36
The Varieties of Progress
This absolutist alternative to pluralism, “Kropotkin’s view” as one might call it with only
mild anachronism, may seem like elitism, and indeed one charge against the notion of moral
progress in favor of pluralism is that the latter is somehow more tolerant or less elitist. One
could, I suppose, just bite the bullet and say that some sort of elitism happens to be true: Some
cultures are more morally advanced than others. However, I think that the charge of elitism is
mitigated by noting an ambiguity in such words as “progress” and “advanced.” Suppose
someone were to say that the United States has shown great progress in the advancement of
mathematical knowledge thanks to research in American universities, NASA, and so forth.
Suppose someone else disagreed, saying that the rate of mathematical illiteracy has risen over the
last thirty years in the U.S. -- not progress at all but its opposite. Clearly, these two people would
be talking past each other. There is one sense in which the United States has made great
mathematical progress and another in which it has declined in its mathematical knowledge.
When Kropotkin speaks of some cultures as being more morally advanced than others, he
could mean either of these or both. So even if one culture is more morally advanced than another
by reason of containing some philosophers or theologians or poets who have more advanced
conceptions of justice or benevolence than does some other culture, this does not mean that an
individual selected at random from the former culture will be more morally sophisticated than
one chosen at random from the latter. It could still be the other way around. Any claim of one
culture’s being superior to the other would have to be qualified by this consideration.
One should also consider the fact that progress need not imply only one dimension.
Historically, different cultures progressed in different areas of mathematics. As a result, the
interaction between cultures meant that they were often teaching each other. On this second
account of moral diversity, one would expect something similar to be the case: different cultures