göran therborn

AN AGE OF PROGRESS?

We are living in a global, in a civilizational crisis. History has no direction, but

if this system continues, it will collapse. Progress was something people believed
in in the 1960s. Now we know that history has no progressive trend . . .

T
hese sentences give expression to what seems to be the
prevailing conception of our time, on the left broadly defined,
at least in Western Europe and the Americas.1 Zeitdiagnosen
and their Sinnstiftung, the sense they make of their obser-
vations, are notoriously subjective interpretations of a period, and a
favourite genre of social philosophers and social critics with hands unsul-
lied by hard empirical spadework. However, even after diligent study,
one’s image of the present remains almost unavoidably selective and
subjective. The picture presented here does not purport to be an excep-
tion. What it does claim, however, is that it is true—as far as it goes—and
that its arguments are based on falsifiable empirical evidence. Against,
or perhaps, more cautiously, alongside the sombre mood prevailing on
the left, including the environmentalist left-of-centre, it can be stated
that humankind today is at a historical peak of its possibilities, in the
sense of its capability and resources to shape the world, and itself. Never
has humankind faced its future with greater mastery of the world.

To some readers the very word ‘mastery’ may appear repulsive,

associated with domination and modernist arrogance. Here, however,
the association should go in another direction, to art and craftsmanship,
particularly in the pre-modern sense, with its connotations of learn-
ing, understanding, practice and skill. In recent times there has been
an upward leap in the human capacity to understand and shape the
world. We might talk about a third industrial revolution, after the first
of steam and coal, the second of electricity and the combustion engine.
This one is driven by electronic communication and steering, creat-
ing ‘smart’ sensor-reactive environments, and taking us into ‘artificial’

new left review 99 may june 2016 27

 28 nlr 99

intelligence—now capable of beating human masters of go as well as

of chess—robotics, drones and driverless cars. At the same time there
is a revolution in biology, equivalent to the classical breakthroughs of
Darwin and Mendel, with the discovery of dna, the mapping of the
human genome, genetic manipulation and cloning. There are unprece-
dented penetrations of space, expanding enormously the areas humans
can navigate and operate in, from astronomic outer space to the inner
space where nanotechnology has developed. New sources of energy
have been discovered and/or harnessed—nuclear, solar, wind, wave,
fossil fuels from fracking. Of course, these discoveries and inventions
can be used as means of destruction as well as development—indeed,
they already have been—and some, such as fracking, appear directly
dangerous ecologically. Nevertheless, they all testify to the extraordinary
continuing creativity of humankind.

Our available economic resources are greater than ever before. Between
1980 and 2011 world gdp per capita (in constant prices and purchasing
power parities) increased 1.8 times, the imf reports. As a comparison, we
may remember that between year 1 and 1820 global product per capita is
estimated to have increased 1.4 times, and from 1870 to 1913 1.7 times.
More reliable are figures for 1950–73, 1.9, and for 1973–2003, 1.6.2 All
of these numbers have their margins of error. But they tell us at least
two things. Human economic resources are increasing at a much faster
pace than in pre-modern times. Not that recent scientific-technological
breakthroughs have accelerated modern economic growth: the period
1950–73 remains what Eric Hobsbawm styled a Golden Age of develop-
ment.3 We all know that the recent income increase has been distributed
most unequally, an issue to which we shall return below. Nevertheless, it
is worth noting that between 1999 and 2012 about 800 million people
got out of extreme poverty (defined as less than $1.90 a day of income or
consumption in purchasing power parities).4 During 2009–13, for the

1
This is a montage of verbatim quotations from discussions with friends and col-
leagues. It communicates an intellectual mood rather than a set of authorized and
accountable propositions, and for that reason is left without further details of attri-
bution. The text itself derives from debating in the International Panel on Social
Progress, a large collective scholarly initiative, and from a talk at clacso (the Latin
American Council of Social Sciences) at Medellín in November 2015.
2
Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 ad, Oxford 2007, p. 382.
3
Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London 1994.
4
Marcio Cruz et al., ‘Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and
Policies’, World Bank Policy Research Note/15/03, October 2015, p. 6.
 therborn: Progress 29

first time since the first Industrial Revolution and probably since the
first millennium ce, what are now called ‘developing countries’ were
growing more in absolute monetary terms (that is, not only relative to a
low absolute baseline) than the world as a whole.5

