History of the Idea of Progress, by Robert Nisbet
Minogue, Kenneth
In his History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet argues that the doctrine of progress has fallen on hard times, and who can gainsay him? In the nineteenth century, men may perhaps have had...
...He determined its melting point to be 976+ 8 K by differential thermal analysis...
...However, the bargain price of the book has been achieved at the expense of omitting all footnotes, and that makes it no bargain at all to the serious r e a d e r who might like to follow up some of the many fascinating themes Professor Nisbet disCUSSES...
...Sharma to evaluate the stability of boron nitride with Li-Si alloys of differing composition...
...The new compound, Li2~Sis, did not exhibit sufficient lithium activity to attack boron nitride...
...He produced a scanning electron micrograph that clearly indicates a single phase for the compound...
...Second, he probably had not paid taxes on the cash...
...Boron nitride was found to react with Li,sSi, only when in the presence of LinSis...
...Most inorganic insulators, including the refractory oxides and nitrides, are destroyed or rendered conductive by this attack...
...early on by Professor Nisbet in his remark that "little if anything in the world could be considered in its own right...
...He was also able to determine the maximum nonstoichiometric ranges of the lithiumsilicon compounds from charge passed during the transitions between voltage plateaus...
...In terms of the first, commonsensical view, man stopped progressing about the time when the barbarian invasions began to beat down the military power of Rome and only resumed the process of improvement at some point in the high Middle Ages, about a tlaousand years THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 29 later...
...Sharma confirmed the existence of the new compound by x-ray diffraction analysis...
...Nevertheless, Professor Nisbet achieves it by an ingenious juxtaposition, remarking that these are not the words o f " a believer in relentless, unremitting decline and in eventual extinction of a race, but of a believer, instead, in a philosophy of life and work not very different from what in modern history is termed the Protestant Ethic...
...Sharma conducted research at the Argonne National Laboratory, the Institute of Direct Energy Conversion at the University of Pennsylvania, the Nuffield Research Group in England and the National Metallurgical Laboratory in India...
...In this book, he changes his plea...
...To the federal court in 1974 Elliott Abrams is a lawyer living in IVasbington, D.C...
...One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh," remarked that gloomy prophet, "but the earth abideth for e v e r . " He went on to explain that "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be" and this is exactly what progressives have been denying ever since the seventeenth century...
...This, of course, is Agnew's view...
...Now it might be thought that to describe an idea as a Christian heresy is to categorize it in a way of interest only to Christians, but this is not the case...
...In fact, the reverse is often the case...
...This is a form of Western selfknowledge which is largely independent of doctrinal questions like belief or lack of belief in God...
...KNOWLEDGE OF THE lithium activity present in the systems various compounds allowed Dr...
...What is interesting in this book is not Agnew's personal fate, for his insouciance toward political integrity is everywhere evident, but rather the question of whether the prosecution of Agnew was not i t s e l f a form of political c o r r u p t i o n - - t h e abuse of power by prosecutors determined to topple their man for political reasons...
...Ultimately, that brings the prospect of high-performance electric vehicles closer to reality...
...Why can't we...
...Agnew's description here of a prosecutorial team out to get him is a good deal more plausible than many other parts of the book...
...But it may be seen in a more subtle form as anthropology and tourism conspire to install everything exotic in Western civilization's vast conservationist museum without walls...
...Yet he argues that he was innocent of all political corruption charges...
...It is, rather, the context within which all the others are understood...
...This remark is embedded in a discussion of travel literature of the seventeenth century, a discussion in which Professor Nisbet also writes of "the spell of the idea of progress...
...It is a strange kind of theodicy, by which the European will to power spilled over into the dimension of time and history...
...The consequence is that Professor Nisbet has identified the doctrine of progress with the self-confidence of Western civilization itself, and since he would understandably like to see that self-confidence restored he is inclined to lament the decline of the doctrine of progress itself...
...Ram Sharma is a Senior Research Scientist in the Depart ment of Electrochemistry at the General Motors Research Laboratories...
...Tuveson and discussed by Professor Nisbet, the Christian belief in God's providential governance of the universe was brought down from heaven and incorporated in the laws of history, by which successive generations of men revealed the potentialities of a continuous human creation...
...Allen Green, a consulting e n g i n e e r who lived by government contracts, " d i d make contributions to me for political purposes...
...S p i r o Agnew left the White House in 1973 after pleading "nolo contendere" to an income-tax charge and, implicitly, to associated charges of political corruption...
...Agnew's book is, then, a defense of sleaziness, in which the governor of Maryland, who would see himself as a proud and patriotic son of an immigrant and a great defender of America, is a willing participant in the .corruption which pervaded Maryland politics...
