The Idea of Progress Part 11

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 a.s.sever 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 chastis.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mventing 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 inst.i.tutions 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 const.i.tution 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 pa.s.s again through the same successive phases of history. [Footnote: Syst. soc. i. 16, p. 190.]

There was, indeed, one question which caused some embarra.s.sment 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 acc.u.mulation 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 inst.i.tutions; that enlightenment is a necessary condition of general happiness; that war and superst.i.tion, for which governments and priests are responsible, are the princ.i.p.al 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 aggrandis.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.syrians 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 a.s.sez) in the different cla.s.ses 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 circ.u.mstances 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.]

CHAPTER X. THE YEAR 2440

1.

The leaders of thought in France did not look far forward into the future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with principles and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition of improvement, was only in its infancy. A pa.s.sage in a work of the Abbe Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not extravagant optimism which was current. [Footnote: Reflexions sur les avantages d'ecrire et d'imprimer sur les matieres de l'administration (1764); in Melanges, vol. iii. p. 55. Morellet held, like d'Holbach, that society is only the development and improvement of nature itself (ib. p. 6).]

Let us hope for the amelioration of man's lot as a consequence of the progress of the enlightenment (des lumieres) and labours of the educated (des gens instruits); let us trust that the errors and even the injustices of our age may not rob us of this consoling hope. The history of society presents a continuous alternation of light and darkness, reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in the succession of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in ever greater proportion. What educated man, if he is not a misanthrope or misled by vain declamations, would really wish he had lived in the barbarous and poetical time which Homer paints in such fair and terrifying colours?

Who regrets that he was not born at Sparta among those pretended heroes who made it a virtue to insult nature, practised theft, and gloried in the murder of a Helot; or at Carthage, the scene of human sacrifices, or at Rome amid the proscriptions or under the rule of a Nero or a Caligula? Let as agree that man advances, though slowly, towards light and happiness.

But though the most influential writers were sober in speculating about the future, it is significant of their effectiveness in diffusing the idea of Progress that now for the first time a prophetic Utopia was constructed. Hitherto, as I have before observed, ideal states were either projected into the remote past or set in some distant, vaguely-known region, where fancy could build freely. To project them into the future was a new thing, and when in 1770 Sebastien Mercier described what human civilisation would be in A.D. 2440, it was a telling sign of the power which the idea of Progress was beginning to exercise.