Chapter 10. Progress Is Our Most Important Product

Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind.

—Frances FrtzGera/d²

The study of economic growth is too serious to be left to the economists.

—£. J. Mishan

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of trie universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift m viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.

—Vine Deloria, Jr.

Steadfast reader, we are about to do something no high school American history class has ever accomplished in the annals of American education: reach the end of the textbook. What final words do American history courses impart to their students?

The American Tradition assures students "that the American tradition remains strong—strong enough to meet the many challenges that lie ahead." "If these values are those on which most Americans can agree," says The American Adventure, "the American adventure will surely continue." "Most Americans remained optimistic about the nation's future. They were convinced that their free institutions, their great natural wealth, and the genius of the American people would enable the US. to continue to be—as it always has been—THE LAND OF PROMISE," LandofPromise concludes.

Even textbooks that don't end with their titles close with the same vapid cheer. "The American spirit surged with vitality as the nation headed toward the close of the twentieth century," the authors of The American Pageant assure us, ignoring opinion polls that suggest the opposite. Life and Liberty climbs further out on this hollow limb; "America will have a great role to play in these future events. What this nation does depends on the people in it." "Problems lie ahead, certainly," predicts American Adventures. "But so do opportunities." The American people "need only the will and the commitment to meet the new challenges of the future," according to Triumph ofthe American Nation. In short, all we must do to prepare for the morrow is keep our collective chin up.

As usual, such content-free unanimity signals that a social archetype lurks nearby. This one, the archetype of progress, bursts forth in full flower on the textbooks' last pages but has been germinating from their opening chapters.

For centuries, Americans viewed their own history as a demonstration of the idea of progress. As Thomas Jefferson put it:

Let the philosophical observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains eastwards towards our seacoast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association, living under no law but that of nature ... He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting, . . . and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved siate in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day. And where this progress will stop no one can say.^s

The idea of progress dominated American culture in the nineteenth century and was still being celebrated in Chicago at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. As recently as the 1950s, more was still assumed to be better. Every midwestern town displayed civic pride in signs marking the city limits: "Welcome to Decatur, Illinois, Pop. 65,000 and growing." Growth meant progress and progress provided meaning, it) some basic but unthinking way. In Washington the secretary of commerce routinely celebrated when our nation hit each new milestone—170,000,000, 185,000,000, etc.—on his "population clock."⁶ We boasted that America's marvelous economic system had given the United States "72 percent of the world's automobiles, 61 percent of the world's telephones, and 92 percent of the world's bathtubs," and all this with only 6 percent of the world's population.⁷ The future looked brighter yet: most Americans believed their children would inherit a better planet and enjoy fuller lives.

According to American History, "Westward the Course ol Empire Takes its Way" has been reproduced in more American histories than any other picture by Currier and Ives. StereotyRically contrasting "primitive" Native hunters and fishers with bustling white settlers, the picture suggests that progress doomed the Indian, so we need not looK closely today at the process of dispossession.

In the 1950s a graphics firm redesigned the symbol for Explorer Scouting to be more "up to date." The new symbol's onward ant) upward thrust perfectly represents the archetype of progress.

This is the America in which most textbook authors grew up and the America they still try to sell to students today. Three textbooks offer appendixes that trace recent trends, all onwards and upwards. These efforts are undistinguished. They do not use constant dollars, for one thing, so their bar graphs of rapidly rising family income or health care expenditures show far more "progress" (if spending more on health care is progress) than occurred. The American Pageant records the steep increase (flattening in about 1980) in number of automobiles in the United States, percentage of Americans homes with television sets, and the like. No textbook charts phenomena that might be negative, such as frequency of air pollution alerts, increased reliance on imported oil, or declining real wages.

Perhaps textbooks authors do not question the notion that bigger is better because the idea of progress conforms with the way Americans like to think about education: ameliorative, leading step by step to opportunity for individuals and progress tor the whole society. The ideology of progress also provides hope for the future. Certainly most Americans want to believe that their society has been, on balance, a boon and not a curse to mankind and to the planet⁸ History textbooks go even further to imply that simply by participating in society, Americans contribute to a nation that is constantly progressing and remains the hope of the world. The closing sentence of The American Pageant

states, "As the twentieth century approaches its sunset, the people of the United States can still proudly claim in the words of Lincoln, that they and their heritage represent 'the last best hope of earth.'" Thus the idea of American excep- tionalism—the United States as the most moral country in the world—which starts in our textbooks with the Pilgrims, gets projected into the future.

