Some (tierd) thoughts on progress
I was challenged on a political forum for my association of the term ‘progressive’ with the left. Given recent form it’s not hard to see why, being brutally honest, the left lost pretty much any more than a nominal notion of standing for real progress somewhere in-between Russia’s Red October and the Fall of the Wall. Liberals became caught in the dilemma of defending capitalism as a more democratically structured society but also a viciously socially unequal one. Pulled both ways they engineered a compromise in statist socialism; ironically mimicking communism in seeing the state as the vehicle through which Utopia would be delivered, gift-wrapped in suitably radical blandishments as it was handed down to the grateful masses. Communism meanwhile became the exact opposite of what it was intended to be; far from an ideology of liberation it became a tool of vicious repression, mainly of the very people it was supposed to liberate.
Somewhere along the way the very idea of progress became tainted and then perverted as rabid right-wingers stole it off the battered body of the left. Why did they bother? Put purely and simply they bothered because there is something inherently human about the cause of progress. At the very core of it all is the notion that we can do better; that we are on a constant quest for self-improvement as a species. If you get down to brass-tacks then that, my friends, is the motor force of evolution. Where would we be now if some force hadn’t compelled our ancestors to rub together two flints or move into oral communication? Progress is primal; its part of human nature.
Politically speaking, of course, that recognition does little to help us chart a course. It does however explain why the language of progress is such potent political currency and how so many great, epoch shaping, movements of the past have taken the cause of progress as there starting point. Progress is often won through struggle and that’s a truth liberals often want to shy away from although this does not always mean armed struggle, sometimes it is the ‘armed’ clash of ideas that produces most progress. Right-wingers, often less idealistic and more pragmatic, fall prey to this liberal weakness less often.
This is not to be confused with the recently popularised perversion of progress; namely the neo-conservative dictum that progress is delivered from high by the mighty onto a supposedly gratefully waiting population. Sad to say it but the notion is not ‘new’ at all. It stretch’s back all the way unto the beginnings of civilisation; to the time when the ‘glorious mission of Rome’ was to civilise the world under its tyranny. In so much that progress presupposes the destruction of the old it is true that to make an omelette you have to break some eggs. However, the way we go about that should be a tad more sophisticated nowadays. Rome knew little better; America, steeped in a history of rebellion against unjust rule, not delivered from a foreign power but fought for by its people, should know a lot better.
Right-wingers often over emphasise the competitive element to progress. Little would have been gained in terms of human progress if we had simply isolated ourselves and competed as individuals. Effective competition can only go hand-in-hand with cooperation. Brilliant breakthroughs are possible on an individual scale but for them to achieve critical mass they require cooperation and implementation from other sources. Here we see the second fundamental strength of the left’s vision of progress. Strength comes from when we unite together. Division makes us weak; however unity cannot be gained at any price, it has to be built around strong foundations of shared values and goals. Society is our strength and in turn society protects its weak and raises them above the lowest level. We are only as strong as our weakest link. This is not to say individuals cannot prosper; they can and would better within the framework of a strong society.
A strong society does not necessarily mean a strong state though. The state is a guide, a builder of the framework. It does not, and cannot, impose that framework on the unwilling. It is also a guardian of society’s, and individuals within that society, rights against infringement even by the state itself. The state’s role in promoting a strong society should be extremely limited; it should not even try to impose an identity but allow a society to develop healthily its own identity and voice and only take measures which facilitate that. Coercion should be a weapon of last resort against those who threaten social cohesion (not necessarily the position of the state) and against whom no other means work. Other than that, the role of state should be to integrate itself more fully with its citizenry; they is nothing fundamentally wrong with wanting the state to, eventually, wither away.
A lot could be said about the religious misappropriation of progress but the undeniable truth that the integral nature of it to the fabric of humanity lends a spiritual edge to it (and indeed religion does have, somewhere, a human core). This deification of the secular progressive ideal has to be treated with caution though lest it become an ossified bulwark against change (witness the Soviet Union). If it is nothing else then progress belongs to people, in all their dramas and vibrancy and (often misplaced) passions and conflicts. It is this notion of progress, as a living breathing thing, that the left must recapture if it is to win the bitter ideological battles that lie before it.
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