On this day in 1512, the Sistine Chapel was opened to the public. It seems a cheap shot to compare that to this. But it’s not. The comparison reminds us that conceptions of progress have changed completely in the modern era.
As Thomas Kuhn famously pointed out, for centuries painting was regarded as the progressive discipline, as representations of the human form became more accurate and lifelike. Meanwhile, until the 17th century, what we now know as science was largely stagnant, consisting of alchemic mumbo-jumbo and half-remembered Aristotelian nonsense.
Today, things are reversed. Science is progressive. Art, many believe, is not.
There’s a second way in which conceptions of progress have changed. The classical economists, among them Ricardo and Mill, believed economic growth would soon end. The race between technical progress and diminishing returns, they thought, would be won by the latter. However, Mill was unperturbed by this. He wrote:
A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.Again, things are reversed today. We take economic progress for granted. But few of us are confident that there is, or will continue to be, moral and social progress.
So, why are our ideas of progress so different from our ancestors?
It’s certainly not because we are more intelligent than they (the Flynn effect notwithstanding.) It’s because we now have institutions in place to generate scientific progress and economic growth: a market economy, an open society and peer review. These are of course interlinked.
Delicate as these institutions are, they have no obvious counterpart in moral, social, or artistic spheres. Which raises the questions: could there be such institutions? What would they look like?
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