Progressivism

It occurred to me this morning that the root anger and fuel of so-called Progressivism is precisely the fact that they don’t believe progress is possible.  They don’t believe in moral hierarchies, that some people are better than others, that some moral choices are better than others.  This is implied, for example, in the assumption that ONLY racism could have caused blacks to fail to thrive after all the formal restrictions on their access to the wheels of power and success were lifted.

I well remember listening to a series on Existentialism and the lecture on Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, how the implied belief was that all belief in individual moral progress was an illusion.  Once one grants this–and it is a common outcome for atheists–then an existential crisis happens.  One way out is to embrace radical politics–politics being an earthly and empirical religion–which focus on an abstraction: SOCIAL development.  And in what does such development consist?  Leveling and homogenizing.  It consists precisely in a manic need to deny that some people are better than others, that they are more diligent, honest, knowledgeable, competent, compassionate, loving, empathetic, etc.

Goodness as I understand it and so-called Progressivism–which I normally term Regressivism–are literally antipodal.

And to be clear, nobody–least of all me–wants to countenance physical suffering from poverty, or the violence of hatred.  This is not the point I am making.  The point I am making is that countries like Cuba are the end game of the leveling and homogenization process.  In Cuba everyone is poor, has no opportunities for improvement, no good outlet for creative energy, and is watched relentlessly by a vast horde of informers.  If they step out of line, they might get locked in a tiny little box, too small even to sit comfortably in, with a little bitty slit for air, and left there for a month.  Their ordeal will leave no physical marks, and the government will deny using this “soft” torture, as the Soviets called it.

There is no substitute for doing your own thinking and forming your own opinions, and the proven methods of getting closest to the truth are gathering as many facts as you can, forming patterns from them, and then performing logical operations on them as dispassionately as you can, then determining how you FEEL about what you have, you think, uncovered. I obviously have plenty of room for feelings.  I talk about them all the time.  I simply think that the capacity to integrate them into an overall perceptual strategy is essential if you are going to avoid being wrong in large ways over long periods of time.