was attracted by the idea of the simplification of
society, and met Rousseau so far as to declare that the happiest
state was a mean between savage and civilised life.

"I am convinced," he wrote, "that the industry of man has gone too
far and that if it had stopped long ago and if it were possible to
simplify the results, we should not be the worse. I believe there is
a limit in civilisation, a limit more conformable to the felicity of
man in general and far less distant from the savage state than is
imagined; but how to return to it, having left it, or how to remain
in it, if we were there? I know not." [Footnote: Refutation de
l'ouvrage d'Helvetius in OEuvres ii. p. 431. Elsewhere (p. 287) he
argues that in a community without arts and industries there are
fewer crimes than in a civilised state, but men are not so happy.]

His picture of the savages of Tahiti in the Supplement au voyage de
Bougainville was not seriously meant, but it illustrates the fact
that in certain moods he felt the fascination of Rousseau's Arcadia.

D'Holbach met all these theories by pointing out that human
development, from the "state of nature" to social life and the ideas
and commodities of civilisation, is itself natural, given the innate
tendency of man to improve his lot. To return to the simpler life of
the forests--or to any bygone stage--would be denaturer l'homme, it
would be contrary to nature; and if he could do so, it would only be
to recommence the career begun by his ancestors and pass again
through the same successive phases of history. [Footnote: Syst. soc.
i. 16, p. 190.]

There was, indeed, one question which caused some embarrassment to
believers in Progress. The increase of wealth and luxury was
evidently a salient feature in modern progressive states; and it was
clear that there was an intimate connection between the growth of
knowledge and the growth of commerce and industrial arts, and that
the natural progress of these meant an ever-increasing accumulation
of riches and the practice of more refined luxury. The question,
therefore, whether luxury is injurious to the general happiness
occupied the attention of the philosophers. [Footnote: D'Holbach,
ib. iii. 7; Diderot, art. Luxe in the Encylopaedia; Helvetius, De
l'esprit, i. 3.] If it is injurious, does it not follow that the
forces on which admittedly Progress depends are leading in an
undesirable direction? Should they be obstructed, or is it wiser to
let things follow their natural tendency (laisser aller les choses
suivant leur pente naturelle)? Voltaire accepted wealth with all its
consequences. D'Holbach proved to his satisfaction that luxury
always led to the ruin of nations. Diderot and Helvetius arrayed the
arguments which could be urged on both sides. Perhaps the most
reasonable contribution to the subject was an essay of Hume.

4.

It is obvious that Rousseau and all other theorists of Regress would
be definitely refuted if it could be proved by an historical
investigation that in no period in the past had man's lot been
happier than in the present. Such an inquiry was undertaken by the
Chevalier de Chastellux. His book On Public Felicity, or
Considerations on the lot of Men in the various Epochs of History,
appeared in 1772 and had a wide circulation. [Footnote: There was a
new edition in 1776 with an important additional chapter.] It is a
survey of the history of the western world and aims at proving the
certainty of future Progress. It betrays the influence both of the
Encyclopaedists and of the Economists. Chastellux is convinced that
human nature can be indefinitely moulded by institutions; that
enlightenment is a necessary condition of general happiness; that
war and superstition, for which governments and priests are
responsible, are the principal obstacles.

But he attempted to do what none of his masters had done, to test
the question methodically from the data of history. Turgot, and
Voltaire in his way, had traced the growth of civilisation; the
originality of Chastellux lay in concentrating attention on the
eudaemonic issue, in examining each historical period for the
purpose of discovering whether people on the whole were happy and
enviable. Has there ever been a time, he inquired, in which public
felicity was greater than in our own, in which it would have been
desirable to remain for ever, and to which it would now be desirable
to return?

He begins by brushing away the hypothesis of an Arcadia. We know
really nothing about primitive man, there is not sufficient evidence
to authorise conjectures. We know man only as he has existed in
organised societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation
and its prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an
imaginary golden age but in a known historical epoch. And we must be
careful not to fall into the mistakes of confusing public prosperity
with general happiness, and of considering only the duration or
aggrandisement of empires and ignoring the lot of the common people.

His survey of history is summary and superficial enough. He gives
reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and
Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy.
Yet what about the Greeks? Theirs was an age of enlightenment. In a
few pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, "We are
compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece
was a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient
history, generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition
a hundred times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life
in the Roman period are even more apparent than in the Greek. What
Englishman or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient
Rome? It is interesting to remember that four years later an
Englishman who had an incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of
history declared it to be probable that in the age of the Antonines
civilised Europe enjoyed greater happiness than at any other period.