Then there is mastery of the self. Humans have recently learnt to

(largely) control their own reproduction, through effective contracep-
tion, safe abortion and artificial insemination, and to remake their
bodies. The human body can have most of its parts replaced by organ
transplants, or repaired by stem-cell reconstructions, and plastic surgery
can alter its appearance. The battle against infectious diseases is con-
tinuing, with new ones erupting and old ones, once thought to have
been eradicated or marginalized, returning in drug-resistant forms.
Nevertheless, the medical balance is strongly positive, thanks to new
drugs, early diagnostics, and new surgical techniques. Life expectancy
is rising—from 64 to 71 years worldwide, in the three decades from
1990—despite setbacks in Africa (hiv-aids) and the former Soviet
Union (the restoration of capitalism).6

It can certainly not be claimed that the human species has mastered its
environment. However, what has evolved is a wider and deeper aware-
ness and knowledge of the planetary ecology of humankind. While many
peoples in the past and several in the present have had a deep under-
standing of their own habitat, contemporary knowledge of the planet
and its atmosphere is unprecedented. Climate science has made another
recent leap in human knowledge. Increasingly, it includes awareness of
the self-destructive capacity of humankind, and in the future will assist
in developing a third form of human mastery, that of self-limitation.

Species as collective agency

Humans are the only species on earth with the potential to act as a spe-
cies. Climate change and global warming will be the first major test of
this, and how humankind will fare nobody can say today. Nevertheless,
great strides in the direction of species action have been made in recent

5
The 2009–13 trajectory is from a graph drawn by K. P. Kannan, in a thus far
unpublished paper, on the basis of the World Bank’s World Development Indicators
2015. See also Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 ad, p. 380.
6
World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2015, Geneva 2015, Table 1,
pp. 44–53.
 30 nlr 99

times. Through electronic communication via satellite signals, pan-

human direct communication has become possible, and is largely an
actual reality. More than a billion people are connected on Facebook,
for instance, and even more people have simultaneously watched events
like the Olympics or the fifa World Cup. The enormous densification of
human connectivity makes much less likely, even if not impossible, the
civilizational disasters and collapses that have befallen several discon-
nected cultures and societies in the past.

In the last third of the twentieth century, a vast movement of existential

human equality swept the world. Falling far short of universal elementary
human equality, and often of debatable efficacy even on its own terms,
it nevertheless claimed victories over explicit, institutionalized racism
and sexism in most parts of the world. Heralded in 1948 by the un
Declaration of Human Rights, the late twentieth-century wave ended us
school segregation and racial disenfranchisement, South African apart-
heid, and male-superiority clauses in the family laws of most countries.7
This has continued into the 21st century, notably as an intercontinen-
tal movement for sexual equality. In the late 1970s, ‘human rights’,
implying species rights, became an important political criterion for chal-
lenging authoritarian or dictatorial regimes, in Latin America, Eastern
Europe, and all over the world.

Since World War II the United Nations has tried to develop collective
human action. The effect has been limited, and ‘the international com-
munity’ has usually been de facto defined as the biggest power and
its friends and clients. But specialized un agencies such as unesco,
unicef and the World Health Organization are making significant con-
tributions to the well-being of humankind. The un 1974 Conference
on Women had a great impact worldwide, bringing women’s move-
ments together and spurring an intercontinental process of dismantling
institutional gender discrimination. In this century, the un is also pro-
moting species goals of development, starting with the Millennium
Goals of 2000–2015.

Furthermore, there has been an effort to establish an international judi-

ciary, which has resulted in the formation of an International Criminal

7
See further Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000,
London 2004, ch. 2; and also my The Killing Fields of Inequality, Cambridge 2013,
p. 83 ff; and Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, London 2011, ch. 7.
 therborn: Progress 31

Court, in particular for war crimes and crimes against humanity—

though it is compromised by the fact that the world’s most powerful and
most frequently engaged warrior-state does not recognize it, jealously
guarding its own global impunity. Third, it has been possible to bring
(virtually) all the states of the world together, at least to discuss a crucial
challenge to all humankind, global warming. The Paris 2015 meeting
agreed a set of concerted actions, which are probably not adequate, and
are unlikely to be fully implemented. Nevertheless, in the modest annals
of human joint action, even this might turn out to be a landmark.

All of these developments, however limited, ambiguous or compro-

mised, are forms of emergence of a possible species agency.

