Yin and Yang of Progress

Today we see progress all around us. But this was not always the case. Until the 17th century, almost nobody would have understood the question: Does progress exist? They knew things changed. Plants and animals grew, matured, and died. However, there was no innovation. Their lives were much the same as their parents' and grandparents'. Cycles dominated everyday experience—the seasons of the year, the phases of the moon, the rise and fall of the sun—and this experience shaped how people viewed the world.

One example of this type of thinking is the Chinese concept of yin and yang. The ancient Chinese saw the world in terms of opposites. They believed that opposites such as light and dark, fire and water, male and female, were linked in an endless cyclical interchange. The yin-yang symbol expresses the concept. Its circular shape suggests motion and continuous cycles. The "s" shaped division produces two sides that appear to flow into each other with no absolute separation. The black and white coloring represents the dueling forces.  Each half of the symbol has a small bead of the opposite color.  The dot represents the seed from which the opposing color grows.

From its creation, people have explained the philosophy of yin and yang using the cycle of the day. Before the day starts, it is dark. The only light comes from the moon and stars. Then the sun begins to rise. At first, the light is feeble and can only penetrate a little of the darkness. However, as the sun crests over the horizon, light flows into the valley and quickly chases away the shadows. By midday, the only shade to be found is under trees and rocks. As the afternoon becomes evening, the shadows grow. Eventually, the sun sets in the west, and darkness returns. The philosophy of yin and yang matched what people saw happening around them. Almost everyone in ancient China worked on the land, and cycles dominated their lives. The flow of the seasons determined what people did and when. They could see the moon waxing and waning and used the twelve annual lunar cycles to understand where they were in the year. Therefore, it was natural for the Chinese to build a philosophy based on their everyday experience.

China was not unique. Cycles dominated the daily life of many ancient cultures around the world. For the Egyptians, the river Nile's annual rise, flood, and fall were critical to their agriculture. Reflecting this, they divided their year into three parts: inundation, growth, and harvest. In India, the Hindu tradition went further and described the universe in terms of cycles within cycles. For a Hindu, the life and rebirth of Brahma, the creator god, defines the rhythm of the universe. A day in Brahma's life is a Kalpa and lasts 4,320 million years. There are 360 equal days and nights in a Brahman year, and he lives for 100 such years. Within a Kalpa, there are fourteen manvantaras cycles.  In turn, each manvantara contains seventy-one eons or mahayugas, and within each eon, there are four yugas. Each yuga is a different age in the world. Ultimately, at the end of the last yuga, the world is destroyed before being recreated in the next Kalpa cycle.

The ancient Greeks had a mixture of ideas about cycles and progress. The poet Hesiod (circa 750 to 650 BC) created a mythology of social decline. In his poem, Works and Days, he described a "Golden Age" when men lived like gods. It was a time of abundance and peace. People lived long, healthy lives without having to toil for their food. They were free to feast and enjoy the company of their friends as much as they wanted. However, the Golden Age was followed by the Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages. Each succeeding age was worse than its predecessor, except for the Heroic Age. Hesiod believed that his society was declining, and his belief resonates across history. We have a disproportionate fear of loss. This fear makes us overly sensitive to signs of deterioration. Each generation sees faults in the next and believes the younger generation is worse than its own. All of which gives us a nostalgic view of the past.

Greek history proved Hesiod's view was too pessimistic. Rather than declining, Athens flourished. A little over two hundred years after his death, it had grown to be the preeminent Greek city-state. Historians have called this the Athenian "Golden Age" (449 to 431 B.C.).  However, Athens's glory soon turned to ruin. Sparta defeated it in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The philosopher Plato (circa 428 BC to 348 BC) experienced Athens's fall. He was born at the end of the Golden Age and lived to see the effects of Athens’s defeat. Given what was going on around him, it is not surprising that Plato was interested in social development and questions like who should rule.

