The difficulty is, of course, that the Sam Jackson College Experience isn't as relevant now that I've graduated from college. But now that I've given you time to unsubscribe from all my RSS feeds and delete me from your bookmarks, the time is right... for a change!

That's right. I'm in the midst of a re-design of my online branding @ samjackson.org (including, rightly or wrongly, some blogging capabilities). I know it's 2012, but hey, long-form writing still has its virtues... maybe?

Look for changes (very) soon. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter @samjackson.

This paper traces the evolution of the Enlightenment idea of progress, exploring the manner in which this unique idea of progress - of the universal advance of man, delivered by reason into a brighter future - was usurped by what I identify as a 'technocratic' or technologically deterministic idea of progress. The issues are presented analytically, rather than historically, the better to reveal the political implications of this shift and the institutions and effects it created. Inspired originally by the question of whether or not technological progress could be expected to produce social change, I have learned much.

Perhaps it is simplest merely to present the introduction in its entirety.

+ + + + +  Introduction + + + + +

What can mankind expect from the future? For the better part of the last 300 years, the answer to this question has been “progress.” The modern idea of progress was born of the Enlightenment, and it is a belief that advances in reason will empower changes in the human moral, political, and material condition: these changes were believed to come in effect concurrently, driven by the broad impact of scientific reason upon disparate aspects of life.

This powerful idea faced serious criticisms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and ultimately ran aground on the shoals of the 20th century. In the present era this idea of progress is a suspect figure, popularly doubted and seen as a vestigial naiveté in many intellectual circles. Is this modern ambivalence a repudiation of the very idea of progress, or just a temporary setback? Its promises unfulfilled, the universal notion of progress is today broken down into constituent ideals – among them, political progress, social progress, and economic progress.

Essential faith in technology, science, and reason was formerly the dynamo at the center of this universal ideal, but the enlightenment idea of progress has been discredited for its broken promises, unfulfilled utopias, and misguided adherents. It has been reduced to a narrower thesis which privileges technology, rather than reason, as the key arbiter of human advancement. This reduction took place for political reasons essential to understanding present civilization.

In this paper I examine the constitutive elements of the Enlightenment ideal of progress, highlight certain historical antecedents, describe its later transformation into the technocratic or technologically deterministic idea of progress, and explain its subsequent fall from grace. Finally, I address the question of whether or not certain elements of this idea can or should be salvaged, and if so, how. The changing nature of the idea of progress is a function not only of changing technical and industrial circumstances, but of shifting social priorities and changes in the institutions of political power. The subject is important, but too often ignored, for if, as Charles Beard writes, “The world is largely ruled by ideas, true and false,” there have been few more influential than the idea of progress.

+ + + + +

I once again invite you to read the full paper: I welcome all questions, comments, concerns, etc. Thank you for your interest!

If you'll be in Paris, Tours, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, Carcassonne, Barcelona, Bern, Luzern, Geneva, Chamonix, Annecy, or Paris (again) in the next few weeks, let me know - send an e-mail. When I get back, I'll be moving to New York in July (more details on this later...)!

Thank you to my readers who have followed me from high school to college. I hope I haven't bored you too much -- I promise college was more exciting than what ended up posted on this blog...! As always, the best new ways to follow along with me are at www.twitter.com/samjackson and occasionally at stream.samjackson.org where I tend to post tidbits more often.

I don't know what will become of this blog, but I do know that Yale has been a wonderful experience. I've grown a lot, had a tremendous time, and I'm excited for what comes next. In the meantime - I've got a lot of packing to do!

I'm going to be traveling some before Commencement, and much more afterwards (hopefully) before starting work in July. So I need to front-load this work, which basically means crawling through Craigslist and then looking forlornly at my back account statement before contacting brokers and potential landlords. There's simply too much information out there and it's really painful to sift through, especially when I'm as interested in finding a good apartment (at a semi-sane price) as I am.

I'm not one to settle for something that will leave me unhappy - not when I have to sign the long lease! The main purpose of this post, aside from ranting, is to invite any readers or visitors who have friends or might themselves personally be looking to rent an apartment to let me know if you have any good leads. I'll be working in midtown and am looking to live somewhere between midtown east and say, the east village, this sort of region; Murray Hill would be good. Feel free to comment here or e-mail me if you have any contacts or suggestions in general.