Faith in progress has played various functions in society and in American history textbooks. The faith has promoted the status quo in the most literal sense, for it proclaims that to progress we must simply do more of the same. This belief has been particularly useful to the upper class, because Americans could be persuaded to ignore the injustice of social class if they thought the economic pie kept getting bigger for all. The idea of progress also fits in with Social Darwinism, which implies that the lower class is lower owing to its own fault. Progress as an ideology has been intrinsically ami revolutionary: because things are getting better all the time, everyone should believe in the system. Portraying America so optimistically also helps textbooks withstand attacks by ultrapatriotic critics in Texas and other textbook adoption states.

Internationally, referring to have-not countries as "developing nations" has helped the "developed nations" avoid facing the injustice of worldwide stratification. In reality "development" has been making Third World nations poorer, compared to the First World. Per capita income in the First World was five times that in the Third World in 1850, ten times in 1960, and fourteen times by 1970," The vocabulary of progress remains relentlessly hopeful, however, with regard to the "undeveloped." As E. J. Mishan put it, "Complacency is suffused over the globe, by referring to these destitute and sometimes desperate countries by the fatuous nomenclature of "developing nations,'"¹⁰ In the nineteenth century, progress provided an equally splendid rationale for imperialism. Europeans and Americans saw themselves as performing governmental services for and utilizing the natural resources of natives in distant lands, who were too backward to do it themselves.

Gradually the archetype of progress has been losing its grip. In the last quarter-century, the intellectual community in the United States has largely abandoned the idea. Opinion polls show that the general public too has been losing its faith that the future is automatically getting better. Reporting this new climate of opinion, the editors of a 1982 symposium entitled "Progress and Its Discontents" put it this way: "Future historians will probably record that from the mid-twentieth century on, it was difficult for anyone to retain faith in the idea of inevitable and continuing progress."¹¹

Probably not even textbook authors still believe that bigger is necessarily better. No one celebrates higher populations.¹² Today, rather than boast of our consumption, we are more likely to lament our waste, as in [his passage by Donella H. Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth: "In terms of spoiling the environment and using world resources, we are the world's most irresponsible and dangerous citizens," Each American born in the 1970s will throw out 10,000 noreturn bottles and almost 20,000 cans while generating 126 tons of garbage and 9.8 tons of paniculate air pollution. And that's just the tip of' the trashberg, because every ton of waste at the consumer end has also required five tons at the manufacturing stage and even more at the site of initial resource extraction.¹³

In some ways, bigger still seems to equal better. When we compare ourselves to others around us, having more seems to bring happiness, for earning a lot of money or driving an expensive car implies that one is a more valued member of society. Sociologists routinely find positive correlations between income and happiness. Over time, however, and in an absolute sense, more may not mean happier. Americans believed themselves to be less happy in 1970 than in 1957, yet they used much more energy and raw materials per capita in 1970.

The 1973 Arab oil embargo precipitated the new climate of opinion, for it showed America's vulnerability to economic and even geological factors over which we have little control. The new pessimism was exemplified by the enormous popularity of that year's ecocidal bestseller, The Limits to Growth.¹⁴ Writing the next year, Robert Heilbroner noted the new pessimism: "There is a question in the air ... 'Is there hope for man?'"¹⁵ Robert Nisbet, who thinks that the idea of progress "has done more good over a 2500-year period . . . than any other single idea in Western history,"¹⁶nonetheless agrees that the idea is in twilight. This change did not take place all at once. Intellectuals had been challenging the idea of progress for some time, dating back to The Decline ofche West, published during World War I, in which Oswald Spengler suggested that Western civilization was beginning a profound and inevitable downturn." The war itself, the Great Depression, Stalinism, the Holocaust, and World War II shook Western belief in progress at its foundations.

Developments in social theory further undermined the idea of progress by making Social Darwinism intellectually obsolete. Modern anthropologists no longer believe that our society is "ahead of or "fitter than" so-called "primitive" societies. They realize that our society is more complex than its predecessors but do not rank our religions higher than "primitive" religions or consider our kinship system superior. Even our technology, though assuredly more advanced, may not be better in that it may not meet human needs over the long term.¹⁸

Another key justification for our belief in progress had come from biological theory. Biologists used to see natural evolution as the survival of the fittest.

By 1973 a much more complex view of trie development of organisms had swept the field, "Life is not a tale of progress," according to Stephen Jay Gould. "It is, rather, a story of intricate branching and wandering, with momentary survivors adapting to changing local environments, not approaching cosmic or engineering perfection."¹

Since textbooks do not discuss ideas, it is no surprise that they fail to address the changes in American thinking resulting from World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, or Stalinism, let alone from developments in anthropological or biological theory. By 1973, however, another problem with progress was becoming apparent: the downside risks of our increasing dominance over nature. Environmental problems have grown more ominous every year.

Most books at least mention the energy crises caused by the oil embargo of 1973 and the Iran-Iraq War in 1979. No worries, however: textbook authors imply that both crises found immediate solutions. "As a result" of the 1973 embargo, Triumph ofibeAmerican Nation tells us, "Nixon announced a program to make the United States independent of all foreign countries for its energy requirements by the early 1980's." Ten pages later, in response to gas rationing in 1979, "Carter set forth another energy plan, calling for a massive program to develop synthetic fuels. The long-range goal of the plan was to cut importation of oil in half." No mention in 1979 of Nixon's 1973 plan, which had failed so abjectly that our dependence on foreign oil had spiraled upward, not downward.²⁰ No mention that Congress never even passed most of Carter's 1979 plan, inadequate as it was. Virtually all the textbooks adopt this trouble-free approach. "By the end of the Carter administration, the energy crisis had eased off," Land of Promise reassures its readers. "Americans were building and buying smaller cars." "People gradually began to use less gasoline and conserve energy," echoes The American Tradition.

If only it were that simple! Between 1950 and 1975 world fuel consumption doubled, oil and gas consumption tripled, and the use of electricity grew almost sevenfold.²¹ If our sources of energy are not infinite, which seems likely since we live on a finite planet, then at some point we will run up against shortages. A century ago farming in America was energy self-sufficient: livestock provided the fertilizer and tillage power, farm families did the work of planting and weeding, wood heated the house, wind pumped the water, and photosynthesis grew the crops. Today American farming relies on enormous amounts of oil, not only for tractors and trucks and air conditioning, but also for fertilizers and herbicides. Given these circumstances, most social and natural scientists concluded from the 1973 energy crisis that we cannot blithely maintain our economic

growth forever. "Anyone having the slightest familiarity with the physics of heat, energy, and matter," wrote Mishan in 1977, "will realize that, in terms of historical time, the end of economic growth, as we currently experience it, cannot be that far off.''^J2 This is largely because of the awesome power of corn- pound interest. Economic growth at three percent, a conventional standard, means that the economy doubles every quarter-century, typically doubling society's use of raw materials, expenditures of energy, and generation of waste.

The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 pointed to the difficulty that capitalism, a marvelous system of production, was never designed to accommodate shortage. For demand to exceed supply is supposed to be good for capitalism, leading to increased production and often to lower costs. Oil, however, is not really produced but extracted. In a way it is rationed by the oil companies and OPEC from an unknown but finite pool. Thus the oil companies, which we habitually perceive as competing capitalist producers, might more accurately be viewed as keepers of the commons.

America has seen commons problems before. Imagine a colonial New England town in which each household kept a cow. Every morning, a family member would take the cow to the common town pasture, where it would join other cows and graze ad day under the supervision of a cowherd paid by the town. An affluent family might benefit from buying a second cow; any excess milk and butter they could sell to cowless sailors and merchants. Expansion of this sort could go on only for a finite period, however, before the common pasture was hopelessly overgrazed. What was in the short-term interest of the individual family was not in the long-term interest of the community. If we compare contemporary oil companies with cowholdtng colonial families, we see that new forms of governmental regulations, analogous to the regulated use of the commons, may be necessary to assure there will be a commons—in this case, an oil pool—for our children.²³

