But is this binary entrenched in childhood, are masculine pressures as strong as ever, and to what extent does the progress of men affect women?
Central to the "modernist" theology was the immanence of God; that is, the notion that the divine will of God could be seen in the progress of man on earth.
In a sense, Robinson is a kind of contemporary George Eliot: socially engaged, preoccupied with the environment and the moral progress of man (especially as catalyzed through art) and preoccupied with the legacy of John Calvin (a misunderstood humanist, by Robinson's lights).
Even the 19th-century frescoes by Wilhelm von Kaulbach, which once traced the progress of man from the Tower of Babel to the glory of Prussia, persist as small fragments embedded high up in the brick, like half-recalled dreams come to life.
Channel 4, 3.55pm 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) Landmarks are the motifs of Kubricks sci-fi masterpiece about the progress of man from his Darwinian dawn to his re-entry into black holes, and his film is itself a cinematic landmark, defining the late 1950s sensibility while exploring the state of the hour.
As such, he had a firm faith in the progress of man, civilization, and Western Christendom; hence, he saw American slavery as a brutal backwardness that ran counter to the progress of history.
Just as the initial progress of man requires the spark of the eternal consciousness, so the good man's actions grow out of the self-realising principle embodied in his nature (his character) and his social background (his circumstances).
Like so many Masonic rituals, it symbolises the progress of man from darkness to enlightenment.
"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel/And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land/Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken/Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man".
