What is Progressive in the 21st Century?
Edward MillerOct 8, 2010Embrace Unity
I have often referred to myself as a progressive but I have felt increasingly uneasy doing so. The word -progressive’, like virtually every other term which refers to a political ideology, has become so broadly applied as to become virtually meaningless.
Historically, the term conjured images of Teddy Roosevelt and “Fighting Bob” La Follette. Progressives were seen as outspoken and fiery advocates for the common man. They were trust-busters, anti-monopolists, and anti-corporatists. In terms of foreign policy they were at times divided, but when it came to economics their voice was loud and clear: “We demand that big business give the people a square deal.”
The rest of that Roosevelt quote reads as follows: “in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall himself be given a square deal.” So progressivism was hardly anti-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination. It was simply a movement which sought to rectify the imbalances of power that had been usurped by the business elites. In the context of the era, this often happened through compromises, picking out “good trusts” from “bad trusts,” and later through the mixed bag of the New Deal.
In the present day, the Democrats have dusted off the progressive moniker and appropriated it for themselves. At their best they see themselves as nostalgic curators of the memory of the post-war economic order. The one which propelled the longest period of sustained rising wages and growth in US history. At their worst, Democrats are merely the friendlier face of corporatism. Unfortunately, if opinion polls are to be believed, the image which seems to be prevailing is the latter one. Thus, the good name of progressivism has been dragged through the mud, and all the Democrats have to say to their disappointed public is, “Stop whining.”
Even if we for some reason concede the best of intentions to the Democrats, and conclude they are hoping to achieve progressive change through corporatist means, it is self-defeating lunacy at best. Defending these lunatics gets us nowhere. Virtually nothing hoped for by genuine progressives will come to pass unless our discourse changes dramatically, and we once again find that fighting anti-corporatist spirit.
Perhaps it is blasphemy to say, but what if progressivism’s historic achievement, the New Deal economy, is no longer viable? Kevin Carson has written anumberofdamningcritiquesof the progressive movement. Instead of engaging in the quixotic task of perpetually reforming bureaucracies that will inevitably corrupt, we must recognize that the era of big business, big bureaucracy, and big infrastructure needs to come to an end. There are no “good trusts.” With its crowning invention of the Internet, the corporate-state apparatus has laid the seeds for its own obsolescence.
I suspect Carson is wrong when he says that progressivism was fundamentally misguided from the start, considering the realities of the Gilded Age through the WW2 era and the fact that it’s doubtful the Internet would be here so soon otherwise. Though, since the Internet has arrived, perhaps it is time to recognize that now more than ever we need to re-orient our economy towards Lewis Mumford’sneotechnicideal.
We must usher in an era of flexible manufacturing networks, digital fabrication, and distributed production. This sort of resilient model is our only hope against the converging crises we are experiencing, from the economic to the ecological.
Can progressives take the lead? We cannot go on defending the ever more draconian nature of the so-called “Intellectual Property” regime, the enormous corporate-captured regulatory system, the blood-sucking finance sector, and the gargantuan military-industrial-complex. We must stand firm against them, like a bull moose!
A new concept of progressIn common parlance, the term 'progress' is associated with technical and scientific advancement, or anything which enhances the comforts of life. Humanity is said to have made tremendous progress today because life seems so much more comfortable these days than it was a few centuries ago.People today can travel fast by automobile and airplanes, whereas only in the last century they were travelling by horse-drawn buggies and bullock carts. If we go back to ancient times, people had to travel on foot.
