We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age. Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as that they are bettering it.
But it was not always so. Just a few centuries ago, Western thinkers were caught up in a wave of optimism for technology, humanity and the future, based on the new philosophy of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was many things, but in large part, it was a philosophy of progress.
At the end of the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet gave expression to this philosophy and its optimism in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. In it, he predicted unlimited progress, not only in science and technology, but in morality and society. He wrote of the equality of the races and the sexes, and of peace between nations.
His optimism was all the more remarkable given that he wrote this while hiding out from the French Revolution, which was hunting him down in order to execute him as an aristocrat. Unfortunately, he could not hide forever: he was captured, and soon died in prison. Evidently, the perfection of mankind was slow in coming.
Material progress, however, was rocketing ahead. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, and then the Civil War in America, the path was clear for technological innovation and economic growth: the railroad, the telephone, the light bulb, the internal combustion engine.
By the end of the 19th century, it was obvious that the world had entered a new age, and progress was its watchword. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (best known for his work on evolution with Darwin) titled his book about the 1800s The Wonderful Century. In it, he attributed twenty-four “great inventions and discoveries” to the 19th century, as compared with only fifteen in all of human history preceding it. The boundless optimism of the early Enlightenment seemed to have been justified.
And if the material progress prophesied by Francis Bacon could be realized, perhaps the moral progress prophesied by Condorcet would come true as well. By the end of the 19th century, slavery had been ended in the West, and some hoped that the growth of industry and the expansion of trade would lead to and end to war and a new era of world peace.
They were wrong.
The 20th century violently shattered those naive illusions. The world wars were devastating proof that material progress does not inevitably lead to moral progress. Technology had not put an end to war—in fact, it had made war all the more terrible and deadly. In 1945, the nuclear bomb put a horrible exclamation point on this lesson: the most destructive weapon ever devised was the product of modern science, technology, and industry.
At the same time, other concerns were coming to the fore—including old ones, like poverty, and new ones, like the environment. By the mid-20th century, the philosophy of progress had been dealt a severe challenge. The optimism at its foundation had been shaken. In its place, we saw the rise of radical social movements based on a deep distrust of technology and industry. Today, progress and growth are called an “addiction”, a “fetish”, a “Ponzi scheme”, or a “fairy tale.” Some even advocate a new ideal of “degrowth”.
It’s no wonder, then, that the last fifty years have seen relative stagnation in technological and industrial progress. Nuclear power was stunted, the Apollo program was canceled, the Concorde was grounded.
But now, in the 21st century, some people are starting to call attention to the problem: Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison. There’s now a growing community that recognizes the threat of stagnation and the value of progress.
The 19th century philosophy of progress was naive. But the 20th century turn away from progress was no solution.
We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. One that teaches people not to take the modern world for granted. One that acknowledges the problems of progress, confronts them directly, and offers solutions. And one that holds up a positive vision of the future.
To establish that new philosophy is the mission of The Roots of Progress.
Today The Roots of Progress is transforming from a blog to a new nonprofit organization. Read the announcement.
Republic is the reference. I'm not going to take the hours it would take to give book-and-paragraph citations, because either you haven't read the the entire Republic, or else you've read it, but you want to argue that each of the many terrible things he wrote don't actually represent Plato's opinion or desire.
(You know it's a big book, right? 89,000 words in the Greek. If you read it in a collection or anthology, it wasn't the whole Republic.)
The task of arguing over what in /Republic/ Plato approves or disapproves of is arduous and, I think, unnecessary.
First, everybody agrees that the topic of Republic is "social justice", and Plato makes his position on that clear, in Republic and in his other works: Justice is when everybody accepts the job and the class they're born into, without any grumbling or backtalk, and Plato is king and tells everybody what to do. His conclusion, that justice is when everybody minds their own business (meaning they don't get involved in politics, which should be the business of philosophers), is clearly meant as a direct refutation of Pericles' summary of Athenian values in his famous funeral oration: "We do not say that a man who shows no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all."