I'll post more updates soon with details about my senior essay (done!) and other things... in the meantime, here's a picture I took of some pretty flowering trees outside the School of Management.

Compare the mission statements of various U.S. universities aboard.

NYU Abu Dhabi:

NYU's agreement with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi to create NYU Abu Dhabi is the outcome of a shared understanding of the essential roles and challenges of higher education in the 21st century: a common belief in the value of a liberal arts education, concurrence on the benefits a research university brings to the society that sustains it, a conviction that interaction with new ideas and people who are different is valuable and necessary, and a commitment to educating students who are true citizens of the world.

Dartmouth College American University of Kuwait:

The American University of Kuwait is committed to creating an enlightened and progressive educational culture in which all students, faculty and staff, regardless of nationality, creed, or position, will co-exist and help create a dynamic and equitable environment. All members of AUK are expected to respect the diverse nature of the AUK community and interact in a manner that is respectful of such, and that supports a commitment to life-long learning and the pursuit of academic excellence in higher education. The University encourages the freedom to engage in academic inquiry, and the fair exchange of ideas, and as such supports open access to and dissemination of information. The University founders uphold the philosophy that one cannot create a true enlightened academic environment without practicing the very virtues and ideals it hopes to instill in its students.

Then we have Yale-NUS:

The collaboration between NUS and Yale is a landmark partnership to create a new model of undergraduate education for Asia. In the fast-changing world of the 21st century, leaders need an education that offers both breadth of learning and depth of understanding. Yale-NUS College will draw on the best elements of liberal arts education from the traditions in the United States, but re-shape and re-imagine the curriculum and collegiate experience for Asia.

It's like the difference between an academic and a corporate mission statement.

I think that last line really captures the way this whole project is just being rushed through and denied the serious discussion it deserves. At the very least, there are just so many unanswered questions and empty responses from Levin or others in the administration. Really shames Yale at times like this.

Let me first say the following: I think digital subscriptions to the NYT are fine, and I'd buy one if they were priced more reasonably. But right now I wish for the following things to be true:

• Home print subscriptions could be shared.
• Schools and institutions could purchase domain-specific subscriptions and access, like journals.
• Digital prices were fairer relative to print prices.

1 -> My family has a subscription to the NYT, but this can't be shared across more than one digital account. If I'm at home, I can split up the paper... why not here?

2 -> Yale buys hundreds and hundreds of copies of the NYT every day. I read the NYT in print every day at lunch. Yale would be happy to buy a digital global subscription usable on campus and on the VPN, I'm sure - though our library already subscribes to an 'image' version. But this isn't available yet.

3 -> Digital prices are outrageously high relative to the print costs... I wish the NYT could just abolish the print edition; they'd save an incredible amount of money if they could get rid of all that overhead! But even with those high costs, it's cheaper in certain circumstances to just buy the print subscription as a dead-trees paperweight to give you the online version. Ridiculous.

Now, without further ado:

My simple strategy to bypass the paywall (until either one of these conditions changes or I'm living on my own after school and it becomes less insane for me to buy something I already get in print).

I use AdBlock already, available for both Firefox and Chrome, though I whitelist a lot of websites! I mainly use it to keep away nasty ads and pop-ups in a lot of places which just ruin my day. (Note to NYT: please make the Boston Globe, which you own, toss the pop-ups).  AdBlock usually blocks URLs, but it can just as easily block <div> elements on a page, which is what the NYT uses to display everything. So if you add the following rules:

##div#gatewayCreative
##div#gatewayUnit
##div#overlay
##*#overlay
##*#gatewayUnit
##*#gatewayCreative


Then you're just as safe as if you used NYClean, but you never have to press anything. The overlay just never shows up - at least until the NYT does something like make the <div> names permutate with every page load, etc.

I hope the times has success with the effort to get people to pay for news... I'm happy to support the times as soon as it becomes a little more reasonable in its available options, as per my complaints above. I want to support journalism I care about, but there needs to be more flexibility than the plan currently on hand!

