Do you believe in progress?
Around the corner from me here in Paris is a café called Le Progrès. I imagine its pavement tables a century ago, populated by early French socialists in hats and elaborate moustaches. These were men (yes, mostly men) who believed in progress. They met in the cafés and halls of eastern Paris to discuss uplifting the poor. They believed that humanity had been slowly rising, like an ancient lift clanking upwards, ever since 18th-century Parisian philosophers rediscovered the idea of “progress”.从我巴黎住处出发拐一个弯，就能看到一家名为“进步”(Le Progrès)的咖啡馆。我想象一百年前，法国带着礼帽、留着精心修饰的八字须的早期社会主义者坐在人行道桌子边的场景。这是一些相信进步的男人（没错，大多数是男人）。他们聚集在巴黎东部的咖啡馆和礼堂里，讨论如何提高穷人的地位。他们相信，自从18世纪巴黎哲学家们重新发现“进步”的理念以来，人类一直在缓慢崛起，就像一台陈旧的起重机，咣当咣当地举升。
Western belief in progress has been slipping steadily for decades, but is now at a nadir. Anyone who still believes that politics will uplift humanity is considered a crank. Yet the idea of progress hasn’t vanished. It has simply been privatised. Just as those early Parisian socialists believed in humanity’s progress, westerners increasingly believe in their own personal progress. They don’t think the next human generation will be better off, but they are making darned sure their own children will be.
西方对进步的信念几十年来不断衰落，但眼下处于谷底。任何人如果仍然相信政治将促进人类进步，就会被视为一个怪人。然而进步的理念并未消亡。它只是私有化了。正如早期巴黎的社会主义者相信人类进步一样，西方人日益信奉自己的个人进步。他们不认为下一代人的生活会更好，但他们竭尽全力确保自己的孩子过上更好的生活。
Only four years ago, belief in progress wasn’t yet dead. Barack Obama became the world’s president with the ultimate progressive slogan: “Yes we can.” After clinching the Democratic nomination, he had said: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” These now sound like words from another era, but even in 2009, heading into the United Nations’ environmental summit in Copenhagen, many still thought the world might solve global warming.
仅仅在4年前，进步的信念还未消失。巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)凭借那句终极的进步口号“是的，我们可以”而成为全世界的总统。他在获得民主党总统候选人提名之后表示：“这是海平面上升速度开始放慢，我们所在的星球开始恢复元气的时刻。”这些话现在听起来就像是来自另一个时代，但即使在2009年联合国哥本哈根环境峰会前夕，许多人仍然认为世界可能解决全球变暖问题。
The past three years have been particularly poor ones for progress. The west’s big popular movements now look back: they promise a return to a past golden age, which Marine Le Pen’s Front National vaguely locates in the time before globalisation, and the Tea Party movement precisely locates in 1776. America’s founding fathers, themselves believers in progress, would presumably have been depressed to discover that they were the end-point of history.
就进步而言，过去三年特别阴暗。如今西方的大型群众运动向后看：他们承诺重返昔日的黄金时代——对法国马琳•勒庞(Marine Le Pen)的国民阵线(National Front)来说，那差不多是在全球化之前，而对美国茶叶党(Tea Party)运动来说，那意味着回到1776年。相信进步的美国开国先贤们想必会沮丧地发现，他们处于历史的终点。
Today the notion that Obama or Mitt Romney might usher in utopia sounds hilarious, like something out of Mad magazine. No western politician incarnates hope any more. On the May night when François Hollande was elected French president, I wandered up to Bastille to see the celebrating masses. There weren’t many. Hardly anyone aged over 30 was out, and many people on the square seemed to have come to watch, like me. What euphoria there was concerned not Hollande but the ousting of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
如今，奥巴马或米特•罗姆尼(Mitt Romney)有望开创乌托邦时代的说法，听起来可笑极了，就像是出自《疯狂》(Mad)杂志的笑话。没有一个西方政客代表着希望。在今年5月弗朗索瓦•奥朗德(François Hollande)当选法国总统的那天晚上，我走到巴士底广场观看民众的庆祝活动。庆祝的人并不太多。几乎没有30岁以上的人出来，广场上的许多人似乎和我一样只是来看热闹。人们仅有的愉悦情绪与奥朗德当选无关，而是大家把他的前任尼古拉•萨科齐(Nicolas Sarkozy)赶下了台。
Politicians now try to present themselves not as saviours but as managers: Romney, Mario Monti and even Hollande. That’s no wonder, as since 1945 the managerialism of Dwight Eisenhower or Bill Clinton has fared rather better than the utopianism of, say, Pol Pot. As George Orwell wrote in 1943: “Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying ‘I told you so’ than the optimist.” In Ukraine last month, a liberal dissident mused to me about who might be the country’s ideal leader, everyone else having failed. He came up with Lee Kuan Yew or General Franco. Progress has vanished not just from politics but from public life generally: the British municipal libraries that once stood for progress are now being closed.
政客们现在试图把自己定位成经理人，而非救世主：罗姆尼、马里奥•蒙蒂(Mario Monti)甚至奥朗德都是如此。这并不奇怪，因为自1945年以来，德怀特•艾森豪威尔(Dwight Eisenhower)或比尔•克林顿(Bill Clinton)的管理主义风格表现远好于（随便举个例子）红色高棉领导人波尔布特(Pol Pot)的乌托邦主义。正如乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)在1943年所写的那样：“旨在推动人类进步的计划确实往往以失败告终，悲观主义者比乐观主义者更有机会说‘我早就告诉你会这样’。”上月在乌克兰，一位自由派异见人士跟我说起谁也许是该国理想的领导人，因为其他人都失败了。他提到了李光耀(Lee Kuan Yew)或西班牙前独裁者佛朗哥(General Franco)。进步不仅从政坛消失，而且还普遍从公共生活中消失：曾经代表进步的英国各城市的图书馆目前正被关闭。
However, progress has merely gone private. The western middle-classes increasingly believe in progress in their own lives. They read self-help books, take cooking classes, go on diets, stop smoking, do “home improvement”, and have invented a new mode of parenting, “concerted cultivation”, which largely means the sort of nonstop education for your own children that those moustachioed socialists had envisioned for the workers.
然而，进步只是成为了个人的信念。西方中产阶级日益信奉个人生活中的进步。他们阅读自助书籍、参加厨艺班、节食、戒烟、在家里大搞装修，还发明了新的育儿模式“协调一致培养”(concerted cultivation)，后者基本上意味着对自己孩子进行无休止的全方位教育，就像那些留着八字须的社会主义者为工人们所设想的教育。
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