It is not impossible to formulate a definition of progress which does not assume the perfectibility of mankind, which does not regard progress as a necessity, and which does not assume to say with finality what has happened or is likely to happen to humanity as a whole.[346]
Progress may be considered as the addition to the sum of accumulated experience, tradition, and technical devices organized for social efficiency. This is at once a definition of progress and of civilization, in which civilization is the sum of social efficiencies and progress consists of the units (additions) of which it is composed. Defined in these terms, progress turns out to be a relative, local, temporal, and secular phenomenon. It is possible, theoretically at least, to compare one community with another with respect to their relative efficiency and their relative progress in efficiency, just as we can compare one institution with another in respect to its efficiency and progress. It is even possible to measure the progress of humanity in so far as humanity can be said to be organized for social action.
This is in fact the point of view which sociologists have adopted as soon as progress ceased to be, for sociology, a matter of definition and became a matter of observation and research. Score cards for neighborhoods and for rural communities have already been devised.[347]
2. Indices of Progress
A few years ago, Walter F. Willcox, in an article "A Statistician's Idea of Progress," sought to define certain indices of social progress which would make it possible to measure progress statistically. "If progress be merely a subjective term," he admitted, "statistics can throw no light upon it because all such ends as happiness, or self-realization, or social service are incapable of statistical measurement." Statistics works with indices, characteristics which are accessible to measurement but are "correlated with some deeper immeasurable characteristic." Mr. Willcox took as his indices of progress:
1. Increase in population.
2. Length of life.
3. Uniformity in population.
4. Racial homogeneity.
5. Literacy.
6. Decrease of the divorce rate.
Certainly these indices, like uniformity, are mere temporary measures of progress, since diversity in the population is not per se an evil. It becomes so only when the diversities in the community are so great as to endanger its solidarity. Applying his indices to the United States, Mr. Willcox sums up the result as follows:
The net result is to indicate for the United States a rapid increase of population and probable increase in length of life, and increase in racial uniformity and perhaps in uniformity of other sorts connected with immigration, and at the same time a decrease in uniformity in the stability and social serviceability of family life. Some of these indications look towards progress, others look towards retrogression. As they cannot be reduced to any common denominator, the statistical method is unable to answer the question with which we started.[348]
The securing of indices which will measure satisfactorily even such social values as are generally accepted is difficult. The problem of giving each index in the series a value or weight in proportion to the value of all the others is still more difficult. This statement, at any rate, illustrates the procedure and the method.
The whole subject of numerical indices for the measurement of civilization and progress has recently been discussed in a little volume by Alfredo Niceforo,[349] professor in the School of Criminal Law at Rome. He proposes as indices of progress: