Technology: Very rapid progress
Science: Rapid Progress
Public morals: Slow progress
Sports: Slow progress
Human personalities: No progress
Art: No progress
I would agree on tech, disagree based on said frustrations above on science..."Public morals", not sure what that means; Sports: Slow progress (?!) To make the judgment more confusing Mr. Sumner writes, "The human body doesn’t change much from one generation to the next, but athletes are clearly better today than a few decades ago, and much better than a century ago." "Human personalities" (?) Doesn't "No progress" go without saying? Homo sapiens are hard-wired it seems to me, the whole of our personalities is not going to change.
I understand why any person would adjudge that there has been "no progress" made in the arts, and Sumner gives one commonly-stated reason (if the judgment is correct). Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, in 1968 I believe, that all post-Renaissance art in the West was a matter of "technical refinement," that all of the fundamental challenges, foreshortening, the illusion of three dimensionality and so forth, had been resolved by artists. How are you going to improve on Michelangelo? And then along came photography. Well, that about killed the painterly drive for realism!
Sumner also gives an alternate vantage which I think is true: modern art shifted to become "idea-driven." Indeed the great art critic Arthur Danto argued that with Andy Warhol art was collapsed with philosophy. I can say this with a straight face and sincerity: I do not consider Warhol or Mark Rothko or David Hockney or Jackson Pollock to be "inferior" to Michelangelo. Clearly they are not as "technically refined" as Michelangelo or van Eyck or, or, or--and yes, not as talented with the brush in that sense. However. But. The single most moving moment I ever had before a work of art was seeing the Rothko Chapel paintings before I even knew what they were in an art magazine. I have told the story previously. In brief, I was leafing through an Art Forum waiting for my girlfriend to get ready for dinner and she came out of her bedroom ready to go just as I saw the photographs of the paintings. I put the magazine back in the rack and we left. I didn't even get the chance to read who painted them, and spent months, maybe years, googling "purple paintings restoration Texas", the only things I could remember, even emailing museums! I stare in uncomprehending awe at Bernini's technique in sculpture but Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings bypass my eyes and my brain and go directly into my soul.
Anyway, those are my answers to "Where are we making progress?"