The fate of ‘progress’

But if the world is truly at a peak of human capability and possibilities,

why do so many people take a much darker view? There will be two
major reasons. One is systemic constraint. Even if capitalist markets do
have an inclusive aspect, open to exchange with anyone, regardless of
colour, sex or politics—to the extent of flouting imperial sanctions, on
occasion—as long as it is profitable, capitalism as a whole is predomi-
nantly and inherently a system of social exclusion, dividing people by
property and excluding the non-profitable. A system of this kind is, of
course, incapable of allowing the capabilities of all humankind to be real-
ized. And currently that system looks well fortified, even though new
critical currents are hitting against it—most unexpectedly and impres-
sively, the upsurge in support of the Sanders campaign in the us.

The second major reason lies in the complex relationship between social
development and the history of its ideological representation as evolu-
tion, viewed as a process of steady, necessary advance, be it in nature
or society. Marxism was originally embedded in evolutionism, a power-
ful and widespread scientific perspective of the 19th century. Marx even
studied it in geology,8 and was fascinated by Darwin; Engels borrowed
from Lewis Henry Morgan an evolutionary anthropology of the family.
The historical materialism of ‘modes of production’ is, of course, a vari-
ant of an evolutionary take on the world. However, in the transfer from
the natural sciences to human history, the limitations of 19th-century

8
I owe this point to Marcel van der Linden, one of the chief editors of the ongoing
mega edition of the works of Marx and Engels.
 32 nlr 99

evolutionism became evident, and were subject to fierce attack in the

following century, after the brutal end of the belle époque in the heca-
tomb of World War I and the subsequent political upheavals. Spencerian
sociology died out—only the mutant Social Darwinism survived, as
part of fascist ideology. In the anthropology shaped by Franz Boas and
Bronisław Malinowski, evolutionism became taboo. In Marxism, ‘evo-
lution’ became the keyword for the complacent gradualism that came
to predominate in the outlook and practice of Social Democracy, and
fell into discredit along with it; neither philosophical Western Marxism
nor insurrectionary Leninism nor voluntarist Stalinism and Maoism
accepted any evolutionary considerations. Only in post-Stalinist Soviet
and Soviet-oriented Communism did they sometimes reappear, as in
the unwillingness of the Communist parties to attack the new technol-
ogy of nuclear energy, an important target for the rest of the left in the
1970s and 80s.

There were good reasons to reject 19th-century social evolutionism, for

its determinism, and for its unilinearity. Nobody wants to revive that
conception of ‘progress’—the belief that historical change is inher-
ently steady, directional and benign. However, human history cannot be
understood only as a series of random, contingent events. Trend lines
are discernible—in scientific-technical knowledge, economic growth
and life expectancy, for example. Some changes appear irreversible,
such as the abandonment of governance by enfeoffment, production
by plantation slavery, or, in some parts of the world such as most of
Euro-America, reproduction by patriarchal families. While it is not the
only possible true characteristic of our times, this survey of the peak of
human capability does imply that there has been real progress in the
development of human resources and human freedom.

What, then, would a non-deterministic, non-unilinear evolutionary

perspective entail? Contemporary evolutionary theory has developed in
economics and game theory, largely with a view to making sense of the
inadequacy of the rational-choice axiom of neoclassical economics in
grasping human behaviour. Brian Skyrms gives a very good summary of
it in his Social Dynamics:

By adaptive dynamics, I simply mean a dynamics that moves in the

direction of that which succeeds, or seems to succeed, better than the alter-
natives. Inspiration comes from evolutionary dynamics . . . Evolution may
be cultural rather than biological, with imitation rather than replication
 therborn: Progress 33

driving the dynamics. Individuals who repeatedly interact may adapt to one
another’s actions . . . In contexts of strategic interaction, everyone aiming
for the best may very well lead to the worst. Or it may lead nowhere definite
at all, as is the case when the dynamics is cyclic, or even chaotic. Adaptive
dynamics may not lead to adaptation.9

