It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.
Interpretation
The quote critiques how the belief in progress has been used to justify the transition from feudalism to capitalism, often ignoring the negative aspects.
Immanuel Wallerstein's quote reflects on the liberal belief in progress as a justification for the shift from feudalism to capitalism. It highlights how this belief system tends to overlook the detrimental impacts of capitalism, suggesting that the emphasis on progress often leads to the commodification of all aspects of life and the dismissal of negative consequences. Thus, it urges a critical examination of the narrative that celebrates progress without acknowledging its costs.
In practice
A speaker at a political rally discussing economic reforms might use this quote to critique blind faith in capitalism.
If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all - it can be seen how the two practices emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes and solids.
No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.
Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood not our pain.
Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide; anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive.
Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.
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