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 every-thing
now is more “advanced,” it also tempts us to conclude that societies long ago
were more primitive than they may have been. Progress underlies 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,