The commons issue afreets our society in other ways. I write this chapter within sight of Chesapeake Bay in a year when the crab and oyster harvests are unprecedentedly low. A catch of20,000,000 bushels in 1892 and 3,500,000 in 1982 fell to just 166,000 bushels in 1992. Fisherfolk have responded the way people usually do when their standard of living is imperiled: work harder. This means redoubling their efforts to take more of the few crabs and oysters still out there. Although this tactic may benefit an individual family, it cannot but wreak disaster on the commons. The problem of the bay is amplified in the oceans. The United Nations is struggling to develop a global system "to manage and repropagate the fish that are still left." Since international waters are involved, however, negotiations may not succeed until after many species have been made extinct.²⁴

Because the economy has become global, the commons now encompasses the entire planet. If we consider that around the world humans owned ten times as many cars in 1990 as in 1950, no sane observer would predict that such a proportional increase could or should continue for another 40 years.²⁵ Quantitatively, the average U.S. citizen consumes the same resources as ten average world citizens or twenty-five residents of India.²⁶ Our continued economic development coexists in some tension with a corollary of the archetype of progress: the notion that America's cause is the cause of all humankind. Thus our economic leadership is very different from our political leadership. Politically, we can hope other nations will put in place our forms of democracy and respect for civil liberties. Economically, we can only hope other nations will never achieve our standard of living, for if they did, the earth would become a desert. Economically, we are the bane, not the hope of the world. Since the planet is finite, as we expand our economy we make it less likely that less developed nations can expand theirs.

Almost every day brings new reasons for ecological concern, from deforestation at the equator to ozone holes at the poles. Cancer rates climb and we don't know why." We have no way even to measure the full extent of human impact on the earth. The average sperm count in healthy human males around the world has dropped by nearly 50 percent over the past fifty years. If environmentally caused, this is no laughing matter, for sperm have only to decline in a straight line for another fifty years and we will have wiped out humankind without even knowing how we did it!²⁸ We were similarly unaware for years that killing mosquitoes with DDT was wiping out birds of prey around the globe. Our increasing power makes it increasingly possible that humankind will make the planet uninhabitable by accident.

All these considerations imply that more of the same economic development and nation-state governance that brought us this far may not guide us to a livable planet in the long run. At some point in the future, perhaps before readers of today's high school textbooks pass their fiftieth birthdays, industrialized nations including the United States may have to move toward steady-state economies in their consumption of energy and raw materials. Getting to zero economic growth involves another form of the problem of the commons, however, for no country wants to be first to achieve a no-growth economy, just as no individual family finds it in its interest to stop with one cow. A new international mechanism may be required, one hard even to envision today. Heilbroner is pessimistic: "No substantial voluntary diminution of growth, much less a planned

reorganization of society, is today even remotely imaginable."²⁹ If tomorrow citizens must imagine diminished growth, we cannot rest easily, knowing that most high school history courses do nothing whatever to prepare Americans of the future to think imaginatively about the problem. Continued unthinking allegiance to the idea of progress in our textbooks can only be a deterrent, blinding students to the need for change, thus making change that much more difficult. David Donald characterizes the "incurable optimism" of American history courses as "not merely irrelevant but dangerous,"'⁰ In this sense, our environmental crisis is an educational problem to which American history courses contribute.

Edward O. Wilson divides those who write on environmental issues into two camps; environmentalists and exceptional ists.^{! 1} Most scholars and writers, including Wilson, are of the former persuasion. On the other side stand a relative handful of political scientists, economists, and natural scientists, several associated with right-wing think tanks, who have mounted important counterarguments to the doomsaying environmentalists. Julian Simon, Herman Kahn, and others compare today's world to the world of our ancestors and argue that although modern societies have more power to harm the planet, they also have more power to set the environment right. Hence modern technology may exempt us from environmental pressures. The exceptionalists point out that recovery time after natural disasters such as earthquakes or manmade disasters such as World War II is much shorter today than in the previous century, owing in part to the ability of our large bureaucratic organizations to mobilize information and coordinate enormous undertakings. Human life expectancy, one measure of the quality of life, continues to lengthen. Herbert London, who titled his book Why Are They Lying to Our Children? because he believes that teachers and textbooks overemphasize the perils of economic growth, points out that more food is available today than twenty years ago.⁵²

Such optimism gives economist Mishan faint comfort: "From the mere fact that humanity has survived to the present, no hope for the future can be salvaged. The human race can perish only once."³* In short, we are in a huge debate. If the majority of books and articles and the arguments in this chapter seem skewed to favor the environmentalists, perhaps the potential downside risk if they are right makes this bias appropriate. But for textbook authors simply to join the chorus of doomsayers without presenting arguments from the excep- tionalists would be intellectually negligent. Authors could show trends in the past that suggest we face catastrophe and other trends that suggest solutions. Doing so would encourage students to use evidence from history to reach their own conclusions.

