The Myth of Social Progress Revisited

Abstract

While countless organisations today claim to be promoting ‘social progress’ or ‘social justice’, very few actually define what that means or refer to any objective, universal standard that can be used to measure it. While there does seem to be an international legal consensus on measures of ‘progress’, there is little agreement among social scientists as to whether cultures (or societies) really do have the potential to trans form their social and political systems given that the potential for social justice may be dependent on(or constrained by) the natural environment and the human technologies that organise economic production in those environments, and may be independent of social justice movements or moral appeals. This double article is in two parts.

The first part presents the historic and religious origins of the idea of objective measures of human progress and notes how ancient religious assumptions about it are accepted on faith but largely untested. It offers measures and definitions of social justice and social progress as well as comparisons with the universal standard offered by the international community that can serve as a basis for agreement on measuring it and testing how and whether it occurs. The second part of the piece seeks to test the idea of social progress empirically. It summarises some previous work on determinants of political systems and social change that has been unable to document any cases at all of real internally driven ‘social progress’ that goes beyond either adaptation to environment or diffusion or hegemonic change. This has been called ‘progress’ but without any scientific justification for referring to it in this way.

The piece also presents a twenty to thirty year retrospective case study of social innovations through university education that demonstrates the difficulty if not impossibility (or paradox) of actual social transformation and explains why it may be a myth.