Thus progress is commonly understood as an increase in living comforts through scientific inventions, which have eased our lives not only physically but also intellectually. The invention of paper has helped spread the ideas of scholars. People can now engage< Engaging> their minds reading novels and other literature. Thus, scientific discoveries may be credited with tremendous advance that humanity has made in the physical and intellectual realm.However, all this may not be progress.To be sure, it has resulted in a great change in the mode of living, but most scientific discoveries have created problems which were non-existent before. Faster travel today has increased the risk of accident; industrialization has resulted in environmental pollution and cancer and other diseases unheard of in the past; modern medicine quickly cures the malady but generates side-effects requiring further treatment. Even in the intellectual sphere, there is much available to keep the mind occupied, but people today suffer from emotional problems and neuroses that did not afflict them before
Can you think of any invention which (while reducing life's boredom) has not added to life's danger at the same time? If dishwashers wash our dishes, air conditioners cool our rooms, laundry machines clean our clothes, automobiles do our walking and so on, life certainly appears blissful relative to what our forefathers had to endure in a science-less world. But then they did not have to contend with electric shocks, fatal accidents, air, water, land and noise pollution, noxious automobile fumes, urban congestion, super-selfishness, crime and so on.While the concept of progress in the material sphere is at best dubious, things are no better in the intellectual sphere.People in ancient times were intellectually backward, but they did not suffer from emotional stress and neuroses. One who is less scholarly is also less prone to mental disturbances, whereas an intellectual is highly vulnerable in this regard. He creates unnecessary problems in his own web of imagination, and experiences sleepless nights. Hencein the intellectual sphere also progress is unlikely, if not impossible, because the feeling of increased pleasure is likely to be balanced by one of increasing pain.
The barometer of progress in the ultimate analysis must be mental pleasure which is really nothing but a mental vibration expressed through the relaxation of the nerves; that is, pleasure is nothing but a mental vibration emitted by relaxed nerves. On the other hand, pain is just an opposite experience. When the nerves are under tension, the vibration generated in the mind is called pain. In evaluating the impact of science, people usually focus on the convenience it has provided, while ignoring the nervous tension it has created in our lives. The fact that progress is not possible in the material sphere only means that scientific change increases both pleasure and pain in the same proportion.
A person who has won an argument over another is usually very happy and sometimes delirious with joy<欣喜若狂>. But after a while, he will experience an corresponding amount of pain in some other aspect of his mind. The reason is that human mind has a certain finite mass and volume. Purely intellectual study and analysis fail to enhance this mass; all they do is to increase the activity and play of ideas within a given intellectual arena. With a greater number of thoughts criss-crossing a given mental area, the result inevitably is an increased clash in the mind. Hence occur the mental breakdowns; hence the neuroses, hence the growing need for psychiatrists in intellectually developed societies. Is then progress possible at all? The answer is yes.
Human existence has three aspects - physical, mental and spiritual. While the first two are not amenable to progress, the third is. Increased happiness in that sphere is not neutralized by increased misery.
While physical and intellectual activities deal with the limited, spirituality is concerned with the unlimited. Hence the goal in the spiritual arena is not the finite but the infinite. Therefore, the feeling of pleasure resulting from spiritual activity is not accompanied by pain, or happiness by misery.
This then is true progress.
In the spiritual experience there is no negative movement; every effort there is a forward march unaccompanied by any deleterious side-effect.
Spiritual activities include meditation and selfless living. Without providing help to the needy, the forward movement to the infinite is impossible.
And since the mind's goal is infinitude, the spiritual life results in an expansion in the volume as well as the mass of the mind. As a result, the mental conflict declines and the nerves get relaxation. The person becomes broad-minded. He or she seeks to serve others, to share in their pains. A community which respects the selfless beings and attempts to emulate them also then experiences increased happiness without corresponding pain.
That is when true progress occurs in the entire society. The degree of selflessness, therefore, is the true gauge of society's progress, not its material development, nor its intellectual attainment.
While real progress is unlikely in the material and mental sphere, human beings should by no means abandon scientific and intellectual pursuits. But scientific advances should be 'spiritualized'; that is to say, they should be accompanied by spiritual practices at the same time. For such practices enable us to gain increasing mastery over our body and mind. All detrimental effects of scientific and intellectual developments on the human organism can thus be brought under control.