History reveals many previously vital societies, from the Mayans and Easter Island to Haiti and the Canaries, that irreparably damaged their ecosystems.³⁴ "Considering the beauty of the land," Christopher Columbus wrote on first seeing Haiti, "there must be gain to be got." Columbus and the Spanish transformed the island biologically by introducing diseases, plants, and livestock. The pigs, hunting dogs, cows, and horses propagated quickly, causing tremendous environmental damage. By 1550 the "thousands upon thousands of pigs" in the Americas had all descended from the eight pigs that Columbus brought over in 1493. "Although these islands had been, since God made the earth, prosperous and full of people lacking nothing they needed," a Spanish settler wrote in 1518, after the Europeans' arrival "they were laid waste, inhabited only by wild animals and birds."" Later, sugarcane monoculture replaced gardening in the name of quick profit, thereby impoverishing the soil. More recently, population pressure has caused Haitians and Dominicans to farm the island's steep hillsides, resulting in erosion of the topsoil. Today this island ecosystem that formerly supported a large population in relative equilibrium is in far worse condition than when Columbus first saw it. This sad story may be a prophesy for the future, now that modern technology has the power to make of the entire earth a Haiti.

On the other hand, Julian Simon has pointed out how most short-term predictions of shortages in everything from whale oil in the last century to food in the 1970s to silver in the 1990s have been confuted by new technological developments.⁵⁶ Moreover, environmental damage has been undone: some American rivers that were deemed hopelessly polluted forty years ago are now fit for fish and human swimmers. Human activity has reforested South Korea.⁵⁷ Textbooks might also present these adaptive capacities of modern society.

Ironically, textbooks that assure us that everything will come out right in the end do not report any of the reasoning or evidence marshaled by Simon and his ilk. Instead they exhort students to accept on faith that they need not worry much about where we are going.³³ Their endorsement of progress is as shallow as General Electric's, a company that claims, "Progress is our most important product," but whose ecological irresponsibility earned it a place on Fortunes list of the ten worst corporate environmental offenders.⁵⁹ Not one textbook brings up the whale oil lesson, the Haiti lesson, or any other inference from the past that might bear on the question of progress and the environment. In sum, although this debate may be the most important of our time, no hint of its seriousness seeps into our history textbooks.

If textbook authors revised their closing pages to jettison the unthinking devotion to progress, their final chapters would sit in uneasy dissonance with earlier chapters. Their tone throughout would have to change. From their titles on, American history textbooks are celebratory, and the idea of progress legitimates the celebration. Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of Yankee usurpation and Negro debauchery fits with the upward curve of progress, for if relations were bad in Reconstruction, perhaps not as bad as in slavery but surely worse than what came later, then we can imagine that race relations have gradually been getting better. However, the facts about Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in many ways race relations in this country have yet to return to the point reached in, say, 1870. In that year, to take a small but symbolic example, A. T, Morgan, a white state senator from Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from New York, and was reflected.⁴⁰ Today this probably could not happen, not in Hinds County, Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to conclude that black Americans have no legitimate claim on our attention today because the problem of race relations has surely been ameliorated.⁴¹

A. T. Morgan's marriage is hard for us to make sense of, because Americans have so internalized the cultural archetype ofprogress that by now we have a built-in tendency to assume that we are more tolerant, more sophisticated, more, well, progressive than we were in the past. Even a trivial illustration— Abraham Lincoln's beard—can teach us otherwise. In I860 a clean-shaven Lincoln won the presidency; in 1864, with a beard, he was reelected. Could that happen nowadays? Today many institutions, from investment banking firms to Brigham Young University, are closed to white males with facial hair. No white presidential or Supreme Court candidate has ventured even a mustache since Tom Dewey in 1948. Beards may not in themselves be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking, but we have reached an arresting state of intolerance when the huge Disney corporation, founded by a man with a mustache, will not allow any employee to wear one. On a more profound note, consider that Lincoln was also the last American president who was not a member of a Christian denomination when taking office. Americans may not be becoming more tolerant; we may only think we are. Thus the ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism.