EDIT: I realize that the above quick fix doesn't solve the problem perfectly, since it doesn't change the overlay: noscroll condition. Thanks to very clever CSS quick fix, it's easy to make an extension which does the same and just adds the following CSS conditions:

#overlay, #gatewayCreative, #gatewayUnit { display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important; }body { overflow: scroll !important; }

And then you just make a very simple manifest.json file to go with it... but that may sound a bit complicated for some people. You can just find Chrome extensions which do this same thing and it's trivial for Firefox, too. But if all else fails, you can also 1) use Incognito mode / Private Browsing / etc, or 2) remove the "gwh=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" trailing section of the URL when you hit a paywall'd NYT article. Yes, the paywall is that sophisticated.

Let's go fishing for the problem, obviously seen in these quotes from a YDN article this last week.

“It would have been irresponsible for Yale to have gone forward without having reached a degree of confidence about these matters [of academic freedom] that would justify going forward,” Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School and an advisor on the Singapore project, said Thursday. “We have been given the strongest possible guarantees by the government of Singapore and by [NUS] that on the campus of the liberal arts college, the principle of freedom of expression will be honored just as on the campus of Yale in New Haven.”

Note this emphasized text carefully.

Yale does not plan to issue a handbook spelling out what actions and freedoms are guaranteed in Singapore, Bailyn said, but instead will create a committee that students and professors can approach with questions and concerns. The committee will comprise faculty from Yale and NUS, but not those employed at the jointly run college itself, Levin said Thursday.

“[The committee will] represent Yale and its American perspective and NUS and its Singaporean perspective,” Levin said. “We thought this would be a good way to have a group outside the college itself to provide good advice and resolve any issues that might arise with the college.”

That sure sounds transparent, consistent, and accessible.

“I think we are convinced that you can publish in the scholarly literature, you can criticize government policy, you can teach a course on queer theory,” Provost Peter Salovey told the News Wednesday. “But what you can’t do the same way as in the United States is… protest in public places.”

Hm... that would seem to, uh, totally contradict the statement made earlier that "the principle of freedom of expression will be honored just as on the campus of Yale in New Haven." Last I checked, here at Yale we're allowed to protest things, whether it's President Levin, Yale-NUS, or the Iraq War.

Still, Bailyn said those freedoms are only guaranteed on campus, and that off-campus “is a different case, a much more complicated and in some ways difficult thing.”

Yep, there you go...

This whole affair is quite offensive to me; Yale just seems so ready to throw out some important values for the sake of this expansion. I really laud the motivations behind this project, but it just feels reckless to start hiring faculty and admitting students when these kinds of questions haven't been worked out.

The article said that the details of the plans haven't been described since they're so complex, essentially, but if they're so well-worked out, why not share them? As far as I can tell, because they want to advance the project to the point that it's already a fait accompli before anyone can really seriously muster a challenge on the grounds of what the university should actually be doing.

This was a heady discussion over lunch among the Trumbull College seniors. Personally, I am a very, very strong supporter of gender equality, and I am not tolerant of some of the kinds of behavior we have seen at Yale in the last few years: the "We Love Yale Sluts" incident, the offensive DKE chants on old campus, and a few other instances of note. I think that the University could have acted more quickly and more decisively to call out these actors. But to me, the problem of these examples is not one which can be solved by punishing some frat brothers, no matter how strict the official reproach.

Ultimately, these issues are representative of a failing of the Yale community, or at least particular subsets thereof. Scaring away public misogyny would help make Yale more welcoming, but I think that's just the part of the iceberg which shows itself... in this regard, I agree with fellow Trumbull senior Adriel Sapporta who wrote as much in a column today. Of greater significance are the sexual assaults which get reported, but never resolved, or the offenders let off with slaps on the wrist; more still, the sexual assaults which never go reported at all, because people feel that official recourse is hopeless.

I haven't seen the exact terms of the complaint, but it raises for me the same kind of questions that I have had when the Women's Center has responded to these mentioned instances. Often, I asked whether the YWC response was good tactics or good strategy to advance the goal of gender equality on campus. While I think I sympathize with the intentions of this complaint (not having discussed it with the submitting group), I do wonder if this is the best avenue to pursue this goal. The #1 response I have noticed has been a widespread alienation of Yale women from the YWC as a result of the kinds of statements made in the YDN today from a group of men and women which is, I know, not 100% representative of the YWC as an institution -- just saying what was discussed at lunch today.

