Directions of Progress

I - Cycles

Just as the moon and sun rotate around the earth, just as the seasons pass by in set cycles, so too do human civilizations prosper and decline. This was a common understanding, discovered independently by thousands of civilizations who found enough stability to think about the nature of time.

Keeping prosperity and peace was the goal of any civilization that had found them, and a return to some remembered or imagined better time the goal of any that didn’t. The cycles of Ma’at, the Mandate of Heaven, the endless Kalpas of the Indian yugas, all posited this return as the goal of human striving.

Even the Greeks and Romans could only hope for returns. Roman civilization is a constant yearning for the old moral days of the past. The Augustan age, now seen as the peak, was in its time heralded as a return to the glory of the republic from before the civil wars. The following generations of famine and triumph were always then compared unfavorably to the days of Augustus. When the empire became Christian, the golden age shifted a few centuries forward to Constantine, who remained the good idealized founder for over 1000 years in the eastern empire.

Other civilizations were simply others. The tribes on the peripheries of the imperium were not primitives who could advance to become equals, only competing nations which hope to gain in prosperity through imitation and assimilation. In an early example of science fiction, the parents of Kaguya-hime are revealed to be from the nobility who rule over the moon and make use of flying carts, but there is no implication that Japan could one day master such devices. Man’s relationship to the cosmos and to himself could never fundamentally be changed.

II - Linear

Looking back from the Western European 19th century, this same history looked different. While the Egyptians and the Chinese may have believed that they were simply repeating cycles, in a broader timeframe they were advancing, and were in fact doing better than the past they idealized. The Stone Age was man’s prehistory, and over the millennia was succeeded by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age, small technological discoveries compounding into greater accomplishments. Tools got better, and civilization advanced accordingly.

As our knowledge of history accumulates and advances, this view has found more evidence. Most of human history seems to have been a scattered collection of hunter-gatherers not properly capable of any longterm projects or aspirations. But different innovations have managed to last and allowed people to become capable of more. The fundamental technologies of agriculture, metalwork, animal domestication, and eventually construction all allowed for greater civilizations at an accelerating rate.

It is not surprising that this view flourished in the 19th century. Europe, and especially England, had just received the first fruits of industrialization, the greatest and most rapid advance in technology and civilization. After the rather dismal times of its middle ages, England had not only matched Rome, but exceeded it, stretching its empire across the whole world and bringing its triumphant scientific culture to lands previously unknown. The prosperity that came from steamships, railroads, factories, and telegraphs made it obvious that things were getting better in a way that had not been possible before.

Progress was not only material, but also spiritual. The political institutions of constitutional monarchy supported by a strong parliament championed by liberal aristocrats was the ultimate system that had evolved from the best ideas of the ancients. Protestantism had replaced the superstitious and barbarous Catholicism, rapid advances in science were the original fount of all this material advancement, and people were even becoming more moral on an individual level.

As technology has continued to advance, so has this view and understanding of history.

III - Binary

Around the same time as the linear view of history was gaining in belief and reality, the economist Thomas Malthus came up with influential arguments for why things would always stay the same. Malthusian economics posits that any increase in prosperity leads to an increase in population, which divides the prosperity in such a way that everyone stays in essentially the same condition. Enough of the governing officials of the British Empire were convinced by these arguments that they allowed several horrible famines in their territories to proceed without resistance.

Two centuries later, economics regards Malthus as having been wrong, but wrong only about the future. If one measures civilizations not in terms of technology or cumulative wealth, but individual welfare, one finds that most of history saw no longterm rise in prosperity - only cycles. But looking after the rise of industrial technology in a country, prosperity rises a lot and quickly.

Human history therefore has a hinge, and it can be located with the rise of the first steam-technology in England in the 18th century which then led to the first real takeoff growth in the 19th century. Each country hits this threshold of development differently, but once they do it makes the first real important difference in the lives of its people ever. England comes first, then Western Europe and America, then Eastern Europe, Asia, India, South America, and now just a few holdouts in countries that have suffered from poor institutions or natural-resource curses. It is a slow process from the perspective of a lifetime, but for every country in the world to become richer than ever in a few centuries after millennia of comparative stagnation is truly remarkable. Once the secret of industrialization was out, it was not hard for the whole world to reach for it.

