Any change or adaptation to an existing environment that makes it easier for a person, group, institution, or other "organized form of life" to live may be said to represent progress. Whether the invention is a new plow or a new six-inch gun we accept it as an evidence of progress if it does the work for which it is intended more efficiently than any previous device. In no region of human life have we made greater progress than in the manufacture of weapons of destruction.
Not everyone would be willing to admit that progress in weapons of warfare represents "real" progress. That is because some people do not admit the necessity of war. Once admit that necessity, then every improvement is an evidence of progress, at least in that particular field. It is more easy to recognize progress in those matters where there is no conflict in regard to the social values. The following excerpt from Charles Zueblin's preface to his book on American progress is a concrete indication of what students of society usually recognize as progress.
Already this century has witnessed the first municipalized street railways and telephones in American cities; a national epidemic of street paving and cleaning; the quadrupling of electric lighting service and the national appropriation of display lighting; a successful crusade against dirt of all kinds—smoke, flies, germs,—and the diffusion of constructive provisions for health like baths, laundries, comfort stations, milk stations, school nurses and open air schools; fire prevention; the humanizing of the police and the advent of the policewomen; the transforming of some municipal courts into institutions for the prevention of crime and the cure of offenders; the elaboration of the school curriculum to give every child a complete education from the kindergarten to the vocational course in school or university or shop; municipal reference libraries; the completion of park systems in most large cities and the acceptance of the principle that the smallest city without a park and playground is not quite civilized; the modern playground movement giving organized and directed play to young and old; the social center; the democratic art museum; municipal theaters; the commission form of government; the city manager; home rule for cities; direct legislation—a greater advance than the whole nineteenth century compassed.[326]
2. The Problem of Progress
Sociology inherited its conception of progress from the philosophy of history. That problem seems to have had its origin in the paradox that progress at retail does not insure progress at wholesale. The progress of the community as individuals or in specific directions may, for example, bring about conditions which mean the eventual destruction of the community as a whole. This is what we mean by saying that civilizations are born, grow, and decay. We may see the phenomenon in its simplest form in the plant community, where the very growth of the community creates a soil in which the community is no longer able to exist. But the decay and death of one community creates a soil in which another community will live and grow. This gives us the interesting phenomenon of what the ecologists call "succession." So individuals build their homes, communities are formed, and eventually there comes into existence a great city. But the very existence of a great city creates problems of health, of family life, and social control which did not exist when men lived in the open, or in villages. Just as the human body generates the poisons that eventually destroy it, so the communal life, in the very process of growth and as a result of its efforts to meet the changes that its growth involves, creates diseases and vices which tend to destroy the community. This raises the problem in another form. Communities may and do grow old and die, but new communities profiting by the experience of their predecessors are enabled to create social organizations, more adequate and better able to resist social diseases and corrupting vices. But in order to do this, succeeding communities have had to accumulate more experience, exercise more forethought, employ more special knowledge and a greater division of labor. In the meantime, life is becoming constantly more complex. In place of the simple spontaneous modes of behavior which enable the lower animals to live without education and without anxiety, men are compelled to supplement original nature with special training and with more and more elaborate machinery, until life, losing its spontaneity, seems in danger of losing all its joy.
Knowledge accumulates apace and its applications threaten the very existence of civilized man. The production of the flying machine represented a considerable advance in mechanical knowledge; but I am unaware of any respect in which human welfare has been increased by its existence; whereas it has not only intensified enormously the horrors of war, and, by furnishing criminal and other undesirable characters with a convenient means of rapid and secret movement, markedly diminished social security, but it threatens, by its inevitable advance in construction, to make any future conflict virtually equivalent to the extermination of civilized man. And the maleficent change in the conditions of human life which the flying machine has produced from the air, the submarine parallels from the depths of the sea; indeed, the perception of this truth has led to the very doubtfully practicable suggestion that the building of submarines be made illegal....
Moreover if life itself is more secure, there is at the present moment a distinct tendency towards a diminution of personal liberty. The increasing control by the state over the conduct and activities of the individual; the management of his children, the details of his diet and the conduct of his ordinary affairs; tend more and more to limit his personal freedom. But the restriction of his liberty amounts to a reduction of his available life just as complete loss of liberty differs little from complete loss of life.[327]
It is this condition which, in spite of progress in details, has raised in men's minds a question whether there is progress in general, and if there is, whether the mass of mankind is better or worse because of it.