This is not especially clear and focused, but what I mean is the following:

• I totally agree that the University's March 2 report of the task force on sexual misconduct was woefully inadequate and really quite shameful; this and other nearly desultory efforts to reach minds seem to fall quite short.
• I agree (and have stated since freshmen year) that there are widespread deficiencies in awareness and education which contribute to a hostile atmosphere in certain contexts on campus, or at least help precipitate negative circumstances.

What I don't agree with is the following statement, from Presca Ahn in the YDN today:

So what do we mean when we say that Yale is a hostile environment for women? What we don’t mean is that every female student at Yale has experienced sexual harassment or assault. What we mean is that the University has consistently demonstrated an attitude of tolerance for highly public acts of misogyny and sexual aggression. Female undergraduates see their peers call them “Yale sluts” and hear still other peers chant that “no means yes.” They live with the knowledge that the University has failed to punish those peers for sexual harassment. It takes little imagination to understand the effect of this kind of atmosphere on female students’ ability to engage in campus life on a basis of safety and equality.

Emphasis mine. Ultimately, this is what it comes down for to me - I think that Yale hasn't done enough, that Yale STUDENTS haven't done enough - but I'm not sure that what's happened at Yale so obviously has an especially significant effect on female students' ability "to engage in campus life on a basis of safety and equality." Hopefully the OCR inquiry will help push things in the right direction, but I do hope that this can prove to be a good discussion, rather than a venomous one where the university feels compelled to defend itself and the general public just ends up disparaging the efforts altogether. We shall see!

Full response from Dean Miller below.

____

"Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages."  - - - David Hume, "Refinements in the Arts" Essay II in E. Miller's collection "Essays Moral, Political, and Literary" a collection of Hume's work published 1985/7

I have about 45 pages so far, having finished the first three revisions of part 1 (the enlightenment idea of progress and its historical antecedents) and a first revision of part 2 (the rise of the technocratic idea of progress and the invention of technology as an autonomous force). These are vastly improved from the poor versions I last shared here, but I will spare any readers the pain of seeing work still in progress until, sometime tomorrow night, I finally 'finish' these sections and seal them at least until final revisions and reappraisal. Parts 3 (critique of the technologically deterministic idea of progress) and parts 4 (judging the idea of progress in the modern age) remain works in progress.

Deadline is, I believe, April 24. Something like that. Plus, I've got two other good-length essays to write... this one is the hardest essay I've written per-page of my Yale tenure; I don't really know why it poses such a challenge. One thing is for sure, the difficulty of such a project definitely doesn't scale linearly with page length. -__-

Aside: Is it possible to be interviewed for a student journalism publication and not end up misquoted? : ( I don't think this was intentional in this situation, I just *always* tend to have negative experiences. I completely refuse to cooperate with the Yale Daily News for anything because they just simply can't be trusted; I've been misquoted in such horrible ways in the past. Please don't go to their website to investigate this statement. Over-eager freshmen reporters unaware of the pyramid scheme hierarchy of the YDN have good intentions, but something always goes wrong. I know that editors are often to blame as well, but, still. Anyway, this instance was not really harmful in any way, I am just saddened that 'I' in the article wasn't able to express clearly my views on the subject of blogging and its so-called decline among young people.

I had a quite good conversation with the author, Caitlin Cromwell BR '14 about changing norms about privacy, the decline of blogging and rise of social media, etc. Here's the paragraph mainly stemming from this discussion:

Jackson is the author of a blog called “The Sam Jackson College Experience,” to which he has devoted a significant part of his last five years writing, analyzing, and responding to comments. He says that this endeavor has been valuable to him in several ways. Since high school, when he began posting, he has followed the hot-button issues of college admissions and higher-education marketing, meanwhile documenting his own college process. As he blogged, though, Jackson simultaneously witnessed “the decline of blogging,” and a shift away from more traditional blogs. “In the last five years, there’s been this rise of social media where blogging has been overshadowed by these social interactions,” he says. “But I try to make blogging as social as possible. Ideally, I want to have interactions with people.”

Almost all of this is unrepresentative; maybe it was my lack of clarity... or the hand of an editor which made things strange? I won't blame anyone, and it doesn't really matter. (That's why I have this blog - to present an 'authoritative voice online,'blah blah blah). What probably got cut from this were my explanations of the particular benefits I have received from blogging (such as, getting into college, getting jobs, etc). I was speaking broadly about the ways which social media is related even to a more 'traditional' blog like mine, since I always enjoy interacting with commenters (when they exist!!!) and to get people to otherwise interact with the ideas I am presenting. The last line in particular was truncated or rearranged with the cumulative effect of making me seem like an asocial loser. But hey.