Human social evolution is here dissociated from the complacent pro-

gressivism that social theory absorbed from the prevailing emphases of
evolutionary biology: irreducible to nature, from which it has emerged, it
has its own socio-cultural dynamics, of interactive adaptation, and imita-
tion or emulation of perceived success. This dynamics has no intrinsic
direction, and may fail as adaptation. The bare essentials of the adap-
tive social dynamics of perceived success, imitation and emulation are
similar to what I once called the material matrix of affirmations and
sanctions of ideological discourse.10 It is an approach to and a perspective
on social change, not a theory aiming to calculate cultural ‘transmission
coefficients’ or ‘probabilities of selection’.11 Its basic assumption is that
human beings have a capacity to learn from what they perceive of other
people’s experience as well as their own, and to transmit this learning to
other humans, of the same as well as the next generation. The lessons
to be learnt are usually not objectively ascertainable, however. An evolu-
tionary perspective entails a hypothesis that long-term human history
includes some discernible trends towards an enhancement of human
capacities and social opportunities, implying that some changes have
been practically irreversible, and most likely will remain so. The main
determinant of this irreversibility is probably a restructuration of the
relations of power among the relevant social actors after a tipping-point
of social change.

But what is missing in Skyrms’s account is precisely a dimension of

power, and a corresponding attention to systemic social processes and
thresholds. Actors have different amounts of power, first of all allocated
by their positions in a given social system. Adaptation to perceived

9
Brian Skyrms, Social Dynamics, Oxford 2014, p. xiii.
10
Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology, London 1980, p. 33 ff.
11
For a scathing critique of such theoretical ambitions, see Kenta Tsuda,
‘Academicians of Lagado?’, nlr 72, Nov–Dec 2011. However, the perspective of
evolutionary game theory, economics and norm theory which I have in mind is not
touched upon there. See further, Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The
Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge 2006.
 34 nlr 99

success operates both within a system, in forms such as different

capitalist policies of growth or crisis management, and between sys-
tems, such as capitalism and socialism, imagined or existing. System
development affects the power distribution within the system, open-
ing/widening or closing/narrowing the force of systemic opposition.
Social evolution involves systemic thresholds and tipping-points. While
imaginable, it is very unlikely, to put it cautiously, that, say, national
democracies will revert to kingship by divine right, that post-industrial
economies will return to the factory system of the 19th and 20th cen-
turies, with its advanced social democracies and strong working-class
parties, or that the usa or South Africa will revert to racist segregation
and apartheid.

Human social evolution is dialectical, self-contradictory, while ideologi-

cal and political perspectives and discourse have a natural propensity
for one-sided consistency. Conventional social evolutionism, closely
connected with the political ideology of liberalism—or the Whig inter-
pretation of history—concentrates on the average or median norm, as
in average per capita income or life expectancy, or on official democratic
rights. A dialectical take on human evolution looks also at contradic-
tory tendencies, at distributions, and at conflicts, beyond as well as
around the norms. The dialectics of human evolution is most directly
and simply demonstrated by the fact that scientific and technological
advance is also an advance in the knowledge and means of human
destructiveness. The means of travel to outer space developed out of
missile technology designed to destroy an enemy located oceans and
continents away. Some biomedical advances derive from superpower
preparations for biological warfare. The internet emerged out of military
communication, while electronic remote steering is now also deployed
for intercontinental assassinations.

What has been economic development for many has often been a loss
or a cost for others, with the disappearance of familiar livelihoods
and historical habitats. Economically induced climate change and its
consequences for the human environment are now creating huge devel-
opment costs for humankind as a whole. Depletion of natural resources
and pollution of the environment by economic development are further
major examples. According to a recent World Bank research paper,12

12
Cruz et al., ‘Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity’, pp. 45–6.
 therborn: Progress 35

low-income countries are losing their ‘capital’ (physical, natural and

human) per capita, although at a decelerating rate since 1990. Exposure
to urban pollution is increasing in the world as a whole, but most of all
in poor countries.

Furthermore, the conventional norm of progress obscures the unequal

distribution of its opportunities. Almost half, 46 per cent, of the world’s
income growth between 1988 and 2011 was appropriated by the richest
tenth of humanity.13 In the us, since the late 1990s, there has been a
progressive decoupling of gdp per capita—advancing with short-lived
fallbacks—and the family income of four-fifths of the population, which
has been stagnating and recently declining, above all from the median
and below.14 The spread of the Anglo-American financial crisis of 2008
has meant a substantial decline in the income share of the bottom 40 per
cent in the recession-hit European countries, from Greece and Ireland to
the uk and Spain.15