...Agnew tells this lie because it is central to his defense, which is that he did nothing that is not standard behavior for politicians: Others did it so I did it and that is that...
...He received a Ph.D...
...There are currently straws in the wind (of which History oft/~e Idea of Progress is perhaps one) which suggest that a new mode is .developing in the study of history which will restore to greater emphasis the idea that men are essentially the same everywhere...
...Everything had to be seen through the West and its values...
...But I think he goes astray in two resDecrs First, he takes his bearings from the commonsensical idea of progress and thus finds that it may be detected" as far back as Hesiod in the seventh century B.C...
...By monitoring the current in the cell at different potentials, Dr...
...FredTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 31 erick Teggart, who rightly pointed out that progressive ideas are bad history, is assumed t h e r e b y to be disillusioned with the idea of progress...
...This behavior was confirmed by experiments in which pure silicon was used in place of Li-Si alloy as the starting material...
...Some of the nastier passages of 20th-century politics have been associated with a head-on collision with progress...
...Augustine, Joachim of Flora) and in its gnostic preoccupation with salvation through the power conferred by knowledge...
...and third, he knew that in every campaign there was a great need for "walking around money," the legal tencler for paid election-day workers and for other cash needs that did not look quite right on a detailed election expenditure report...
...Even so, his speculations about motives are incomplete at best...
...His purpose would be better served, I think, by abandoning what I have called the real doctrine of progress altogether...
...Nothing in the book is more offensive than Agnew's insistence that politics is, always and everywhere, corrupt--that "every politician" accepts co.rruption as a "way of life...
...Certainly it ought to be possible to regain our self-confidence without having to succumb once more to that spell...
...Dr...
...This kind of vulgarity appears every time Europeans behave superciliously toward people of other cultures...
...This is to confuse Whig history with Whig politics: To criticize the former need not mean rejecting the latter...
...Leaving us to wonder what a precedented age might be, he goes on: "Perhaps my most useful function would be to disenthrall th'em from the spell of history, to help them see the irrelevance of the past...
...The religious world picture, in which man found his place in a scheme of higher and lower beings, gave way to a satisfyingly narcissistic pantheism...
...Restricting the amount of charge in keeping with the recommended limits will control lithium activity, preventing the formation of highly-conductive compounds and adding durability to an electrochemical system which already displays high specific energy...
...Of particular concern is the lithium attack upon separators and seal components...
...Lithium activity changes by two orders of magmtude in the concentration range shown...
...I further acknowledge that contracts were awarded by s t a t e agencies in 1967 and o t h e r years to those who made such payments, and that...
...The electrochemical cell consisted of a Li-Si alloy positive electrode, a eutectic mixture of LiCI-KCI electrol y t e , and two Li-AI a l l o y electrodes-one negative and one reference electrode...
...There are, then, at least two ideas of progress in our intellectual history, and they are in important ways quite distinct...
...Sharma established the point at which lithium activity produces reaction...
...It may also be, however, that this latter sensation is merely the epidemic self-pity of our age...
...But the real doctrine of progress, if I may call it such, is very different, in some ways almost the opposite of this humble piece of common sense...
...Sharma was educated in India and England...
...I am writing this book because I am innocent of the allegations against me which compelled me to resign from the vicepresidency of the United States in 1973...
...Any history of so popular an idea must necessarily stop well before the present generation, since we cannot know the historical significance of ideas without having at least some idea of their outcome...
...Still, Ulysses got through Scylla and Charybdis...
...Europeans of that era had risen to so great a level of confidence as they surveyed all the other civilizations they knew, both past and present, that they began to indulge that sense of their own eminence which Hobbes recognized as one of the supreme amusements of mankind...
...Reaction occurred according to the following equation: BN + (3+ x)Li = LimB + LiaN The lithium nitride that formed during reaction dissolved in the molten salt electrolyte, but the lithium boride remained on the surface and became electronically conductive, causing high selfdischarge in the cell...
...For them progress requires that we conceive of mankind as a single entity which is engaged in the overriding adventure of raising itself by its own bootstraps to a state of affairs in which men will not only enjoy greater comfort and power but also be worthy of them by virtue of its spiritual improvement...
...That is, when contractors bought their government contracts with political contributions, the money really went for Agnew's political i n t e r e s t s and not for Cadillacs or condominiums...
...One is reminded, by this account, of Senator Talmadge's denying his own corruption charges by explaining that at parties people just came up to him and stuffed 20dollar bills into his shirt pocket, which he attributed to friendship and admiration...