In his book The Laws, Plato proposed a more optimistic view than Hesiod. He saw human development as a long and fluctuating process involving thousands of cities. Some cities would improve, others might regress, and eventually, one would rise to a Golden Age. The process started with the most basic social unit of all, the kinship unit. At first, the group was under the patriarchal rule of its oldest members. Over time the unit grows into a settlement, and the patriarchs develop norms and regulations and teach them to the next generation. The next stage occurs when kinship groups merge. At this stage, the heads of the former units come together to form an assembly or legislator. Plato's description of the process ends with the development of city-states like Athens. For him, the whole process was like the growth of a primal seed into its mature form. He did not speculate about what might come after the mature form: the city-state. However, if you read some of his other books, you can see he wanted to learn from the past. This interest only made sense if he believed that the lessons of history could help build a better future. However, Plato also believed in cycles. They were a core part of his cosmology and theory of time. This belief inevitably led him to the conclusion that human development had to end in decline and fall. What Plato did not say was how much time was left. 

There were two significant exceptions to all of these ideas about cycles and progress, and they came from the religious world. From their formation, the Christian and Muslim faiths taught that the path to spiritual salvation was linear and ended with Judgment Day. You had one life in this world. The faithful's goal was salvation in the next world. This separation between the spiritual and the temporal worlds meant there was no inevitable conflict for the first Christians and Muslims between cycles in this world and believing in a linear path to spiritual salvation. However, the point was irrelevant for early Christians. They thought Jesus's return and judgment day was imminent. This belief left no room for a long future with or without cycles. However, as centuries and then millennia passed, Western Christian thinkers tried to reconcile the expanding period of history with their beliefs. By the 16th century, they were shifting towards the idea that the spiritual path could include growing human happiness in this world. They recognized that there could be bumps on the way. History told them about the effects of wars, diseases, and famines. However, through the ups and downs, they argued that there could be an overall drift towards greater happiness. Life could get better.

The idea of substantial concrete progress finally emerged in the 18th century. Johannes Gutenberg's invention of mass printing was changing how people saw the world. Gutenberg perfected his invention around 1450 AD. The technology rapidly spread across Europe. By the end of the century, about 270 cities had at least one printing press. People wanted to buy books. There was money to be made, and publishers rushed to meet the demand. Almost every year, people were buying more books, and they were cheaper. This massive increase in printing and reading spread knowledge. Slowly people in Europe became aware that they knew more than the ancient Greeks or Romans. They could compare their books with translated Greek and Roman works. It was clear that the new books contained knowledge not mentioned in the ancient texts. By the 18th century, people could also see that the rate of discoveries was increasing. There were so many discoveries each year that it was challenging to keep up to date. To help, publishers created new journals that focused on the latest learning.

People started to speculate that something was different. What they saw was more than the natural process of growth. In the past, growth had always been predictable: an acorn grew into an oak tree. Now what was happening did not follow the same pattern. Nobody knew what the next discovery would be or the effect it would have. But, they were confident there would be more. People realized that they could use their increasing knowledge to make a better future. The modern concept of progress was emerging, and towards the end of the century, it was part of the enlightenment thinking that inspired American Independence and the French Revolution. Since then, progress has changed from an idea and hope into something more concrete. In only one lifetime, you could have seen the first powered flight of an airplane made by the Wright brothers, the first jet planes, the start of mass public air transport, the first jumbo jets, the first space flights, and the moon landings.  History has seen nothing like it, and powered flight is just one of many examples. Despite this, there is still the nagging fear that we are on the edge of a precipice.

In 1972, the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, Zhou Enlai, was asked about the French Revolution's impact. He famously replied, "Too early to say." This quotation is probably the result of a misunderstanding. At the time, there had been student protests and civil unrest in France.  So when the reporter asked his question, Zhou probably thought he was being asked about the recent turmoil in France, not the 1789 Revolution.  However, the misquotation spread because it resonated with the western press. They knew China's history went back further than any other country. To the reporters, it appeared that Zhou was making a witty comment, pointing out how recent the French Revolution was. When you have a continuous history stretching back 3,500 years, then 200 or so years is a small fraction. After all, China has had many dynasties that lasted more than 200 years. But, they all fell in the end. Zhou's quotation touched a nerve. The philosophy of yin and yang could be correct, and we are in a cycle, which will turn.

What do you think? Will progress continue?