Progress is a precursor to, perhaps even a prerequisite for, optimism. Not the psychological optimism of cheery moods, but the scientific optimism that is the main subject of this book. Psychological optimism, as I have suggested, is more like resignation—making the best of what you have, finding silver linings. Scientific optimism is forward-looking, even obsessed with a future of possibilities.
Progress, too, is future-oriented. While that may sound trivial to modern ears—of course, progress requires a future—it has not always been so. Even today, progress is a controversial subject. We’re all quite happy to have anesthesia. Less happy for sure about The Bomb. Both are the result of scientific progress.
How do we parse this and many other examples of technologies that are used for good or ill, or many times both? Scientific progress is littered with genies we might rather not have let out of the bottle. Nonetheless, I think that most people would agree that the benefits are undeniable and, by most measures, outweigh the harms. Arguments over progress fill books and journals and podcasts and many other media, most of which rely themselves on some technological progress. Progress is a fraught subject.
Let us try avoiding this complicated morass by separating the idea of progress from the products of progress. This is not just a semantic trick, but a way to see aspects of progress that have shaped human society and attitudes, no matter how you feel about the particular results of that progress. It’s not that I think discussions about the values of progress are not important, but for our purposes here, it is not any particular progress that matters. It is the idea of progress and having that idea as a regular part of our mental lives—as a shared outlook, as an expectation, as commonplace—that have so radically changed us and our social constitution in the last few centuries.
This idea of progress is something that gets much less attention than the products and values of progress, perhaps because it has become so habitual in our thinking that we are all sure we know what it means. Not so. There are many layers of meaning and many aspects to the concept that are worth examining, especially in light of our attempts to redefine optimism, which depends in many ways, and in many not-so-obvious ways, on the idea of progress. So, let’s complicate the idea of progress. That will require us to let go of some familiar associations attached to the word and consider some perhaps unexpected ones.
First, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that progress as an idea is something innate to human beings, that it has been around since people were painting pictures on cave walls. There is no strong evidence that Paleolithic cave artists were expressing an explicit optimism for the future in the way we think of that sentiment today. Most scholars interpret early cave art as tied to immediate concerns—rituals, communication, or sympathetic magic—rather than a conscious projection of hope into an abstract future. There is a lack of explicit progress iconography—of a past or present, a before and after, or a change over time. Indeed, the paintings may just as easily have been a depiction of a recently successful hunt, with no thought of the future.
Several things are required for an idea such as progress to gain a footing, and it was not until the Scientific Revolution that all of those were met. This is not to say that some notion of change did not exist before the late sixteenth century, but with very few exceptions, it seems that change was either not highly regarded or simply occurred so slowly as to go largely unnoticed.
It may seem remarkable, but the Athenian Greeks, so admired for providing the foundations of philosophy and democratic ideals of governance and even an early devotion to something we could sort of call science, had no single word for progress. There were words that could loosely be translated as progress but they were more like “change” or “increase” or some vague property that we might now associate with progress. To the extent that progress was considered, it was typically thought to be undesirable. Progress and the change associated with it were a source of dissolution and decay, a further loss of the innocence of the Golden Age of the ancestors. They were the opposite of stability and dependability. Consider the mythic fates of Icarus, Prometheus, Hercules—all were punished rather severely for trying to expand knowledge, to make progress.
It’s not that there was no progress, but that within a single generation, so little changed as to be imperceptible.
The Platonic ideal of transcendent forms that exist in eternity is another block to progress, because, strictly speaking, there is no open future and no such thing as invention. As E.R. Dodds put it in his famous essay, “The Ancient Concept of Progress,” “What the ancients call invention is but recollection of a reality which is already there—nothing entirely new can ever come into being.” There is nothing new under the sun, only perhaps approaches to more perfect versions that already exist in some transcendent place.
Yes, the Greeks made remarkable advances in mathematics, but mostly in geometry, which is about solid, stable objects and uses a strict hierarchy of axioms, rules, and procedures—very Platonic. I doubt the Greeks could have imagined calculus, the mathematics of change. Indeed, no one would until nearly two thousand years after Euclid. What progress was made in some technological areas—navigation, shipbuilding—was seen as the pinnacle of achievement. There was little motivation to go further.
There were exceptions, but they were outliers. Archimedes wrote, “I apprehend that some either of my contemporaries or of my successors will be enabled to discover other theorems in addition, which have not as yet occurred to me.” In the second century BCE, the astronomer Hipparchus compiled a list of the fixed stars so that future astronomers might compare his observations to their own and discover what might have changed.
