BY ALEX STORY
The Progressive haunts our public square.
You will find him effortlessly promoting his creed on our screens, our universities, the HR departments of our largest companies, our civil service and our parliament.
He is part of our “new establishment“, according to Andrew Neil, the veteran broadcaster.
He is everywhere.
You know him because he tells you, shamelessly, when he introduces himself.
He knows what is right and what is wrong. Core to his belief is that man, like technology, is perfectible. The right laws will reboot, or more accurately, “update” him and society, removing viruses such as obscurantism or bigotry in the process.
His opinions are conveniently based, not on ancient texts or even a fleeting knowledge of the past, but on feelings.
After all, “to obey one’s instinct is noble but to obey logic is to give way to the mob”, Nietzsche said, as “the laws of logic reduce everyone to the same level”.
The progressive is, of course, noble, while the people are “a race of enemies”, in Orwell’s words.
In the cold light of day, logic and knowledge slow down the revolution.
As a corollary, inherited morality in our societies is de facto the problem.
Undo those, he fervently believes, and all our problems disappear.
The Progressive, though, has history.
The elevation of the “feeling ignoramus” is not new.
He is today’s Voltaire’s 17th Century “Ingenu“, an individual who, unburdened by knowledge, judges the Western world “through the lens of pure reason and untamed nature”.
However, while he was an imaginary visitor to our shores three centuries ago, he is now omnipresent, armed with a self-righteousness as absolute as Einstein’s wit was sharp.
As Andrew Neil suggested, the progressive is in office and in power.
His heartfelt desire is “emancipation”.
Indeed, Marx thought mankind should abandon the “groundless laws of the Jews”, by which he meant the Ten Commandments, in his 1843 “On the Jewish Question” pamphlet.
The laws of Moses were, to his troubled mind, nothing but a roadblock to progress.
Remove them, he thought, and revolution is possible.
In 1932’s Brave New World, Aldous Huxley eliminated Christianity “not because it is untrue but because it is incompatible with the social model the rulers want to impose”.
Today, Martine Rothblatt, a woman with XY chromosomes no less and a billionaire Transhumanist, who believes that man’s body is essentially hardware and his soul software, the former being replaceable allowing the soul to be eternal, says progress means unchaining people from the arbitrary nature of bodily sex in the name of “the full cultural liberation of all people”.
Our moral framework, crystallised during the Sermon on the Mount, which hitherto defined our civilisation, stands in the way of modernity’s man-made Nirvana.
The removal of inherited moral constraints is a prerequisite because reality is the prison from which the progressive seeks to escape.
The Faith that imposes them must be eradicated; those that don’t, exalted.
Like all religious actors, the Progressive has a rich repertoire of hymns, sung with gusto, mainly in public, for show.
These are “Diversity is our strength”; “sovereignty is old hat”; “all religions are equal”; “sex is a social construct”; “International law overrules national law”; “the science is settled”; and “Man is the problem”.
Laws are, thus, passed, treaties signed, treasure spent, to impose, corset-like, a world order that demands simultaneously infinite physical diversity and intellectual uniformity.
In a constant trance, reality, and with it Truth, disappear from the Progressive’s view.
And, as both shrink ever more into the distance, the progressive must force the non-believer to accept his world view globally, which demands a “common social order” as proposed by H.G. Wells, picked up by Jean Monnet and formalised by the creation of the UN in 1945.
Of note, Wells envisaged the social order to have one single language, one currency, and one global bureaucracy, to stop among other things “the spontaneous, disorderly breeding that characterised” earlier eras, directed from above by a better type of person, or who knows, in time, an algorithm.
Each step taken in the direction of Progress is irreversible. “Turn the clock back” would be an unconscionable crime.
But, as Newton wrote in 1687, and as we have always observed, for every action there is a reaction.
The path to Utopia is filled with foreseeable consequences and evident, deep-seated societal effects.
It explains in part one of the central points made in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe.
In the book, he explained that there is across our civilisation a “habit of attacking the secondary symptoms of a problem rather than the primary problem“.
The secondary symptom he describes is none other than Newton’s “reaction”, which is based on an observable and always foretold reality.
It forces the Progressive out of his daze.
The truth must therefore be throttled, the common people subdued.
Nefariously, the reaction leads, politically, to populism.
The “Progressive / Reactionary” dichotomy recently came to light during a discussion between Alistair Campbell, Labour’s former attack dog, and Konstantin Kisin, the TRIGGERnometry Podcast host.
Campbell explained that populists “seek to exploit rather than solve“; Kisin proposed that, logically, it is the situation that provokes a reaction.
Populism and their leaders are “reacting to the public anger” that current policies engendered and which “have changed the face of this country”, not the other way around.
“You wouldn’t have populism if you didn’t have mass immigration, didn’t have grooming gangs, and you didn’t have them being covered up”.
To Campbell, the Progressive, the reaction was the problem; to Kisin, the reactionary, the problem, as Douglas Murray could have written, is the problem.
“Until you fix that, this isn’t going away”, Kisin concluded.
All true, logical and based on reality, but reactionary, therefore evil in the progressive’s mind.
If the facts are ignored and the price of the reaction kept elevated, then the path to Utopia might still seem achievable, because “facts”, as Professor Thomas Sowell says, “are a danger” to the progressive mind.
Based on the idea that attack is the best defence, Progress must keep moving on or stall and self-implode.
The Progressive, having erased nation, borders, culture, education and religion, has perpetrated acts of intense snobbery dressed up as piety, to change the face of “our country“.
John Carey tentatively diagnosed the “soggy, half-baked insincerity that runs through all ‘advanced opinion‘”, as Orwell wrote, exemplified by Virginia Woolf’s circular argumentation against the masses, as a “form of insanity”.
Suffering the same condition, our new establishment finds itself in her ward.
The trouble is, of course, that “when the people that matter in power all sing from the same hymn sheet, terminal descent into mediocrity, or worse, is assured”, as Andrew Neil concludes.
Terminal mediocrity is the lead weight tied to our civilisation’s feet that will ensure her sinking to the depth of Sheol’s door.
As Machiavelli wrote in the Prince, a ruler must be either loved or feared but avoid being hated at all costs.
By design it seems, one can’t love the new order; one can’t fear it either.
Machiavelli’s last option is all that seems left.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.