Why Progressivism died, and why it should stay dead

I liked the term "progressive" when I first heard it being thrown around in a modern political context a few years ago. I thought that it managed to, amazingly, be simultaneously quite fresh, but also, rife with historical meaning. Even better, it was a history that it seemed few people could object to. Who nowadays would object to progressive reforms like urban sanitization and clean food?

Of course, I was wrong when I thought progressivism had a clean slate. The progressives were quite fond of, for example, eugenics, and the sort of racial psuedo-science that traditionally accompanies that doctrine. Now, one might argue that all historic movements have their dark sides, and they’d probably be right. But progressive fondness for eugenics is indicative of a larger problem, a sort of sterile scienticism which goes hand in hand with the ideology. It’s easy to see how one might relate scientific administration of the economy, to scientific administration of the gene pool.

The problem with progressivism is that it places as it’s central tenant the noxious idea of “progress.” Progressives never really seem to analyze the notion of progress, or try to understand what’s it’s relationship is to the goals which it aspires towards, but nevertheless they seem to feel as if the word somehow is so meaningful enough to be used as a tag for their ideology.

But what does progress mean? It has one relatively innocuous meaning, which is moving forward physically. But it has another meaning which became prevalent during the Enlightenment period. It was a myth of historical development which usurped ideas of cyclical or regressive development, so popular amongst the Greeks, Roman’s and Renaissance Italians, and argued that man was moving towards some sort of ideal society propelled by the development of technology, and rational governance.

Implicit in this myth was, first of all, a naïve notion that scientific reasoning could both determine what constituted proper values, and how a state could best act in order to realize those values. Secondly there was an exaggerated faith in technology and science (the French during the revolution, for example, practically deified reason.) Thirdly, there was a sense of historical inevitability.

The latter of these three notions -- the idea of historic inevitability -- is the easiest to debunk. No one in their right mind, looking at the 20th century, could say that every political development which occurred constituted an improvement upon earlier forms. The idea of predicting the future via a process of rational thought, also, seems like a dubious endeavor in and of itself. Many of the best minds of the past couple centuries have sought to do precisely that via the logic of Marxism, but we all know how that turned out.

The first two notions -- an exaggerated faith in science, and I naive belief in the ability of reason to provide man with moral values -- a which are the more dangerous elements of the idea of progress, are most easily debunked with history. It’s no accident that the term progressivism fell out of favor with the onset of World War I. The idea that we were moving towards a higher stage of society, propelled via technology, seemed much more dubious after we discovered that technology, along with allowing us to prepare food quicker, also allowed us to kill tens of thousands of people in a single day. But disillusionment with technology, science, reason, and the idea of progress, reached an all time height, understandably, in the wake of World War II. Not only did we see technology being misused, we saw scientific management, almost tayloristic principles of production, being applied to the question of genocide. Horkeimer and Adorno, some of the more astute intellectuals of the period, came to the conclusion that reason was merely a tool, something like math. It could be applied to any problem, whether it be the creation of world peace, or the mass extermination of Jews, with equal validity, because reason could never provide one with moral values. Philosophy’s hundred year decay into moral relativism demonstrates precisely that.

While it may seem tempting to resurrect faith in science in a period during which the very truth of scientific inquiry is being assailed, there’s a huge difference between believing in science’s ability to produce accurate results, and believing that science is always beneficial. We have to be wary of the tools that we develop, and learn to control them right. Moreover, it’s important that we not begin to imagine that history is going to move in the right direction without us working to make it move that way. Finally we need to approach the idea of value justification intelligently.

Now, a lot of people might say that progressives never actually argue for any of this. That’s quite true. But it’s all commonly associated with the idea of progress, and anyone who identifies as a progressive, and thinks at all about what that means, should at least subconsciously begin take in some of these ideas. I know I did. And I have noticed that at least one of these intellectual trends is now quite common amongst the left. It used to be that the left was a bunch of “bleeding heart liberals,” that we were seen, and probably rightly so, as being lead by empathetic emotions. Now I can’t talk to a liberal who doesn’t imagine that he’s right because his ideas are based off of reason, while the right is governed by superstitious irrationality. Not only is that somewhat haughty, it’s manifestly untrue. Science won't tell you what's morally right and wrong. You won't find the answers to your moral dilemmas in a test tube, those answers will only be found inside, by searching through your soul and deciding for yourself what you think is right and wrong.