When the topic of the book is social justice, and you get to the end and it says "Justice is when everyone does what I say and stays in their place", you should throw that book in the trash.
(This is a bit unfair to Plato, because the Greek word he used meant something more like "righteousness". "justice" is a lousy translation. But this doesn't matter to me, because I don't care what Plato meant as much as I care about how people use it; and the Western tradition is to say that Plato was talking about justice. And it's still a totalitarian conclusion, whether you call it "justice" or "righteousness".)
This view of justice (or righteousness) is consistent with his life and his writings. He seems to support slavery as natural and proper, though he never talks about it directly; see Vlastos 1941, Slavery in Plato's Thought. He literally /invented/ racism, in order to theorize that a stable, race-based state, in which the inferior races were completely conditioned and situated so as to be incapable of either having or acting on independent desires or thoughts, would have neither the unrest due to social mobility that democratic Athens had, nor the periodic slave revolts that Sparta had. He and his clan preferred Sparta to Athens; his uncle, a fellow student of Socrates, was the tyrant of Athens in 404 BC, appointed by Sparta; and murdered 1500 Athenian citizens, mostly for supporting democracy. Socrates was probably executed in 399 BC not for being a "gadfly", but because the Athenians believed that they'd lost the war with Sparta thanks to the collusion of Socrates' students with Sparta.
Plato had personal, up-close experience of the construction of a bloody totalitarian state, and far from ever expressing a word of disapproval of it, he mocked at least one of its victims in Republic, and continued to advocate totalitarian policies in his writings, such as /The Laws/. He was a wealthy aristocrat who wanted to destroy democracy and bring back the good old days when you couldn't be taken to court just for killing a slave, as evidenced by the scorn he heaps on working people and merchants in many of his dialogues, and also his jabs at Athens and democracy; and by the Euthyphro, a dialogue with a man who's a fool for taking his father to court for killing a slave.
One common defense of Plato is that his preferred State was the first state he described, the "true state", in which everyone gets just what they need to survive; he actually detested the second, "fevered state", in which people have luxuries (which, he says, can only ever be had by theft and war--property is theft!)
I find this implausible, or at best hypocritical, for several reasons.
The simplest reading of Republic, I think, is that the second state he described is one he liked to dream about, but knew wasn't plausible.
But my second reason for thinking this debate over Plato's intent is unimportant is that people don't usually read Republic for its brief description of the "true state". Either they just read the first 2 or 3 books and a few other extracts carefully chosen by professors to avoid all the nasty stuff and give the impression that Plato was legitimately trying to figure out what justice means like he claimed; or they read it to get off on the radical policies of the fevered state (which is the political equivalent of BDSM porn).
Some of the policies of that state include: breeding citizens like cattle into races that must be kept distinct, with philosophers telling everyone whom to have sex with, sometimes requiring brothers and sisters to have sex with each other (5.461e); allowing soldiers on campaign to rape any citizen they want to (5.468c); dictating jobs by race; abolishing all art, poetry, and music except government propaganda; banning independent philosophy; the death sentence for repeatedly questioning authority; forbidding doctors from wasting their time on people who are no longer useful to the State because they're old or permanently injured; forced abortions of all children conceived without the State's permission (including for all women over age 40 and all men over age 55); forbidding romantic love, marriage, or raising your own children; outlawing private property (5.464); allowing any citizen to violently assault any other citizen, in order to encourage citizens to stay physically fit (5.464e); and founding of the city by killing everyone over the age, IIRC, of 10. (He writes "exiling", but you would have to kill them to get them all to give up their children; see e.g. Cambodia).
The closest anybody ever came to implementing the ideas in /Republic/ (which was not a republic, and which Plato actually titled /Polis/, "The State") was Sparta (which it was obviously based on). The second-closest was Nazi Germany (also patterned partly on Sparta). /Brave New World/ is also similar, though much freer.