The stages of growth

In the nineteenth century England and the Western World experienced industrial development, sustained economic growth, unprecedented material progress. Progress became the new religion: in Its name, as formerly in that of the True Faith, the West justified colonial conquest and the new imperialism.

That same faith foretold the future, and interpreted the past. The future held out limitless improvement; the past was the history of progress, specifically of technical progress, of that particular progress that was the pride and miracle of the West. The triumph of that ideology has been complete: to this day we have no mental categories to describe the vast sweep of human history other than technological ones, from the “Stone Age” on.

The faith in progress would be shaken only in recent decades. Public opinion has become increasingly aware of the limits to growth, especially from the absorptive capacity of the environment. In the 1960s, too, a small number of maverick scholars – working in different disciplines, on different problems, and not, apparently, in touch with each other – produced works that shared a heterodox tendency to redeem the “primitive,” and to interpret past innovations in terms of growing human effort rather than effort-saving technical progress. Together, their analyses suggested an alternative interpretation of human history as a long decadence, a progressive decline in living standards, from the late Stone Age on, due essentially to the relentless growth of the human population. Eden was not a dream, it was a distant memory.