The Necessity and Impossibility of Progress: A View from Complexity

• In Event: Political Theory without the Bannister of Progress

Abstract

How can we account for the way collective moral conditions at once improve and fail to? For instance, the foul institution of chattel slavery was abolished across a global economy over a few decades in the 19th century—and yet human enslavement remains as prevalent as ever. Per Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index, roughly 50 million people lived in “modern slavery” in 2021. Is this a matter of definitions or a failure to progress? Are the stakes Nietzschean eternal recurrence or a crick in that moral arc we are assured—from abolitionist minister Theodore Parker through Martin Luther King, Jr.—bends toward justice? Such binarism, I argue, misses the context for progress’s simultaneous necessity and impossibility. In short, intuitive ways of thinking about progress habitually discount the complexifying nature of social growth. A more complex, larger society may at once succeed on measures of moral improvement produced by the smaller, less complex society it previously was and fail to invent measures that respond well to how its own development has amplified past ills.

Taking a broadly held moral posit (“slavery is bad”), an eternal recurrence perspective highlights only the empirical continuity of that which is bad, while a moral arc perspective overemphasizes concrete shifts toward the good. Neither accounts well for upscaling social complexity across a broad field of interimbricated political economic actors over time. Such accounting demands phronesis, the practical wisdom of moral invention. Drawing on the visions of progress animating John Dewey’s School & Society and self-amplifying complexity offered by Sylvia Wynter’s “New Science of the Word,” I suggest a fractal understanding of what might be hoped for from political theory and change alike. At the nexus of Wynter’s autopoetics and Dewey’s social evolution is a way of accounting for how progress does and does not occur and, in such accounting, a strategy for reinventing progress itself.

Author

• Ira Allen, Northern Arizona University