Cambridge Common

In that light, since I believe Damini will post on the fallacy of progress, I thought that, to start off the discussion, I could give a few thoughts on the pitfalls of dissing progress. My posts on Wednesday and Friday will follow up on this theme, and try to incorporate criticisms. In any case, please feel free to bash me all you want, even if you shouldn't bash development. :)

1) Progress is hegemony, defying it is a weapon of the underdog.

Critiques of development and progress have always had an uncomfortable resemblance for me. People always frame them as a bottom-up phenomenon, an organic and authentic voice from those who suffer under the yoke of cultural imperialism. But it is widely ignored that one of the most powerful and longlasting voices against progress came from a network of "good old boys," as privileged and status quo as we can conceive of in the American collective imaginations. These writers, the "Agrarians" were a group of white, male, upper-middle class, segregationist intellectuals. They became most prominent through their opposition to FDR's New Deal, and they saw progress as a Northern initiative to impinge upon Southern culture.

Consider the following statement from John Crowe Ransom, Southern poet from the 1920's. It is disturbing to realize how eerily it echoes critiques of progress:

"I have in mind here the core of unadulterated Europeanism, with its self-sufficient, backward-looking, intensely provincial communities. The human life of English provinces long ago came to terms with nature, fixed its roots somewhere in the spaces between the rocks and in the shade of trees, founded its comfortable institutions, secured its modern prosperity ...
For it is the character of a seasoned provincial life that it is realistic, or successfully adapted to its natural environment, and that as a consequence it is stable, or hereditable. But it is the character of our urbanized, anti-provincial,a and mobile American life that it is in a condition of eternal flux. Affections, and long memories, attach to the ancient bowers of life in the provinces; but they will not attach to what is always changing. Americans, however, are peculiar in being somewhat averse to these affections for natural objects, and to these memories."

To the contemporary reader, it is clear that Crowe is dead wrong. How in the world could he construe twentieth century England as "stable", "provincial", or "communal"? But the main issue is not whether he was right, but rather that he could make such an argument at all.

We can tell immediately that Crowe is only trying to defend the preservation of a system in which he stands to benefit. We know his statement stinks of shoddy rhetoric and false historical notions. We discern, moreover, that he only uses "progress" as a catch-all term, a punching bag, to symbolize a threat to the disturbing, inhumane society that he is a privileged part of. Who would dare consider Rowe an "advocate of indigenous culture" without fearing serious public denunciation? As it should be clear from the above quote, I am trying to argue that we should not, as Crowe does, conflate progress with CHANGE. Much more often than note, arguments for "stasis" and "preservation" will come from those in a society who stand to lose the most with such change. Whether they are women in indigenous cultures, ethnic minorities in the developing world, or even the party outside of power in a Third World nation, all marginal groups have their own underdog. Those people, and the way their condition will be affected, are the ones who merit our attention when we consider the ethics of "culturally disruptive" progress. These real, tangible, live individuals should be the focus of our discussion, and not some vacuous sense of "community." We cannot presume that bashing progress or development is virtuous by definition: that virtue has to be proven with evidence. The first pitfall, then, of dissing progress is letting romanticism have the best of our ethical sense.