Analyse The Idea Of Progress In Mill

John Morrow's view that, "since Mill related individual freedom to progress, there is a sense in which he treated liberty as an instrumental value, " reflects my belief that, despite its status as a seminal text in the history of liberal political thought, the primary motivation for John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is not to advocate the ideal of liberty itself, but to encourage social progress. Mill's assertion that "the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, " leads me to the view that his proposal of individual liberty does not stem from a conception of freedom as being, in itself, an inherently positive and integral aspect of a functional human society, but rather from a pragmatic understanding that it represents "the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement. " In this way, Mill's position in On Liberty is essentially utilitarian, founded on the Whiggish assumption that greater progress will lead to greater happiness, and his own view that "individuality. is quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress. " Restraints upon the thought and expression of individual members of society must therefore be relaxed in order that views which challenge and contradict the wisdom of public opinion may be aired, for Mill argues that it is from these anomalies that genius and therefore progress is born.

Furthermore, Mill argues that progress is incremental, and occurs by a process of refinement, whereby a flawed predominant philosophy - or "part-truth " - is usurped by one which remedies its failings. However, the nature of this process means that often positive aspects of rejected ideas are lost as collateral damage in the transition. If we take Mill's conception of progress to be accurate, then On Liberty must be read and assessed, by its own terms, as a part-truth itself, responding to a specific cultural context.

Throughout On Liberty, Mill makes clear his belief that progress must be driven by the inspired ideas of exceptional individuals who are, in an intellectual and moral sense, outliers in relation to general public opinion, but whose unusual ideas point the way forward for the rest of mankind. This position is expressed most clearly when he states, "I emphatically insist on the importance of genius, " and "there are but a few persons whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be an improvement on established practice. but, without them, life would become a stagnant pool. " Echoing De Tocqueville's fears about the dangers of a tyrannous majority, Mill states that "no government by a democracy. ever did or could rise above mediocrity, " and cites Socrates and Jesus as examples of great individuals who were persecuted by their peers before their progressive teachings came to be accepted as having positively shaped Western society.

It is in this context that Mill frames his discussion on the necessity of individual liberty. "Unity of opinion is not desirable, " he argues, for "until mankind are much more capable than at present of recognising all sides of truth. free scope should be given to varieties of character. " We see here that Mill advocates individual freedom on the basis that pluralistic debate allows the greatest possibility for the ideas of exceptional individuals to be heard, and it reflects his fears that uniformity of opinion and cultural hegemony will lead to a silencing of those anomalous voices to which society must listen in order to progress. It is impossible to ignore the implication that liberty is seen merely as a pragmatic device by which to overcome human fallibility. Mill repeatedly states the limitations of the human mind, and asserts that "mankind is imperfect, " feeling that this means that the societies we create are also imperfect. Diversity of opinion, then, becomes the philosophical equivalent of trawler fishing, whereby the net is cast wide for all manner of ideas, because he is certain that only a few will prove to be of value, while the majority will be discarded as useless.

Furthermore, while Mill does assert that "human nature is not a machine to be built after a model," and condemns the way in which "conventions maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, " his dedication to liberty does not owe to a belief that it is positive a priori as the natural state of humans, but is in fact expressly limited to times in which he feels it is for the betterment of society in general. He demonstrates this belief when arguing that, "in some early societies these forces [individuality] might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them, " suggesting that freedom was only appropriate in certain contexts, namely advanced Western societies such as the one in which he lived. Add to this Mill's belief that the nuanced moral guidelines of the New Testament were not sufficient to control "barbarous peoples, " and so the absolutism of the Old Testament must be used to keep them under control, and it is clear that Mill is frequently in favour of governments and authorities taking measures to control public opinion when he does not consider it likely that dissident voices will conform to his notion of constructive. He is also closed to revolutionary ideas, rejecting total, immediate freedom for fear of creating an "angry mob, " and asserting that "order and stability. are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. "

Whilst it is true that most liberal philosophers acknowledge the need for some sort of social contract or subjugation of the individual will, the contempt with which Mill talks about the possibility of total freedom for all leads me to the conclusion that he would, in an ideal world, rather see large elements of society strictly controlled, but argues for liberalisation on the basis that he feels that it's benefits outweigh the benefits of enforced order at his particular moment in European history. At no time does Mill attribute any value to freedom itself - its value comes only through being literally synonymous with progress, a link he directly asserts with the quote, "it is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement " - and he introduces the conciliatory and pragmatic harm principle as a means of offsetting the cost of widespread freedom, for it provides a means by which the disorder that he fears will be a by-product of liberty can be controlled, whilst society may advance from the perceived benefits of freedom.

