In an article titled ‘A Short Argument for Belief in Progress’ (THINK 60, 2022), Saul Smilansky tries to present a brief argument in favour of belief in progress, because he assumes that broad claims about ‘social progress’ (either comparing past societies with contemporary societies, or comparing current societies with each other) are often met with severe doubt and suspicion or ridicule. Smilansky rejects this common attitude and tries to show that it is incorrect. He does this by focusing on most people's daily lives instead of ‘marginal groups, extreme conditions such as war, or questions about the future’. He notes that he has no opinion on the claim that the future will necessarily be better or even that the progress that has been made until now will continue. He is merely claiming that ‘currently, and for some generations, there has been great progress in economically advanced societies, as compared to the human situation throughout nearly all of history’.
He begins his argument with the question: ‘What is the worst thing that can happen in one's life?’ Regardless of acute situations such as ‘constant torture, or the return of widespread slavery’, if this question is asked in a modern, advanced society, the predominant answer would probably be ‘loss of a child’. Smilansky considers the loss of a child to be the most tragic or devastating event that can happen to a human being. Unlike the event of losing a parent, which is ‘natural’ in a sense, losing a child is ‘unnatural and horrible’. Now, if we review the history, we find that in the past, this event was very common and expected, and the probability of losing one's child even reached 50 per cent. In this way, Smilansky's argument is as follows:
(a) Nothing is worse than the death of one's child.
(b) Losing a child is now very unlikely in a modern advanced society.
(c) This event was common in past societies.
(d) Conclusion: we have a clear reason to believe in progress and its importance.
Smilansky then responds to some possible challenges. One of the criticisms is that in the past, people did not expect otherwise and so were not as devastated by the death of their child as we moderns are. In response, Smilansky says that we can have two perceptions of progress. First, whether I (more or less as I am now) prefer to live at some point in the past. He emphasizes that in the context of the current discussion, the answer to this first question is certainly ‘no’, that is, we do not want to be in a situation where we are almost certain to lose one or more children. Then we have to admit that we prefer today with all its faults, unless we think there is something more important than the health and life of our children. In this sense, what people have felt in the past about the death of their children is irrelevant. A second way of looking at progress is to ask whether people who represent a time in the past were enviably better off than me. Here I do not imagine myself (as I now am) transported to a past society, but consider the charm of being in their place. Even with this second interpretation, which is more complex, it would be difficult to deny that there has been progress historically, Smilansky believes. If we deny this, Smilansky claims, our argument will be that even though people regularly used to predict that about half of their children would die young, they were better off, the reason being that they did not care about this loss as much as we do. Such an argument shows how lucky we moderns are compared to our ancestors, because their lives were such that they were not emotionally capable of caring for their children as much as we do. Smilansky points out that sometimes we may find some aspects of the past appealing for those who lived then, but the price of living in that past requires indifference to the loss of children.
I accept Smilansky's premise that the worst event in one's life is the loss of a child, but in what follows, I take up some challenges to different aspects of Smilansky's approach which I believe undermine his main argument:
1. Smilansky claims belief in progress is not common, but I believe it is. One reason for this is that when most people encounter the narratives of past societies or the accounts of contemporary primitive societies, their default is that these societies are backward. We believe, at the very least, that we moderns ‘know’ what the ideal of a society is, even though we cannot realize it in practice, but that past societies basically did not know what the ideals were and lived in a kind of stupidity. For example, we know that the government should be elected by the people, we know that men and women have equal rights, and we know that no human should be a slave, but past generations had no understanding of these ‘truths’. This presupposition of ‘knowledge about the ideal situation’ can be considered one of the clearest (but unconscious) signs of the common belief in progress.
2. Several times in his article, Smilansky refers to ‘advanced’ societies, by which he means developed Western societies. He uses the same word for the concept of ‘progress’ (social and historical progress). It seems to me that he should have specifically avoided using the word ‘advanced’ to avoid confusion.
3. I believe the most important challenge to Smilansky's position is one that he himself puts forward: that past generations had a different view on the issue of children's death. Smilansky suggests some might say that the past was better on balance, despite high rates of childhood mortality, because people were comparatively indifferent to the death of their children, that is, they were not as emotionally devastated by the death of their offspring as we are now. However, as I explain below, this alleged indifference might indeed be a sign of life being better back then.
Assume we are aware of two people, A and B, both of whom have children. We know that if person A loses her child, she will not be able to bear the loss and will commit suicide in an hour. Person B, on the other hand, will continue her life after the death of her child, albeit with a relatively short period of sorrow and depression. But why is B less affected by the death of her child? Perhaps B cares for and loves her child just as much as person A, but for various reasons, she can bear the sorrow of being away from the child. For example, perhaps person B can still look forward to a life very much worth living and for that reason can better cope with the death of her child. In fact, if people were less obviously devastated by the loss of a child in the past, that might very well be, not because they cared less, but because they had lives much more worth living. In fact there is empirical evidence in favour of this account: the problem of the meaning of life as it exists today in developed and underdeveloped societies did not exist in the past. Suicide out of despair (or suicide in general as prevailing today) is a contemporary phenomenon.
4. Given that, especially in developed societies, more than half of people do not have children (on purpose), Smilansky's criterion of betterment does not even apply to half of us. Meanwhile, as fewer and fewer people have children, that irrelevance is increasing. Even supposing the very conditions that Smilansky puts forward, many people who do not want to have children might then reasonably prefer to live in the past, especially since some crucial crises of the contemporary era did not exist in the past.
5. It seems to me that the lower childhood mortality rate is a scientific achievement that cannot simply be equated with ‘progress’, which, I think, must involve some kind of ethical, cultural, artistic or other development in the character of a society. Our gaining longer lives, by (for example) some kind of gene modification would not necessitate that society had ‘progressed’. Increased longevity, as such, does not amount to such ‘progress’.
In the end, I would like once more to point to the meaninglessness of life and the prevalence of suicide in the contemporary era, which I mentioned in the third criticism. In my opinion, people who decide to end their lives much more than their predecessors cannot be in a better situation than them. I believe that it is difficult to devise a single criterion by which to evaluate human progress, but if I were to choose one, I would choose ‘love of life’ (the opposite concept of suicidal tendency) and since it has decreased considerably in our time, I can hardly accept that mankind today has progressed compared to the past generations.Footnote 1