But these ideas, it seems, did not percolate into the society of philosophers, politicians, and the average man, and were not taken up by the Roman civilization that supplanted the Athenian and Alexandrian Greeks. Roman science consisted mainly of improving technologies in civil engineering (water and road systems) and warfare, compiling medical knowledge, and developing tools for specialized uses. There was little of discovery and interest beyond this sort of technology development.
Progress fared only slightly better in the long period from the fall of Rome (c. 475 CE) to the Renaissance (in the fourteenth century)—one thousand years during which change was so slow that for nearly forty generations, most people saw little or no change in technology during their lifetimes (except perhaps in warfare). You would likely do what your parents did and your children would do as you did. Options were limited. It’s not that there was no progress, but that within a single generation, so little changed as to be imperceptible.
Think of the stirrup, sometimes credited as being one of the three most important inventions in the course of history. (The plow and gunpowder are the other two, or the printing press, depending on your perspective.) The stirrup probably originated in the Far East in the first century CE and was introduced in Europe around the seventh century. It remained of critical importance from then until about one hundred years ago, when horsemanship quite suddenly was no longer a required skill. That’s thirteen hundred years of the same individual transportation technology. Julius Caesar and Thomas Jefferson both traveled around their lands by horse.
Robert Merton, the renowned sociologist of science, has made the case that in spite of the occasional bright star or beacon of discovery in the earlier periods (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon), they were not enough to support a scientific infrastructure, or the social requirements of a scientific community. To remain viable, science must be widespread and continuous, able to spread and connect with other ideas and other minds.
The Renaissance brings a spark of life to more worldly intellectual pursuits, and the very beginnings of science can be seen toward the end of that period and the start of what may be termed the early modern period (the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries). The Renaissance, as the name implies, was a rebirth of interest in classical (i.e., Greek and Roman) culture, and so was a look back as much as forward. Nonetheless, the Renaissance provided a kind of onramp to the Scientific Revolution and the much speedier pace of progress associated with it.
This faster pace was a key element that allowed progress to become an idea, a viewpoint, a mental and social state. For that to happen, progress must be experienced within a generation, within a single lifetime. That means it must be rapid. I would go a step further and propose that for the idea of progress to become manifest, it must not only be rapid, but it must also accelerate. It is not enough for progress to be fast; the very rate of progress must increase. Then, and only then, will the idea, as much as its products, take hold of a society. It is a kind of cognitive bias that results from the way our sensory systems interact with the world that we are more aware of acceleration than of speed. Like flying in a plane, you don’t really notice the speed when it is constant, only when there is acceleration.
Time was thus malleable and very local.
Four critical prerequisites are necessary for the idea of progress to develop and become a driving force in society. Each of these arose separately over the course of time from Athenian Greece, but they came together in the Scientific Revolution and its immediate aftermath. They are what produced the idea of progress.
First is a transition from a circular to a linear view of time and history. Circular philosophies of recurrence, common in many cultures and religious systems, are not as susceptible to progress, since they conceive of the world as repeating history in an endless cycle. For the Greeks, the circle was the perfect shape because this reflected their worldview of recurrence. Most ancient calendars are in the form of a circle, based on recurring astronomical events and repeating seasons.
Even today, astrological calendars supposedly reflecting ancient views arrange the zodiacal months in a circle. The linear calendar we live and work with now is effectively infinite; you just keep adding days. (On the Calendar app provided with my Apple computer, I was able to scroll one hundred years into the future to 2125, and there seemed to be no end in sight.) This calendar takes for granted that time will proceed without end and therefore that unending progress is also possible. Although the short biblical history and prophecy of a coming apocalypse truncate the literal religious timescale, it was the Judeo-Christian adoption of a linear calendar that provided, if unintentionally, the ground for an open-ended view of continued progress. As J. B. Bury put it in his book The Idea of Progress, “You have not got the idea of progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely into the future.”
A considerable body of scholarship exists on the shift from circular to linear time and its effects on philosophy, society, and culture. Much of it is also wrapped up in the invention of mechanical clocks, in particular the mechanical clocks of medieval Europe. that progressed indefinitely—the second, the minute, and the hour. Today, we argue about the merits of daylight saving time, but until the advent of clocks, hours were simply split into equal portions of day and night. During the summer, daytime hours were longer—twelve of them needed to cover the day. Likewise, nighttime hours were shorter since there had to be twelve of them packed into the shorter night. In the winter, this was reversed. Time was thus malleable and very local.
Keeping time in constant units allowed advances in navigation and in communication and collaboration over distances—time units were now the same everywhere. Time could be parceled into measurable packets, but it was also continuous and unending. There was now a distinct past, present, and future. Calendars possessed an infinite timeline. Once a future existed, there could be progress.
__________________________________
Excerpted from It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty by Stuart Firestein. © 2026 by Stuart Firestein. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Leave a Reply