Though this assertion seems discordant with Mill's compelling advocacy of liberalisation, I feel that scrutiny of the context in which On Liberty was written reveals that Mill thought this to be a unique moment within history, which justifies his radical suggestions. Always working on the assumption that greater progress will bring about greater happiness, Mill was understandably concerned by his belief that his society was, in many crucial ways, regressing. Though he acknowledges that European culture in his age is advanced in some respects - "the majority of eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now known to be erroneous " - Mill was none-the-less sceptical about the state of the society in which he lived; mocking the complacency of a populous who "flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people that ever lived, " whilst pointing out the inadequacy of the legal system and the absurdity of customs. Expanding upon this idea, he favourably compares European culture to China, "a nation of much talent and, in some respects, even wisdom," which has "become stationary, " due to the hegemony of customs and homogony of ideas, but suggests that increasingly interventionist and judgemental social attitudes in Europe were endangering the liberty which engendered this relative advancement. "In our times," Mill declares, "from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. " This almost dystopian view of Victorian society is a theme which runs throughout the text, where Mill makes clear his belief that the "tyranny of custom," is posing limitations on the freedom of action and expression of the general public far beyond those which Mill would acknowledge to be necessary in order to maintain order. There are "two necessary conditions of human development. freedom, and a variety of situations," he writes, before adding, "the second of these two conditions is in this country every day diminishing, " and this quote categorically displays the gravity with which Mill views the situation. It is for this reason that he calls for immediate and dramatic liberal reforms, emphasising his sense of urgency with the warnings, "mankind will speedily become unable to conceive of diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it," and "it is only in the early stages that any stand can be successfully made against the encroachment. " It is clear, then, that Mill must be viewed as a utilitarian and a relativist, proposing a unique solution to a unique problem, rather than a true liberal, and that it is progress which is, above all, at the centre of Mill's philosophy. Scrutiny of all of his suggestions shows that they are constructed primarily to aid societal advancement.

This pragmatism is not altogether surprising given Mill's view of the process by which progress is brought about. In an enlightening passage, he describes advancement as being a process of inadequate philosophies - which he terms 'part-truths' - which dominate a temporal intellectual and cultural landscape being challenged and replaced by philosophies which resolve some of these inadequacies, but bring with them their own blind spots and faults. He illustrates this with the example of how, "in the eighteenth century, nearly all the instructed. were lost in admiration for what is called civilisation, and of the marvels of modern science, literature and philosophy." "The paradoxes of Rousseau exploded like bombshells in their midst, " he says, believing the French philosopher's ideas to have dominated the preceding age, but Mill does not consider all of the changes brought about by this intellectual revolution to have been for the better. "Not that the current opinions were on the whole farther from the truth," he explains, "on the contrary, they were nearer to it; they contained more of positive truth, and very much less of error. " The problem, though, as Mill perceives it, was that in their positivist zeal, these philosophers were guilty of "overrating the amount of unlikeness between the men of modern and those of ancient times," and so, "the superior worth of simplicity of life," and, "the enervating and demoralising effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, " were among the truths sacrificed at the expense of greater empirical understanding. Expanding on this idea, Mill goes on to explore the reasons for which New Testament ideas came to eclipse Old Testament teachings as the predominant theology of the west, and suggests that many of the reasons for the predominance of Christian morality owed to the doctrine's ability to address many of the problems with Old Testament didacticism. Whilst, once more, he asserts his belief that Christianity is an improvement on the ideas it replaced (like the growth of empiricism, he believes it has brought society, "closer to truth,"), he suggests that the fact that ideas tend to arise as a rejection of inadequate philosophical frameworks lead progressive ideals to be "negative rather than positive," and, "passive rather than active. "

These examples ably demonstrate Mill's conception of the way in which progress takes place and, if we consider On Liberty to be a work primarily motivated by a desire to bring about further progress, we must analyse the implications of this view for our understanding of the text. For if Mill believed that progress came about through philosophies primarily designed to address the inadequacies of existing frameworks, must we not regard the ideas he expresses in On Liberty in the same manner? Given his forthright criticisms of his own society, and the evidence that he does not see freedom as in itself a good thing, On Liberty must be read as a pragmatic device, whose ideas are intended primarily as a ladder with which to overcome the obstacles to progress which, in this case, are oppressive public opinion and highly formalised social customs, which restrict the potentially enlivening thought of maverick genius individuals. Were the obstacles to be different, it surely follows, then so too would the methods Mill would recommend to usher in further progress, and this supports a reading of the text in which freedom is an auxiliary on the road to advancement.

