Once upon a time, there was an evil free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Thousands took to the streets in protest against the deal, even if they didn’t know exactly what they were protesting against. They just knew it was bad. Like, it “would mean the New Zealand Parliament would not be able to pass laws in the future.” So thank goodness that the new Ardern government saved us from this entirely plausible legislative Armageddon and, instead, gave us the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is comprehensive by leaving out stuff that the original TPP included and progressive “because it goes beyond reducing costs for businesses.” Amazing what a difference a couple of words can make, though leading TPP critic Professor Jane Kelsey was unimpressed by the new deal: “the new government … have been spinning like crazy to justify the u-turn they’d done” she said, in an article in which the new trade minister trumpeted cost reductions for exporters.
Cynicism about trade negotiations aside, this episode illustrated the power of “progressive”, one of the most loaded words in our political lexicon. It was standard-issue rhetoric for Prime Minister Ardern, hailed internationally as a “progressive icon”. It’s a dominant and positive way of describing yourself in New Zealand politics—no-one wants to be the opposite of progressive, to be (gasp) conservative. But what if progress is taking you to the wrong destination? In that case, the best thing you can do is turn around as fast as possible. For reasons I’ll explain, I think progressivism is heading into a dead-end. But first, and in the spirit of Roger Scruton, I want to consider what’s true and good about progressivism. What should we save from this hegemonic ideology, and what should we reject?
Scruton’s admirably charitable How to be a Conservative considers the truth of rival philosophies, from liberalism to environmentalism to nationalism. In each chapter, he first spells out what he thinks each of them gets right, before considering where they fall short. Long-time readers might remember that we toured through the book in earlier posts. Here, I want to do the same with progressivism, which perhaps wasn’t sufficiently popular to merit attention in Sir Roger’s day, but which straddles the commanding heights of cultural certitude in ours.
Progressivism provides a moral engine, driving us to right wrongs and reflecting a yearning for justice and righteousness. “[T]he arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said. When we see an evil, like racism and segregation, we want to fight against it, and believing that we can win the fight stops us from becoming cynical or even complicit in the injustice. When we look around our modern world, we see many signs of this progress. On average, health and life expectancy have increased over the decades, we have greater political and social equality (you may or may not have been told that New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote), we’re more respectful of and interested in other cultures, and we have a freedom of movement around the globe that would have been almost unimaginable just a couple of generations ago. This combination of outrage at injustice and optimism that it will be overcome is a crucial rebuke to the worst instincts of some conservatives, who might preserve the status quo just because it’s the status quo or, worse, because it suits those in power. This is where we get the (unfortunately recognisable) caricature of conservatives as slow liberals, lacking moral imagination themselves but happy enough to conserve others’ reforms.
But progressivism’s characteristic spirit is also its fatal flaw, which we might sum up as: progressives gonna progress. That is, progress is good just because it’s progress, and the status quo is bad just because it’s the status quo. But believers in progress should have to answer this question: progress from what, to what? The idea of progress simultaneously depends on and conceals a moral imperative, an idea of ‘oughtness’, that things should be different—but merely cloaking yourself in progressive guise doesn’t actually tell anyone where you think we should be going. These days, there’s a quite specific ideology behind the mask of progressivism. It goes by many names—social justice; diversity, equity, and inclusion; expressive individualism; autonomy. All the names have two ideas in common: first, that individuals should be the masters of their own destiny, able to re-make their world to match their desires and objectives rather than, say, accepting the world the way it is and living in accordance with that pre-existing moral architecture. Second, that social systems and structures encode and perpetuate oppression by preventing people from exercising their freedom and being who they truly are.
This is a radical and comprehensive ideology and, powered by belief that progress is a moral necessity, it brooks no dissent. This is why dissenters are told they’re “on the wrong side of history”—not just wrong, but evil, fated to be a byword for ignorance and repression in the annals of history. It’s also totalitarian. That’s a big claim, so think of it this way. If society as a whole is unjust and if this is due to oppressive structures, “progress” demands that these structures are dismantled and replaced across our common life. Anything less is appeasement, and appeasers end up on the wrong side of history (just ask Neville Chamberlain). So we can’t tolerate disagreement, conscientious objections, or even honest questions that cast doubt on the empire of progress. See, for example, the de-banking cases in the UK, including an Anglican vicar querying whether his bank really needed to promote Pride Month and getting his account closed for having the wrong views. “Your comments will not stand!” spluttered the bank at the vicar.
There’s a good dose of chronological snobbery in progressivism. The past was bad because the people who inhabited it were ignorant, narrow-minded, superstitious (or, worse, religious). We, on the other hand, are educated, cosmopolitan, scientific. Curiously, progressives don’t ask themselves an obvious question: how will their descendants judge them? Applying the progressives’ own logic, won’t the grandchildren of today’s social justice warriors conclude their ancestors were ignorant, narrow-minded, etc—by definition, less morally advanced? And if that’s unpalatable, what does it tell us about the claim that the future is always more moral than the past? Maybe that it’s not just wrong, but arrogant, and that every age has its virtues and its vices and all that changes is their composition.
Of course, if progressives concede this point then their ideology collapses on itself. If we’re just as moral as our ancestors and as our descendants, there’s no reason to think our human future will be superior to the present or the past. It’ll be better in some ways and worse in others, but it certainly won’t be utopia. This might sound blindingly obvious but it needs to be stated because utopianism is particularly pernicious. These days there’s a sort of naivety about utopian ideals that treats them as a benign sentiment in a if-you-shoot-for-the-moon-and-miss-you-still-hit-the-trees kind of way. There’s no harm in trying to create a perfect world, right? But untethered from reality, these efforts can do more harm than good. Downsizing New Zealand’s military because you believe in multilateralism and a “benign strategic environment” might sound good (we all want “world peace”, right?), but it could be a bit awkward in a couple of decades when a not-especially-friendly great power is sniffing around the South Pacific and you no longer have much of value to offer your traditional allies. (This is not a hypothetical.)
There are, however, none so blind as those who won’t see, and progressive true believers seem to have the upper hand in our cultural institutions. Of course, it can be hard to tell who’s a true believer and who’s just saying what they need to say in order to keep their status and their social licence to make money—a key driver of the “woke capital” phenomenon whereby large profit-driven corporates have suddenly become some of the most fervent advocates for social justice. In what is doubtless a coincidence, uttering progressive shibboleths just happens to secure power and influence for their mouthpieces.
If you’ve followed this far, you’ll realise I don’t think there’s anything new about this. There will always be bad ideas—utopianism should have been crushed under the rubble of the worlds that Stalin and Mao made, but heresies have a way of rising from the ashes. Our task is to combat the ideas that disfigure our time and place, like our ancestors did and our descendants will do. As the progressives themselves have taught us, this is a moral imperative. We just need to approach it with a little more realism about the human condition, a little more tolerance for differing views, and a little more humility about our own limitations.
Another goodie Alex. Love, 'There’s a good dose of chronological snobbery in progressivism.....'
On Scruton I'm easy to convince. Great piece Alex.