Not only does the siren song of progress lull us into thinking that everything now is more "advanced," it also tempts us to conclude that societies long ago were more primitive than they may have been. Progress underlay the various unilinear evolutionary schemes into which our society used to classify peoples and cultures: savagery-barbarism-civilization, for example, or gathering-hunting-horticultural-agricultural-industrial. Under the influence of these schemes, scholars completely misconceived "primitive" humans as living lives that, as Hobbes put it, were "nasty, brutish, and short," Only "higher" cultures were conceived of as having sufficient leisure to develop art, literature, or religion.

The United States was founded in a spirit of dominion over nature. "My family, I believe, have cut down more trees in America than any other name!" boasted John Adams. Benjamin Lincoln, a Revolutionary War general, spoke for most Americans of his day when he observed in 1792, "Civilization directs us to remove as fast as possible that natural growth from the lands." The Adams-Lincoln mode of thought did make possible America's rapid expansion to the Pacific, the Chicago school of architecture, and Henry Ford's assembly line. Our growing environmental awareness casts a colder light on these accomplishments, however. Since 1950 more than 25 percent of the remaining forests on the planet have been cut down. Recognizing that trees are the lungs of the planet, few people still think that this process represents progress.

Anthropologists have long known better. "Despite the theories traditionally taught in high school social studies," pointed out anthropologist Peter Farb, "the truth is, the more primitive the society, the more leisured its way of life."⁴² Thus "primitive" cultures were hardly "nasty." As to "brutish," we might recall the comparison of the peaceful Arawaks on Haiti and the Spanish conquistadors who subdued them. "Short" is also problematic. Before encountering the diseases brought by Europeans and Africans, many people in Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas probably enjoyed remarkable longevity, particularly when compared with European and African city dwellers. "They live a long life and rarely fall sick," observed Giovanni da Verrazano, after whom the Verrazano Narrows and bridge in New York City are named.^4J "The Indians be of lusty and healthful bodies not experimentally knowing the Catalogue of those health-wasting diseases which are incident to other Countries," according to a very early New England colonist, who apparently ignored the recently introduced European diseases that were then laying waste the Native Americans. He reported that the Indians lived to "three-score, four-score, some a hundred years, before the world's universal summoner cites them to the craving Crave,"⁴⁴ In Maryland another early settler marveled that many Indians were great-grandfathers, while in England few people survived to become grandparents.⁴⁵ The first Europeans to meet Australian aborigines noted a range of ages that implied a goodly number lived to be seventy. For that matter, Psalm 90 in the Bible implies that thousands of years ago most people in the Middle East lived to be seventy: "The years of our lives are three score and ten, and if by reason of strength they be four score, yet is their labor sorrow."⁴⁴

Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief in progress makes students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. To conclude that other cultures have achieved little about which we need to know is a natural side effect of believing our society the most progressive. Anthropology professors despair of the severe ethnocentrism shown by many first-year college students. William A, Haviland, author of a popular anthropology textbook, says that in his experience the possibility that "some of the things that we aspire to today—equal treatment of men and women, to cite but one example—have in fact been achieved t>y some other peoples simply has never occurred to the average beginning undergraduate,"⁴⁷ Few high schools offer anthropology courses, and fewer than one American in ten ever takes a college anthropology course, so we can hardly count on anthropology to reduce ethnocentrism. High school history and social studies courses could help open students to ideas from other cultures. That does not happen, however, because the idea of progress saturates these courses from Columbus to their final words. Therefore they can only promote, not diminish, ethnocentrism. Yet ethnocentric faith in progress in Western culture has had disastrous consequences. People who believed in their society as the vanguard of the future, the most progressive on earth, have been all too likely to indulge in such excessive cruelties as the Pequot massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, or the Great Leap Forward.