Rome declined and Christianity came. Its purpose was not to render
men happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less
avaricious or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes
rarer, punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or
wars waged more humanely. The conclusion is that it is only those
who are profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret "the good old
times."

Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any
attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On
the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in the
Renaissance--here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The
intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the
enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress.
But alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact
that the intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted
no beneficent effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed
was there any perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness
for the people at large during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, notwithstanding the progress of science and the arts. But
the terrible wars of this period exhausted Europe, and this
financial exhaustion has supplied the requisite conditions for
attaining a measure of felicity never realised in the past.

Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but
especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and
their satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political
bodies, like organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed
upon them by pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable
objects, falls back with more energy on useful objects; a more
successful appeal can be made to the rights of humanity; and
princes, who have become creditors and debtors of their subjects,
permit them to be happy in order that they may be more solvent or
more patient.

This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that
intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-
operation of political events, and no political events would
permanently help humanity without the progress of knowledge.

Public felicity consists--Chastellux follows the Economists--in
external and domestic peace, abundance and liberty, the liberty of
tranquil enjoyment of one's own; and ordinary signs of it are
flourishing agriculture, large populations, and the growth of trade
and industry. He is at pains to show the superiority of modern to
ancient agriculture, and he avails himself of the researches of Hume
to prove the comparatively greater populousness of modern European
countries. As for the prospect of peace, he takes a curiously
optimistic view. A system of alliances has made Europe a sort of
confederated republic, and the balance of power has rendered the
design of a universal monarchy, such as that which Louis XIV.
essayed, a chimera. [Footnote: So Rivarol, writing in 1783 (OEuvres,
i. pp. 4 and 52): "Never did the world offer such a spectacle.
Europe has reached such a high degree of power that history has
nothing to compare with it. It is virtually a federative republic,
composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that has
ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt.
War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be;
every campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all
the conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3
possessed elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the
overseas policy of the English--auri sacra fames. Divination of this
kind has never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to
venture on more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of wars, which
the event was no less utterly to belie. As for equality among men,
Chastellux admits its desirability, but observes that there is
pretty much the same amount of happiness (le bonheur se compense
assez) in the different classes of society. "Courtiers and ministers
are not happier than husbandmen and artisans." Inequalities and
disportions in the lots of individuals are not incompatible with a
positive measure of felicity. They are inconveniences incident to
the perfectibility of the species, and they will be eliminated only
when Progress reaches its final term. The best that can be done to
remedy them is to accelerate the Progress of the race which will
conduct it one day to the greatest possible happiness; not to
restore a state of ignorance and simplicity, from which it would
again escape.

The general argument of the book may be resumed briefly. Felicity
has never been realised in any period of the past. No government,
however esteemed, set before itself to achieve what ought to be the
sole object of government, "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number of individuals." Now, for the first time in human history,
intellectual enlightenment, other circumstances fortunately
concurring, has brought about a condition of things, in which this
object can no longer be ignored, and there is a prospect that it
will gradually gain the ascendant. In the meantime, things have
improved; the diffusion of knowledge is daily ameliorating men's
lot, and far from envying any age in the past we ought to consider
ourselves much happier than the ancients.

We may wonder at this writer's easy confidence in applying the
criterion of happiness to different societies. Yet the difficulty of
such comparisons was, I believe, first pointed out by Comte.
[Footnote: Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 379.] It is
impossible, he says, to compare two states of society and determine
that in one more happiness was enjoyed than in the other. The
happiness of an individual requires a certain degree of harmony
between his faculties and his environment. But there is always a
natural tendency towards the establishment of such an equilibrium,
and there is no means of discovering by argument or by direct
experience the situation of a society in this respect. Therefore, he
concludes, the question of happiness must be eliminated from any
scientific treatment of civilisation.

Chastellux won a remarkable success. His work was highly praised by
Voltaire, and was translated into English, Italian, and German. It
condensed, on a single issue, the optimistic doctrines of the
philosophers, and appeared to give them a more solid historical
foundation than Voltaire's Essay on Manners had supplied. It
provided the optimists with new arguments against Rousseau, and must
have done much to spread and confirm faith in perfectibility.
[Footnote: Soon after the publication of the book of Chastellux--
though I do not suggest any direct connection--a society of
Illuminati, who also called themselves the Perfectibilists, was
founded at Ingoldstadt, who proposed to effect a pacific
transformation of humanity. See Javary, De l'idee de progres, p.
73.]
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