Later I'm said to approach social media cautiously, even though I talked a lot about how I use posterous, Twitter, Facebook, whatever else... very confused about where the different things about me in the article came from, but anyway. The only part that really bugged me was the last line, which was I thought funny when I said it, but in its misquoted form sounds mean:

Jackson says, “Even if 99 percent of blogs are boring and trite, you have 1 percent that are interesting or insightful or even help people express themselves better. To put it another way, I’d rather spend more time blogging than watching American Idol or Jersey Shore.”

First off, who would rather do *anything* more than watch Jersey Shore? But seriously: what I said was that I'd rather that PEOPLE in general spent more time blogging; I wasn't speaking personally at all. Which makes sense in the context of my previously saying "people express themselves better" rather than "me," and why I said "99 percent of blogs" rather than, say, "99 percent of my blog posts."

Long story short: Teenagers aren't really blogging anymore, but they do things which could very well be considered different forms of blogging. I think that blogging is still a good activity, even if I don't do it very much myself, and I think the key virtue of blogging is its social nature: whether this is interacting with commenters, merely sharing your views online at all, or indeed having long-form conversations in your Facebook news feed about a post that you made, these kinds of communications and interactions are great.

I'll save the discussion of whether student blogging is still useful for admissions purposes (yes) or whether blogging is still worthwhile (sure) for another time. Until then, you'll just have to follow me on Twitter.

I find Feb Club to be a rather fascinating institution. It was written about in the NYT and of course is regularly revisted by the campus papers. I know some people who were trying to become Feb Club All-Stars, going to every party without fail, but most have already missed one or two - it's tough, especially Monday nights, or so I am told. I now understand why, when I was an underclassman, seniors were so vacant-looking in seminars during the Spring semester. Actually, I think that's mostly because they're second-semester seniors - but close enough.

While the factual description of Feb Club may sound like scornful debauchery, I don't think that's fair. It's mostly a social occasion, though things vary for sure over the week. A mid-week party is a lot different from Friday or Saturday night, of course. Ultimately, this slice of "party all the time" is pretty unusual for Yale, but I imagine that at other places - especially much larger universities - it's not so unfamiliar. Maybe someone at a 50,000 student school would think I'm crazy for puzzling over Feb Club, although to be fair, it's a little different when the total number of your class peers is so much smaller.

Does your school have similar traditions? What do you think of them? Ultimately, I think the more endearing Yale Traditions for Seniors involve the copious amounts of nakedness that arise in the springtime, when streaking becomes de rigeur. Or something like that. Actually, during winter finals period, too.*

*Harvard also has a lot of traditions about nakedness, but as in so many Harvard-Yale disputes, the folks from Cambridge just can't hold a candle to Yale. Seriously though. It's documented. So are the naked tea parties. And there are, of course, just plain old naked parties. Anyway. I'm disappointed that the Saybrook Strip hasn't done its name justice in recent years, though - they need more Saybrugian spirit.

So, if you are truly curious, you can find an extremely rough few pages below, which are incompletely cited and generally horrible. I have designs to tear this apart in the next week to fix it and make it better - more analytical, less historical - but if you are interested in the subject, it is not a terrible detour. Anyway. Work in progress.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

1. Pre-modern Ideas of Progress

[Classical Era Notions of Progress]

This paper is not intended to present an exhaustive history of the idea of progress, but certain historical grounding is necessary to understand the philosophical problems of progress in the modern era. The first pillar of the modern idea of progress is its focus on the advancement of the human condition. Progress assumes that human civilization has the capacity to advance through time and history towards a more perfect or ‘advanced’ state in the future. This entails a belief in history, a sense that events through time may be interrelated as part of a broader, directed narrative; such a belief has not always been as widely held as it is today.

Many sources hold that the Classical Era was without this idea of history. The Greeks and their Hellenistic cultural descendants supported vigorous philosophical exploration, but it is accurate to state that prevailing perspectives of the Classical Age believed in history as a cyclical or nonlinear process. ‘History,’ such as it existed, was interpreted as a process of either continual degradation from a previous Golden Age, or an ongoing process or decay followed periodically by returns to splendor, endlessly repeated. Marcus Aurelius wrote that “All things from eternity are of like forms, and come round in a circle.”[1] This circularity contrasts with any notion of ongoing historical progress.