Rather than assuming that our ways must be best, textbook authors would do well to challenge students to think about practices from the American way of birth to the American way of death. Some elements of modem medicine, for instance, ate inarguably more effective and based on far better theory than previous medicines. On the other hand, our "scientific" antigravity way of birth, which dominated delivery rooms in the United States from about 1930 to 1970, shows the influence of the idea of progress at its most laughable. The analogy for childbirth was an operation: the doctor anesthetized the mother and removed the anesthetized infant like a gall bladder,⁴⁸ Even as late as 1992, only half of all women who gave birth in U.S. hospitals breastfed their babies, even though we now know, as "primitive" societies never forgot, that human milk, not bovine milk or "formula," is designed for human babies.⁴⁹ IF history textbooks relinquished their blind devotion to the archetype of progress, they could invite readers to assess technologies as to which have truly been progressive. Defining progress would itself become problematic. Alternative forms of social organization, made possible or perhaps even necessary by technological and economic developments, could also be considered. Today's children may see the decline of the nation-state, for instance, because the problem of the planetary commons may force planetary decision-making or because growing tribalism may fragment many nations from within.⁵" The closing chapters of history textbooks might become inquiry exercises, directing students toward facts and readings on both sides of such issues. Surely such an approach would prepare students for their six decades of life after high school better than today's mindlessly upbeat textbook endings,

Thoughtfulness about such matters as the quality of life is often touted as a goal of education in the humanities, but history textbooks sweep such topics under the brightly colored rug of progress. Textbooks manifest no real worries even about the environmental downside of our economic and scientific institutions. Instead, they stress the fortunate adequacy of our government's reaction. "As time went on, scientists discovered more about the effects of pollutants on the environment, and people became more concerned with environmental health," says The American Tradition. "In response, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969." Textbook authors seem much happier telling of the governmental response—mainly the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency—than discussing any continuing environmental problems. Life and Liberty goes the furthest; it prophesies, "During the next 20 years, the environment will become a major political issue," and goes on to discuss water shortages, acid rain, and tropical deforestation. But even Lift and Liberty ends its discussion: "Let us be optimistic. Our difficulties of energy and resource shortages will be solved within the next half century." The authors then speculate happily about such wonders as shorter work weeks, robot workers, lunar colonies, and synthetic foods.

"The American people have reason to move into the future with confidence," Triumph of the American Nation assures students in its final paragraph, for "the same scientific genius and engineering talents that unknowingly created many of the as yet unsolved problems remain available to solve them."⁵¹ Students find these words about as inspirational as the photograph that accompanies them: John S. Herrington in a business suit. Herrington, you remember- surely you remember?—was secretary of energy in the Reagan administration. Many students no longer believe that Herrington or all our "scientific genius and engineering talents" will save us. According to a 1993 survey, children are much more concerned about the environment than are their parents,⁵² In the late 1980s about one high school senior in three thought that nuclear or biological annihilation will probably be the fate of all mankind within their lifetimes,⁵³ "I have talked with my friends about this," a student of mine wrote in her class journal. "We all agree that we feel as if we are not going to finish our adult lives." These students had all taken American history courses, but the textbooks' regimen of good cheer does not seem to have rubbed off on them. Students know when they are being conned. They sense that underneath the mindless optimism is a defensiveness that rings hollow. Or maybe they simply never reached the cheerful endings of their textbooks.

Probably the principal effect of the textbook whitewash of environmental issues in favor of the idea of progress is to persuade high school students that American history courses are not appropriate places to bring up the future course of American history.⁵⁴ What is perhaps the key issue ofthe day will have to be discussed in other classes—maybe science or health—even though it is foremost a social rather than biological or health issue. Meanwhile, back in history class, more bland, data-free assurances that things are getting better.

E. ]. Mishan has suggested that feeding students rosy tales of automatic progress helps keep them passive, for it presents the future as a process over which they have no control." I don't believe this is why textbooks end as they do, however. Their upbeat endings may best be understood as ploys by publishers who hope that nationalist optimism will get their books adopted. Such endings really amount to concessions of defeat, however. By implying that no real questions about our future need be asked and no real thinking about trends in our history need be engaged in, textbook authors concede implicitly that our history has no serious bearing on our future. We can hardly fault students for concluding that the study of history is irrelevant.