Progresso, gerarchia, evoluzione e – mannaggia – potere.

In this article, *Progress, Hierarchy, Evolution, and, Damn It, Power*, the point of departure is a “reaction” to Fabio Dei’s reflections (September 2024) on the anthropological discomfort with the very idea of “progress”. The article broadly agrees with Dei’s diagnosis but pushes a set of implications that are not automatically shared by everyone who shares Dei’s premises. The core claim is that anthropology’s routine dismissal of “progress” as mere Western ethnocentrism has produced conceptual incoherence, especially once relativist reflexes collide with universalistic moral commitments such as human rights. The argument first revisits Melville Herskovits’ classic relativist gesture. The article reads Herskovits (and the tradition that leans on him) as trying to defend tolerance and cultural diversity, which already implies a comparative moral stance: some cultures and institutions can be judged “better” or “worse” insofar as they enable or suppress tolerance. But this creates an immediate conceptual friction: “progress” is ordinarily a notion of movement from worse to better, whereas Herskovits’ framework looks closer to an ordering or ranking of cultures by a moral criterion (relative tolerance) rather than a theory of historical improvement. The article therefore questions whether Herskovits really offers “a different concept of progress”, or rather an evaluative hierarchy that anthropology often pretends not to be making. From here, the article reconstructs a genealogy of why cultural anthropology has struggled to conceptualize progress as movement. It locates the difficulty in an idealist heritage (Herderian, and later nation-like conceptions of cultural wholes) consolidated through Boasian anti-biologism. In this intellectual formation, culture is treated as the product of human creativity under particular circumstances, and the disciplinary taboo is any move that smells like biological determinism. Marxism is presented as the “massive exception” that reintroduced determinism (economic rather than biological), and the postwar moral landscape further intensified anthropology’s anti-biological posture, turning it into a kind of disciplinary dogma. Within this background, the article argues that late twentieth century anthropology inherited a semantic and moral confusion between “progress” and “revolution”. Marxist hegemony, coupled with the broader left imaginary, blurred improvement over time (progress) with radical rupture (revolution). The two are treated as morally rival terms: revolution typically presupposes a condemnation of the present and promises a future break, while progress can be conceived as incremental transformation assessed against stable standards. The article suggests that, once revolutionary promises became historically discredited by the realities of “liberated” societies, parts of the left drifted into a generalized anti-present mood and began to recycle, and eventually legitimize, anti-progress repertoires traditionally associated with the right. This is the point at which Pinker and Graeber are introduced as two emblematic poles of the contemporary impasse. Pinker is treated as effective at showing that certain measurable conditions of life have improved (including for large populations under capitalist globalization), thereby exposing the left’s reflexive anti-progress posture. Graeber, by contrast, is framed not as an antimodernist but as a thinker whose deepest target is hierarchy-producing power itself, especially as crystallized in Western capitalism. On this reading, Graeber’s political anthropology is less a critique of “modernity” than a radical refusal of power’s generative role in creating hierarchy, with the practical outcome that politics becomes either utopian negation or small-scale enclaves of withdrawal. The article then adds a further corrective: it challenges the premise that Western rationality emerged by overcoming Judeo-Christian religion. Drawing on a historical thesis associated with Tom Holland, it proposes an inversion: Western moral and rational formations are deeply rooted in Christianity, and the West has arguably become less rational insofar as it has become less faithful to that inheritance. This move matters because it reframes what counts as “progress” and what the supposed enemy of reason actually is. It also sets up a critique of a broadly secularist anthropology that treats religion as a residual pathology (fear, ignorance, domination), rather than as a cognitive and moral instrument that can ally with reason or oppose it depending on historical and cultural configurations. At this stage the article pivots to its constructive proposal: an evolutionary re-opening. The emergence of genetics and later epigenetics is treated as a turning point that connected biology, evolution, and information, making it newly plausible to speak about adaptation and therefore about progress in a non-naive, non-stageist way. The claim is not “genetic determinism” but the opposite: modern evolutionary thinking (with the internal critiques associated with Gould and Lewontin) allows testable hypotheses and forces social scientists to take seriously language, symbolic cognition, and human sociality without fleeing into an idealist notion of “culture” detached from bodies and environments. Epigenetics is then used to argue that culture is not “determined” by geography, but is realized in geography as a situated response that can be more or less adaptive, and can persist through inertia or hysteresis even when contexts shift. From here, “progress” becomes intelligible only within a framework that accepts measurement. The article insists on two kinds of metrics. First, a cognitive metric: tools for accurately registering, comparing, and explaining practices. Second, a moral metric: some principled way, at least in certain domains, to say that something is better or worse. The decisive claim is that comparison requires a common unit of evaluation, which is necessarily external to the particular cultures being compared. If anthropology refuses any external metric, it cannot coherently explain why the relativist position so often feels unconvincing even to anthropologists themselves. The “something that does not convince” remains a vague discomfort until it is articulated as an explicit act of comparison. This brings the text to its provocation: progress talk entails hierarchy talk. Any serious discourse of progress (as movement from worse to better) requires admitting the possibility of intercultural hierarchies on specific dimensions. The article proposes reversing the usual order of taboo and asking whether anthropology can start from concrete comparative hierarchies in limited domains, then see whether a concept of progress becomes workable. Examples include gender equality, tolerance of diversity, and freedom of expression. The claim is not that a single global ranking of cultures is easy or desirable, but that refusing the very possibility of such comparative judgments is a way of protecting a prior conclusion, often an anti-Western prejudice, rather than a defensible epistemic stance. The final stretch extends the provocation to religion in a post-secular world. If religions are treated, in a broadly Geertzian way, as cultural systems that ground values and practices with large-scale social effects, then it becomes at least thinkable to compare religions on specific criteria connected to reasoned argument, individual liberties, or human rights. The article suggests that anthropology has inherited a residual anti-Christian polemic, a secularist reflex that no longer fits the contemporary epistemic landscape, especially now that large textual corpora and comparative access undermine simplistic nineteenth-century accounts of “religion” as mere ignorance or fear. What is needed, the article concludes, is a more intellectually honest comparative study of religions in the plural, and a disciplinary willingness to reintroduce “progress” into the toolkit once the anti-religious and anti-Western prejudgments are confronted. In short, the article argues that anthropology cannot keep denouncing progress as ethnocentric while simultaneously making universal moral claims. If progress is to be discussed at all, it requires explicit standards, explicit comparison, and therefore a controlled re-entry of hierarchy into anthropological reasoning, including in domains that contemporary anthropology often treats as morally untouchable.