The idea of progress was born when society gained rational control over nature

Evidence

No less was involved than the designing of previously unpractised mechanisms, and acquiring of hitherto unthought-of skills – both necessary to produce artificially what was in the past given naturally. In pre-modern times, Jews were a caste among castes, a rank among ranks, an estate among estates. Their distinctiveness was not an issue, and habitual, virtually unreflective, practices of segregation effectively prevented it from becoming one. With the rise of modernity, separation of the Jews did become an issue. Like everything else in modern society, it had now to be manufactured, built up, rationally argued, technologically designed, administered, monitored and managed. Those in charge of pre-modern societies could assume the leisurely and confident attitude of gamekeepers: left to its own resources, society would reproduce itself year by year, generation after generation, with scarcely a noticeable change. Not so its modern successor. Here, nothing could be taken for granted any more. Nothing should grow unless planted, and whatever would have grown on its own must have been the wrong thing, and hence a dangerous thing, jeopardizing or confounding the overall plan. The gamekeeper-like complacency would be a luxury one could ill afford. What was needed instead was the posture, and skills, of a gardener; one armed with a detailed design of the lawn, of the borders and of the furrow dividing the lawn from the borders; with a vision of harmonious colours and of the difference between pleasing harmony and revolting cacophony; with determination to treat as weeds every self-invited plant which interferes with his plan and his vision of order and harmony; and with machines and poisons adequate to the task of exterminating the weeds and altogether preserve the divisions as required and defined by the overall design. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171 (#expands, via linked claim)

The disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an ‘evolutive’ time. But it must be recalled that, at the same moment, the administrative and economic techniques of control reveal a social time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type: the discovery of an evolution in terms of ‘progress’. The disciplinary techniques reveal individual series: the discovery of an evolution in terms of ‘genesis’. These two great ‘discoveries’ of the eighteenth century – the progress of societies and the geneses of individuals – were perhaps correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization. A macroand a micro-physics of power made possible, not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations. ‘Evolutive’ historicity, as it was then constituted – and so profoundly that it is still self-evident for many today – is bound up with a mode of functioning of power. No doubt it is as if the ‘history-remembering’ of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds had long been linked to a modality of power. With the new techniques of subjection, the ‘dynamics’ of continuous evolutions tends to replace the ‘dynasties’ of solemn events. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 243 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Progress is a historically-bounded ideology; becoming is a pure philosophical concept; The modern concept of progress and individual development emerged from techniques of power. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 243; Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171 (+3 more)

Related

• Progress is a historically-bounded ideology; becoming is a pure philosophical concept (similarity 0.88)
• Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature (similarity 0.81)
• The modern concept of progress and individual development emerged from techniques of power. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171
• The modern concept of progress and individual development emerged from techniques of power. #corroborates (0.78) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 243
• Progress fails when its standard bearers become part of nature #qualifies (0.75)