There is still some evidence of historicism in Classical times. Ludwig Edelstein, in The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity, details examples of progressivity in the life and writing of Seneca, Posidonius, and other period Hellenistic authorities.[2] Robert Nisbet additionally navigates this period, demonstrating that the Greeks and other pre-Christian peoples held philosophies more diverse than this single simplistic idea of historical degradation, and that even if these were minority perspectives, intellectual vigor was devoted to the topic of ‘progress’ in one or another forms as early as Hesiod or Homer.[3]

While it is possible to parse ancient texts in such a way as to produce threads linking them to modern philosophies, it is evident that Greek and Roman intellectual debates contain fodder enough to support a multitude of perspectives. To whatever degree progress is mentioned in ancient times, it was unlinked from science or human agency in general; it lacked what Sklair calls an ‘optimistic dimension.’ Plato and Aristotle elevate moral progress above material progress, and while improvements to society could be described historically, they were not ascribed to science or scientific arts.

The practice of history itself in the Classical era took divergent forms: chronologies, horologies, genealogies and other patterns of historiography are all well-represented in the historical record. Can this help to explain the prevailing notion of history in ancient times? As Fornara explains in The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome, history as an ‘objective record,’ an aggregate of all past events, was entirely alien to the philosophers and historians of yore: ‘history’ in this context was delinked from time, and referred always to a specific slice or perspective of events; Herodotus in this frame is a writer of “histories of famous deeds,” rather than a raconteur of specific objective events.[4] This patterning of historia is consistent with the non-linear, cyclic conception of history in Greco-Roman tradition.

[Judeo-Christian Providential Progress]

The immediate alternative to history-as-cycles is the idea of a general, linear history: time as a series of events in sequence from a past into the future. This process can be conceptualized as a process of stages, or as a continuous and smooth succession without any barriers or bulwarks to hinder ‘advancement.’ In the Western tradition, Judeo-Christian thought provides an influential early example of this attitude. Georg Henrik von Wright describes the Old Testament, through Genesis, as the “initial fixed point” of a story; the New Testament then offers a future terminus of the world, time, and history.[1]

St. Augustine was among the first writers to formally situate history between these two bookends. In the City of God, begun after the sack of Rome in 410 C.E., Augustine creates a ‘universal history’ which begins with Creation and continues until the eternal end of the world. While historiography remains unconfined by ‘events in time and space’ until many centuries after his death, Augustine characterized the existence of mankind as a singular journey towards a particular end. In this, his is among the first authors to record an alternative to the cyclical universe perceived by the ancients.

Augustine, then Bishop of Hippo, wrote in response to questions of how a Christian empire had fallen. He also sought to answer questions relevant across the centuries. Augustine was grounded in his belief that history advanced from Creation to the Last Judgment, holding that Christ’s appearance was the most notable point along this continuum. It was from this position that Augustine argued vigorously with his contemporary ‘cyclical scholars,’ including those who looked to scripture for textural support, especially from Ecclesiastes (1, 9) when Solomon declares “There is no new thing under the sun.”[2]

Mommsen cites Augustine’s vigorous refutation of Origen and others in this period, demonstrated below:

“The  philosophers  of  this  world believed  that  they  could  or should not  solve  that  controversy in  any  other  way than  by  introducing cycles  of  time, in  which they  asserted  that  the  revolving  of  coming and passing ages would always be renewed and repeated in  the nature of  things  and would  thus go on without  cessation.” [3]

Augustine solved this ‘temporal’ problem through the bookending of history with Genesis and the Last Judgment. Yet Augustine was writing not only to combat the cyclical writings of near-heretics like Origen, but also, as Mommsen identifies, a host of Christians whose alternate conception of ‘Christian Progress’ was threateningly materialist. These authors identified the coming of Christ with Augustus’ foundation of Pax Romana, and the spread of Christianity with the improvement of the material world. Eusebius, an intellectual heir of Origen, wrote that “it  was  not through  human  merit  that  at  no  other time but only  since the  time  of Christ most  of the nations were under the  single  rule  of  the  Romans; for  the  period  of  His  wonderful  sojourn among men coincided with  the period when the Romans reached their summit under Augustus, who was then  the  first monarch to rule over most  of  the  nations.” [4] To Augustine, these same thinkers additionally conflated the Millennium with material prosperity rather than divine righteousness on Earth.