Progress in life expectancy has been more evenly distributed globally,

and the overall gap between rich and poor countries actually narrowed
between 1990 and 2013 from 22 to 17 years. But it has not been univer-
sal. There is substantial documentation in the rich countries, with the
available data, of a growing intra-national life expectancy gap between
classes—whether defined by occupation, education or income—at least
in the last third of the 20th century and well into the 21st, mainly due
to stagnating or more slowly increasing lifespans among the poorer
classes.16 Now, evidence is appearing of an absolute decline, among the
underprivileged, similar to but not (yet) as dramatic as that in Russia in
the 1990s. In the United States, mid-life (45–54) mortality among white
non-Hispanics without tertiary education began to increase in 1998, and
has continued to rise since then.17 In Finland in this century, increas-
ing mortality has also been registered for the unemployed, people living

13
Oxfam briefing paper, ‘An Economy for the 1%’, 18 January 2016, available on
oxfam.org.
14
See Figure 4 of Lane Kenworthy, ‘Shared Prosperity’, in The Good Society, April
2015, ebook available online at lanekenworthy.net.
15
Cruz et al., ‘Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity’, fig. 9.
16
For an overview with references see Therborn, Killing Fields, p. 9 ff.
17
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, ‘Rising Morbidity and Mortality among White
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
the Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 112, no. 49, December 2015.
 36 nlr 99

alone, and for the poorest fifth of women.18 This is more than uneven
distribution; it is contradictory evolution.

Dialectics of evolution

For those of us interested in, and committed to, radical social

transformations, systemic evolutionism is a very important strategic as
well as analytical instrument. It lifts our eyes from the outrageousness of
the situation and the evil of the enemy to the bases of his power. Dialectical
evolutionism is not liberal progressivism turned upside down, interested
only in swelling indignation at human misery. The possibilities of social
transformation are not decided only—or even primarily—by indigna-
tion, but by a successful handling of the available levers of change and
an effective neutralization of its obstacles. Neoliberalism is an ideology
and a policy kit that rose to intellectual prominence in the wake of the
failure of Keynesianism to cope with the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s. But
with the turn of core capitalism to de-industrialization and financializa-
tion, it became an ideology of hard power that fragmented labour and
made capital accumulation less dependent on worker-producers. A
transformation to post-capitalism will require a systemic weakening of
the power of financial and computer-guided capital—from algorithmic
stock trading to Uber capitalism, in which the producers are turned into
self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’—and the coalescence of new as well as
old forces of opposition.19

Left-wing thought and practice should renew its moral investment in

the development of human capability, and in advances in science and
technology. The universal realization of the full potential of humankind,
of the capability of each and every one is at the core of the classical left
vision of human emancipation. Human history is not subsumable under
any scheme of evolutionary destiny, contrary to 19th-century beliefs, lib-
eral or Marxist. However, in all its messy contingencies, human history
does contain discernible lines of social evolution, which it would simply
be obscurantist to deny. In an evolutionary perspective, progress still
has a meaning, of extending the frontiers of human knowledge and its

18
Lasse Tarkkianen et al., ‘The Changing Relationship between Income and
Mortality in Finland, 1988–2007’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health,
vol. 67, no. 1, 2013.
19
On this latter point, see two earlier pieces of mine: ‘Class in the 21st Century’,
nlr 78, Nov–Dec 2012, and ‘New Masses?’, nlr 85, Jan–Feb 2014.
 therborn: Progress 37

applications, a universalization of the benefits from human evolution,

and an enhanced adaptability to the habitat of the human species, which
will require a seemingly new evolutionary human mastery, that of self-
limitation. Hunters and fishermen have known it for a long time.

Never before have the possibilities of a good world for the human spe-
cies as a whole been greater. At the same time, the gap between human
potential and the existing conditions of humankind in its totality has
probably never been wider. Ours is also an age of extremes. What stands
in between the potential and the actual are the economics of environ-
mental destruction and social exclusion of whoever is not profitable, the
economics, sociology and psychology of inequality, the power politics
of division and war. No end to all of this is in sight. However, a species
consciousness is emerging, in particular one of environmental chal-
lenges but also of human rights and human potential. An awareness
of the commonality of all humankind provides the widest possible base
for critiques of and opposition to prevailing exclusions and inequali-
ties. But there is much more to learn about the contradictions that may
undermine the powers sustaining the current state of the world, poten-
tially taking shape as social forces. That is the focus of contemporary
evolutionary dialectics.