During the past century, thousands of remarkable inventions and new theories have almost totally transformed our way of life. But spiritually, we have stagnated and even moved backwards. Consequently, battles and wars have been deadlier in the current century than ever before. Rising greed, crime, drugs and environmental pollution threaten to overwhelm the delicate thread of life on our finite planet.
The moral is that change in the physical and mental sphere, without spiritual advance, is ultimately self-destructive.What Is Progress In Our Modern Society? As defined by the Oxford dictionary, progress is: “development towards an improved or more advanced condition.” Merriam-Webster defines it as: “the process of improving or developing something over a period of time” or, more concisely, “gradual betterment.”As is the case with attempting to understand any word or phrase, we are confined by the boundaries of our own language. How can we attempt to explain what a word represents when we only have other replacement words to use in our explanation?补充材料But it is not our language that I wish to discuss, or more specifically, not the issue of our language being both an advantage and a hindrance. The issue at hand is the context of the word in which we use it. What its meaning is when we speak it, what we understand by the term when we hear it.Progress is a term that evokes positive feelings. When someone is said to have made progress then we consider it a good thing. Inherently then it seems that progress is a virtue rather than a vice.I believe this to be true, and I am sure many of you would agree with me. It’s highly likely that if we encountered someone that did not agree, that person would have a very difficult time in persuading us that progress is in fact a bad thing.This widespread belief then, that progress is good, immediately faces a contradiction when taken into the political sphere. Progressives are overwhelmingly people of the Left, and yet if what they advocate is inherently good, why are our societies not dominated by these sorts of political parties? Put simply, if we all agree that progress is good, and there is a progressive party in existence in our nation, why are we not voting for them every time?In political terms, and by its very definition, to be conservative is to avoid change. It is to be cautious and a believer in, and defender of, the status quo. Conservative can be seen as the exact opposite of progressive, and yet in the UK, we have had a Conservative Prime Minister for four years. Does this mean then that the people of the UK knowingly deprived themselves of something considered inherently good?The problem with politics is that words very quickly lose all meaning. Freedom, choice, promise, hero, progress. Evidence of this can be seen, oxymoronically, in the fact you can get Progressive Conservatives. People who are firm believers of cautious, conservative ideals, yet also claim to be progressive in what they wish for the society. And it is this that perfectly illustrates the problem of progress.Progress is a mercenary and a whore. It is picked up and put down more times than it cares to remember. The values and the beliefs that we have grown to associate with it become hazy. No longer are we confident in what it represents. Such is its over-usage that the word itself has lost almost all meaning。Progress in today’s society is more money in the bank, it is faster cars, and more devastating weapons. It is cheaper items in shops, more railways and roads, and continuing discussions with tyrants across the world. If we return to the initial definitions that we spoke of, with progress being “development towards an improved or more advanced condition”, we are left with the more questions. Aside from the figure on the bank balance, what has developed? Are cheaper T-shirts and faster cars the “advanced condition” that we want to see?Unless you are nothing but the most shallow of materialists, then I would assume your answer would be no. Faster cars, cheaper clothes, and more money in the bank are not the pillars of the “advanced condition” in which we wish to live, and they do not represent progress It is for this reason that when we discuss the issue of progress within societies, we must ignore such meaningless topics and instead concentrate on what can truly be worthy of the label of progress. The conditions in which we live, our life expectancy, the relationship between men and women, the effect our activities are having on the planet, the opportunities available to a nation’s populace.In 2013 a South Korean film namedSnowpiercer 《雪国列车》was released. It was based on a French graphic novel, and though it scored highly on both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I felt it was a ratherpoor watch. It does however contain a nice metaphor for progress. A speeding train, continually moving on a circular track. Going nowhere fast.
Over a century earlier, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson had his own metaphor for progress. In a campaign speech which, like the title of this piece, was entitled “What is Progress?” He said:
“All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those things that in my boyhood days we called “treadmills,” a treadmill being a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere.”
Until we come to realise what does and does not constitute progress, we will continue to be that mule walking on Woodrow’s treadmill for many years to come.