Significant ideological shifts in the 4^th century led many Christians in the Empire to construct present-day linkages between material progress and Christianity. The notion that Christ’s arrival created (and would continue to create) improvements in material condition was first suppressed and then embraced by Rome once Constantine made Christianity the favored Imperial religion. Constantine, writing in 312 after a battle victory, observed that “the  lawful  recognition  and  observance  [of  the  Christian  faith]  has bestowed  the greatest  success on the Roman  name and  singular prosperity  on all affairs of mankind, blessings which were provided by the divine beneficence."[5]

Augustine sought to explicitly contravene such materialistic relationships with God, giving examples of Christian emperors struck dead and Pagan emperor’s left long lives; to him, temporal earthly power was irrelevant, something which God might distribute to all manner of men. He sought to contradict any hidden message of Pax Romana by highlighting wars and conflicts. Christianity was to be followed for its divine promises, not the potential of earthly reward. Finally, Augustine realized after the fall of Rome that if believe in the alternate “Christian Progress” became widespread, it would leave Christianity (and Christians) open to attack on many fronts – for it was under Christianity that the Imperium Romanum suffered its ignominious decapitation.

This 4^th and 5^th century Christian dialogue therefore offers two important kernels for future conceptions of progress. First, Augustine provides a hugely influential Christian framework through which the actions of all mankind can be placed in relation to a general narrative of Providence. Though the eventual ‘progress’ would be sudden in the Second Coming, still the events of men were now situated in a linear-historical context. These theological notions of progress – in conjunction with continuing emphasis on ‘regress’ from Eden – formed the intellectual backdrop of the Medieval period in the West.

Contemporaneously, Christian thought of this period borrowed from Roman Pagan traditions and frequently emphasized the material benefits wrought the Empire by Christ. Christians were once condemned for bringing misfortune to Rome; the reverse was now true. While Roman Pagan traditions were structured as contractual relations with the Gods, the tradition of do ut des ("I give that you might give") became a current in Christian thought, to the dismay of Augustine. This invigorated idea of progress-made-material resonates with the general idea of techno-scientific progress which will be dissected later. Even if these early Christian Progresses failed to offer mankind a material platform to improve his condition, it is possible to trace a slackening of the pessimism developed by Diogenes and other Cynics. Religious progress serves as an effective conceptual ‘bridge’ to truly modern progress.

[2] CITE

[3] {{242 Mommsen,Theodor E. 1951;}}, 356

[4] Demonstratio  Evangelica,  3,  7,  139) in {{242 Mommsen,Theodor E. 1951;}}, 360

[5] {{242 Mommsen,Theodor E. 1951;}}, 359 [CITE fully]

[2] {{245 Edelstein, Ludwig 1967;}}

[3] {{193 Nisbet, Robert A. 1980;}}, 13

[4] {{217 Fornara,C W. 1988;}}, 92

Right now I need to study (Fractal Geometry test on Thurs) but until I next write, please enjoy this photo of little Arlo and myself from a few months back. This is at Wellesley College, where my family often goes for walks - great place for dogs!

It has been quite illuminating, but much of this light I sadly cannot share. While this blog has its origins in my college search, I think that posting pictures of corporate marketing materials and questioning the 'authenticity' of different firms may not work as well as it did for colleges. This is unfortunate.

Also unfortunate, in a sense, is that I have been very successful with my interviewing, which has kept me very, very busy. So it's been a very hectic season. I will do a post-mortem later where I can, perhaps, share more details.

But, I can say that for now, it is pretty certain that by next Monday I will have accepted an offer from one of a few firms that I am considering. What this means is 1) exciting new adventures and 2) terrifying post-graduate life outside the ivory tower and 3) this is your small window of opportunity to try to poach me away if you have read my blog for a long time, waiting for the chance to have me fill a position as a highly paid technology and media consultant. ; )

If you are a senior reading this, I hope your job search goes well! For juniors et al., internships. For everyone else, well, I hope you find what you are looking for, or that you at least enjoy the search.