On Liberty, then, must be considered not as a text aspiring to reveal objective truth, but as a lubricant in a wider philosophical journey - a Whiggish journey away from ignorance towards knowledge, and Mill's view of his role as a political philosopher must be considered in this light. The ideas he expresses are not intended to be absolutes, to be applied to all societies regardless of geographical or temporal context, but are, rather, tailored to the unique reality of a specific society at a given time. Even a cursory glance at Mill's other texts supports this reading, such as in The Subjugation of Women, where Mill's call for gender equality reforms are introduced with the assertion that male domination is not only "wrong in itself," but also "now one of the hindrances to human improvement. "

Interestingly, if we analyse the effect of Mill's work with the benefit of hindsight, his descri ption of how society progresses appears to be vindicated. Not for nothing is Mill described as, "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, " and if we consider the widespread radical liberalisation of social attitudes that has taken place since On Liberty was published, the predominance of the harm principle as a means of judging legitimate intervention (proved, for example, by its use as the guidelines by which it is judged suitable to section an apparently insane individual), and the spread of the free market attitudes advocated by Mill in the text, it is reasonable to work on the basis that On Liberty was successful in catalysing a change in Western culture. On this basis, we may consider the impact the text has had, not only on superseding the attitudes it sought to challenge, but also as a source of half-truths itself; a passive, negative philosophical development whose flaws would be bequeathed to subsequent philosophers. I believe it has been proved that this is the case.

Take, for example, Mill's reverential descri ption of choice, which he feels is a liberating and positive experience. "The human faculties of perception, judgement, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice," he declares, adding that, "he who chooses life for himself employs all his faculties. " It is easy to comprehend Mill's reasoning when stating these beliefs; believing, as he did, that social convention was limiting the lifestyle options available to individuals, and that narrow-minded conformity was so endemic within his society that capacity for original thought was "withering away. "

Mill's advocacy of truth seems in line with the negative beliefs he describes: statements intended as rejections of what is rather than models of what should ideally be. And so it proves, for while greater individual liberty from the late nineteenth century onwards can be seen to have contributed towards progress (and, Mill would argue, greater wellbeing and happiness as a result), the industrialised, modern liberal democracy shaped by Mill's ideas is far from being without its own problems, or philosophical quandaries. Sartre's complaint that, "man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does, " and the existentialist philosophers' broader preoccupation with the paralysis of choice seems to me to directly confront the nauseating reality of a life lived without externally imposed morality or guidelines. Likewise, the descri ption of modern citizens offered by Guy Debord that, "like lost children we live our unfinished adventures, " is in line with many other situationist and post-modernism philosophers in suggesting modern life is dominated by a chaotic inertia which seems to derive from the lack of a coherent metanarrative derived from public consensus of the sort which On Liberty sought do destroy. Also, Mill's advocacy of free market economics is seen by many to have contributed towards an intellectual movement which has brought about an end to the rigid classism of the past and replaced it with efficient, highly technologized society; but the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession has led many politicians and philosophers to wonder whether capitalism is an increasingly broken and ailing system, while countless scholars have bemoaned the atomisation and alienation brought about by rampant individualism. These examples serve the peculiar purpose of proving Mill's ideas to be simultaneously both accurate and flawed, though the ways in which they are accurate are more important to his purpose. Whilst these examples expose the limitations of the practicality of some of his ideas, it is important to remember that the ideas themselves were of only secondary importance, and progress was his primary aim when writing the text and, as such, these developments have proved him right in two crucial ways: firstly, that more liberal attitudes did indeed allow for a more pluralistic society, from which did indeed emerge ideas which radically altered the way in which we all live our lives. But secondly and, from the perspective of analysing the idea of progress in Mill, more importantly, it can be said that society does indeed seem to progress by a succession of half-truths infinitely replacing each other, each motivated by an acknowledgement of the failings of the that which it usurps.

Mill's view of progress, then, is incremental. He rejects revolutionary ideas of disorderly change, preferring instead a conception of progress whereby free-thinking and intellectual enquiry lead to the gradual refinement of political philosophical understandings and beliefs. Improvement, by this vision, comes about not through discovery of truth, but exposing of fault, and we can view Mill's assertion that "the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested, " as his most succinct account of his view of progress.

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