...The revised phase diagram shows four compounds: Li2Si, Li21Si8, LilsSi4 and Li22Si5...
...Boron nitride, one of the more resistant materials, has been the subject of Dr...
...If this hardly sounds like a ringing declaration of innocence, neither do other parts of his defense...
...For there is a wisdom built into the very foundations of our civilization which distinguishes between the understandings possible and the actions permissible to man, on the one hand, and those things which must be left to God, on the other...
...The source of the abundant energy available in lithium, however, is exactly what makes it almost impossible to manage...
...Hard, I say, but not impossible...
...HIGH ELECTROPOSITIVity and low equivalent weight make lithium an ideal battery reactant, capable of supplying the specific energy needed to operate an electric vehicle...
...And Alan MacFarlane's study of English individualism suggests that patterns of individualist acquisition, far from being part of "the rise of the bourgeoisie," may in fact be traced far back into the Middle Ages...
...Of I.L...
...Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph showing the results of lithium attack on boron nitride...
...It is capable of regarding the most appalling disasters as mere hiccoughs--negative moments of the dialectic--in a fundamental process of advance...
...The worst vulgarity is the one we have already noted: the desire to think that one's own projects and enthusiasms are the stuffofprogress itsels The narcissism of progress is noted A series of anodic and cathodic cycles at very low current densities indicated three wellxlefined voltage plateaus below 80 atom percent lithium composition...
...The vulgarity was always present in, for example, the temptation to think that just because we had better machines we were better people...
...A controlled potential was imposed on a boron nitride cloth sample in an electrochemical cell...
...We live in the best of all possible worlds, and every evil is a necessary evil...
...Having been beaten at the polls in the crushing defeat of the McGovernShriver ticket," he writes, the l e f t . w i n g e r s determined to r e v e r s e the election r e s u l t s by forcing Nixon out o f t h e p r e s i d e n c y by a p r o c e s s which amounted t o a coup d ' $ t a t . However, they would have g a i n e d n o t h i n g by kicki n g o u t Nixon o n l y to have me come to power as his s u c c e s s o r . . . . So to make their revolution a s u c c e s s , they had to g e t rid of me first...
...There is, however, a sound underlying reason why Professor Nisbet should be solicitous of the idea of progress...
...Still, the story of Western civilization is unmistakably one of breathtaking creativity in every field, including some fields, such as science, history, and philosophy, which were barely dreamed of by most other civilizations...
...The challenge is to prepare alloys and find materials stable enough to contain the aggressiveness of lithium without greatly suppressing its activity...
...Even in conservative circles, strong men turn Lithium-Silicon System ] A~m I~a~ S~ican Partial phase diagram of the lithium.silicon system...
...S t i l l , Agnew's case raises difficult questions about prosecutorial behavior in political cases...
...But operating temperatures of 723 K and the aggressive nature of the chemical reactants pose serious new challenges to cell construction materials...
...First, he was giving to both parties, playing both sides of the street and hedging his bets, so he wanted no records made...
...It is one of the best things in Professor Nisbet's book that he sees behind the frequent bouts of hostility between progress and Christianity to recognize how important Christian ideas are in the generation of progress...
...Well, not quite...
...In the end, Agnew says, he quit in part because the biases and practices of the prosecutors made his vindication unlikely and in part because General Haig t h r e a t e n e d his life...
...And he usually gave it in cash, for three reasons...
...Before joining General Motors in 1970, Dr...
...Such a belief--that the improvements we create in each generation add up to a collective advance--is probably the closest thing many people have to a religion...
...Silicon reduces the activity of lithium without substantially increasing its weight, and produces a manageable solid at 723 K. Constant-current potentiometry experiments were carried out m an inert atmosphere...
...Professor" Nisbet would have done better to stick with the serious thinkers of the past than to bother with amateur disenthral!ers who think they know what is relevant and i r r e l e v a n t to t h e i r pupils...
...The best way of understanding the doctrine of progress is to take one's bearings from Ecclesiastes...
...Moreover, he admits to having received cash payments...
...A Harvard professor who has obviously got himself into a muddle is cited as asking: "What, then, can a historian tell undergraduates t h a t might help them in this new and unprecedented age...
...Even so, it is arguable that the current emphasis of historians upon the absolute uniqueness of ideas in each time and place has been overdone...
...They were actually b~nt on absorbing God in man...
...A t its most general and humble, progress just means a conviction that things are, broadly, tending to get better from generation to generation, and in this form at least it is hard to see the history of Europe in any other terms...