Graph from “The Economy” https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/01.html#figure-1-1bf

In this view of history, the evidence of continuous progress looks less solid. The descendants of the first champions of progress make their same arguments: that development requires not only technology, but also uniquely English institutions such as property rights, democratic government, and scientific understanding. But England had all those before the steam engine — as did other places — and the fundamental transformation of human life only came after the steam engine. One can instead view the Industrial Revolution as a massive coincidence, a moment where the binary switch of development was accidentally turned on.

The story might read as follows: one of the peripheral Germanic successors to the Roman empire had a period of economic and institutional good fortune. Their island had solid agricultural productivity and was easily defended, and their major rival for power in the Atlantic had suffered decline thanks to wars and also a very large storm. Their aristocrats were enjoying experimenting with scientific toys like various meters and engines as did the contemporaneous aristocrats of the Ottoman and Ming Empires, but in such a way that tinkerers involved with mining also benefitted from their knowledge. And most importantly, when a steam engine was invented as it had been several times before, large supplies of coal were conveniently very close to major economic river routes, enabling the immediate cost-effective industrial use of the new invention. The subsequent transformation in industrial technology in England was thanks to this one accident and its successors. The following two centuries of scientific progress, discovery, and invention were downstream of the growth caused by this first good fortune.

If progress is a binary, a bifurcation between development and non-development, this could also explain why we have slowed down in the last decades. We are no longer experiencing the benefits of electrification and automobiles in a single generation, the improvements in our lives are smaller (more options on washing machines) and more ambiguous (social media). Once everyone has adequate nutrition and can avoid easily cured diseases, life expectancy flattens out. Happiness doesn’t reliably increase with more wealth past a certain point. Moral behavior and political institutions don’t seem to be improving in quality for those already at the top either.

It is possible that we are nearing the end of what we can reasonably expect from development. Scientific discoveries may have slowed because we have already discovered everything that is easy to discover, invented everything that is obviously useful. We have a few decades, maybe a few centuries, left in our capacity, but that will be it, humanity stops moving forward.

IV - Sideways

Or, maybe there are directions we have yet to explore. The complex multidimensional space that is human life does not need to reduce to a linear concept of progress. The fact that it largely does might be a failing on our part to think bigger. Wisdom, moral behavior, scientific understanding, political cooperation, and artistic creativity largely correlate with societal prosperity because more comfortable, richer people have time and energy to do more interesting things. It is not hard to imagine that progress in these areas might have other barriers than just people with sufficient time and energy. And if one is revolutionized, it could pull technology and prosperity up with it just as technology and prosperity lifted it.

Looking at 100,000¹ years of human history, the first 95,000 are spent mostly in unremembered animal cycles, and the following 4,700 in very similar cycles but with more permanent settlements and trade. And the most recent 300 are a total transformation of human potential. Those key 300 years do not depend on the preceding 99,700. If we had known in advance what was possible, we could have had an industrial computerized Egyptian world empire. Or started modern agriculture 60,000 years earlier, shrugging off the climatic difficulties with a vision of a better future. Once one person makes the discovery, the rest follows.

It took us 99,700 years to stumble onto the steam engine. Some are ready to call that the crucial moment in human history, and that human life has thereby reached its full capacity. But there may be more. There could be hundreds, thousands, or millions of directions that human progress could go in that we simply haven’t explored yet. Technology, or something beyond technology, could revolutionize the way we think or relate to each other, communicate or understand, but we haven’t thought of it yet.

The costs may be high. The steam engine was economically impractical until it was extremely practical, and we may need to explore paths that require decades of waste and lead to nowhere. But they are worth trying.

In the realm of possible futures, there are thousands of steam-engines hovering around us, just out of our sight. Let us not wait 100 millennia to find the next one.

1. Choosing a nice round number for “behavioral modernity,” but my suspicion is that humans were biologically capable of being modern long before this. 5,000 years ago as the start of settled agricultural civilization is possibly also too recent.