...Most of History of the Idea of Progress deals in an admirably generous and lucid way with past exponents of the idea of progess, but in the last section, "Progress at Bay," Professor Nisbet must come to terms with an unmanageable cacophony of modern voices, which at times leads him into trouble...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 pale and fall to stammering if they are called " r e a c t i o n a r y , " and the reason for this is that all manner of scoundrels--Marxist revolutionaries in particular--have managed to impose upon gullible people the idea that they possess the criterion by which what is conducive to progress may be distinguished from that which will take us back to the bad old days...
...Sharma's recent, successful efforts to establish conditions under which attack may be avoided...
...And it is indeed true that to extract a conception of progress from Hesiod's remark that "Through work men grow rich in flocks and substance, and working they are much loved by the immortals" is a difficult task...
...Eighteenthcentury conjectural histories, with their accounts of human development passing through various stages of evolution, are the channels by which this picture became modern social science and by which the word evolution came to stand for a logic of change greatly favored by believers in progress...
...Sharma...
...Agnew presents this refusal to make an ethical judgment as if it were his best defense...
...There is much in what I have called the real doctrine of progress which runs counter to this cosmic prudence and which makes that doctrine not merely explicitly anti-Christian but also responsible for much of the folie de grandeur from which we now suffer...
...This is a lie, and it is a calumny against our nation's political system...
...His prosecutors did, at times, become persecutors: Even Tom Wicker acknowledged that Agnew's rights "obviously have been imperilled by the damaging news le~iks about his case," for there was a lt~ng and indefensible series of leaks which had Agnew pilloried in an already very hostile press before any 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...
...Specific energies greater than 180 W. h/kg, about five times that of the lead-acid battery, have been demonstrated by electrochemical cells utilizing LiCI-KCI electrolyte and electrodes of metal sulfide and lithium alloy...
...The nasty side of progress may be summed up by saying that it is a vulgar and narcissistic Christian heresy, and each of these points needs a word of elucidation...
...Agnew does claim that, in general, he kept political and personal funds separate...
...But according to what I have called the real doctrine of progress everything, including the Dark Ages, as they used to be known, is a necessary part of the process of progress...
...It will be clear from the identification of the Protestant Ethic with that much more commonplace thing, a belief that hard work will'make you prosper, that there are times when the sociologist in Professor Nisbet gets the upper hand over the historian...
...I knew I had done nothing more than every politician charged with the responsibility for raising campaign funds had done," he writes at one point, adding that he "wanted to know as little about the gray areas of fund-raising as, p o s s i b l e . " " I asked for no d e t a i l s , " he explains, "because I wanted to be insulated from a process which always has gray overtones as to legality...
...The full text of the threat is: "The President has a lot of power--don't forget that...
...But it Kenneth Minogue teaches at the London School of Economics, and is the author of The Liberal Mind...
...The results were used to modify the Li-Si phase diagram, which indicated only two such plateaus...
...Further, the doctrine of progress can take many forms...
...Mankind is a marching army with, typically, those two central European Alberts, Einstein and Schweitzer (representing science and sainthood), at the vanguard and the pygmies of the Khalahari Desert straggling along at the rear...
...It was a wise policy for a candidate or officeholder to isolate himself as much as possible from the political collection process, but it wasn't always possible--particularly at the county level...
...he stated: "I admit that I did receive payments during the year 1967 which were not expended for political purposes and that t h e r e f o r e these payments were income, taxable to me in that year, and that I so knew...
...The contributor always wanted to give the money to you personally so he was sure that you knew he was helping you...
...has never been the sole context, since ideas like decadence and cyclicity have never been entirely absent...
...Le Roy Ladurie's recent study of life in a southern French village at the beginning of the fourteenth century, for instance, has been taken to show that the people of that time were preoccupied with much the same things as we are today: sex, power, status, and money...
...Anyone reading the passage about the G e n e r a l ' s " d e a t h t h r e a t " will conclude either that Agnew was unbalanced then or that he is merely touting his book now...
...For what is as clear as a bell is that even if we are no longer drunk on a sense of progress, we are still suffering from the hangover...
...It may be seen surfacing in the famous seventeenth century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns...
...He graduated from Banaras Hindu University with an M. Sc...
...Maybe you had to be there...
...It is perhaps the spirit of this reviving mode of thought which has led Professor Nisbet to detect a strand of progressivism at the beginnings of Western civilization...
...It is not possible to determine precisely why the prosecutors--from Attorney General Richardson on down--felt as strongly as they did, but certainly some combination of ideological politics, a distaste for corruption, and a fear for country lest a man they believed to be a criminal ascended to its highest office was at work...
...Now this second view comes directly and unmistakably out of Christianity and is, further, bent on relegating its venerable ancestor to the scrapheap of mere anticipations of better thoughts...
...It is, instead, a condemnation by his own hand...
...in physical chemistry and chemical metallurgy from London University's Imperial College of Science and Technology...
...He also admits that political fundraising on his behalf was sufficiently corrupt that he did not want to know the details of it...
...John Bury's famous The Idea of Progress, rightly described as a "flawed classic" by Professor Nisbet, had denied any conception of progress to the ancients...
...The exact composition of Li21Sis had not previously been known...
...The process took on a rationalist form in Spinoza, received its most brilliant and complete expression in Hegel, and was quickly vulgarized in Feuerbach (whom Professor Nisbet does not discuss) and Marx...
...New knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of lithiumcontaining materials has been revealed by fundamental studies conducted at the General Motors Research Laboratories...
...Nevertheless, it seems to me that in doing so he has failed to give adequate attention to the sheer peculiarity of the modern belief...
...Investigations, carried out by Dr...
...Agnew apparently views this as a striking assertion of integrity...
...His emphasis upon the importance, and the intellectual vitality, of the Middle Ages is thereby logical and salutary...
...in physical chemistry...
...The establishment of the region of stability of boron nitride makes it possible to recommend appropriate charging limits," according to Dr...
...The real doctrine of progress thrives on such a feeling of sheer power and may be best understood primarily as an expression of European self-glorification...
...In the nineteenth century, men may perhaps have had a sense that progress was a well-adjusted escalator taking mankind gently upwards, but it now feels more like a crazy Big Dipper utterly out of control, inducing giddiness and fright, and taking us God knows where...
...When men start responding to a fear of decadence, they are often tempted to try mobilizing willpower, and the results have been in no way preferable to the excesses of self-appointed stewards of progress...
...9 But those thinkers who really went to work on the idea of progress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were bent on something far more radical than merely explaining the ways of God to man...
...On the other hand, there have always been skeptical voices...
...For in the course of a century or more, in a process traced by E.L...
...Professor Nisbet is right to say that progress is not just one more Western ideal among others...
...Even the most superficial acquaintance with the nineteenth century will reveal a John Stuart Mill worried about the way democracy was going, a Tocqueville pretty ambivalent about equality, and, among many others, poor mad Nietzsche haunted by the polluting spread of mass mediocrity...
...It issues in a form of piety--perhaps merely caution-which can be found no less in a Bertrand Russell or a band of environmentalists than among theologians and believers...
...The fact that progress is a Christian heresy appears in many of the features of its ancestry as discussed by Professor Nisbet (St...
...Certainly, this attitude was wrong but it was, and still is, a way of life in politics.'.' What are these "details...
...I was aware of such awards . . . . I further assert that my acceptance of contributions was part of a long-established pattern of political fund-raising in the state...
...Sharma began by exploring the thermodynamics of the lithium-silicon system...
...Agnew provides us with a few: It would be d i s h o n e s t for me to sa x t h a t I was completely naive about t h e political r e a l i t i e s of f u n d - r a i s i n g . Like most politicians, I knew we had to have the campaign money, and i knew that it came mainly from people who made money out of being politically "in...
...Ram Sharma and his colleagues, aim at developing a basic comprehensive understanding of selected "exotic" systems...
...Agnew admits that he took m6ney from political contractors, but claims he did not deliver government contracts in exchange for it...
...Contemplating the sheer vitality of the cultural high points of earlier ages--the unmatched artistry of the Elizabethan poets, the dazzling inventiveness of the Florentines, the civilized depth of the French and the intellectual intensity of the Germans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--who would not think of the twentieth century as somewhat tuppence-colored...
...Hammerman, a financial and political power in the s t a t e and Agnew's friend, Agnew admits that "it is true that during the eight years or so I knew him, Hammerman gave me personal girls amounting to perhaps nine or ten thousand dollars . . . . . I didn't think it wrong to take a gift from a wealthy friend, who apparently wanted nothing in return except, close proximity to me...
...He insisted on making most of them in cash and handing them to me personally . . . . The money Green gave me was used for political campaigns . . . . [S]ome, I freely admit, went for entertaining and wooing influential civic leaders...
...Progress as steady improvement is, then, the basic, fall-back idea of progress, and Professor Nisbet uses it to revise the common opinion that the ancient world did not understand progress...
...This is an important book on a dauntingly difficult subject...
...Putting aside for the moment the prosecutors' charges against Agnew, his own admissions portray him as a man morally unfit for high office--if no more so than many others who held it...
...Agnew admits that some close collaborators of his were much involved with this way of life...
...Their work is directly related to the search for an advanced molten salt battery cell...
Vol. 13 • August 1980 • No. 8
