What is very interesting about the typical progressive is their dismissal of religious faith based upon personal revelation and inherited tradition as blind. The ideology of the progressive does not stand up to the sort of scrutiny to which traditional Christianity is continually subjected. By that ideology I mean the unquestioned premise that the direction of history is towards a positive state and that the new is good by dint of being new.
Such an ideology can be traced back to the Victorian Positivists and further back to the Whiggery of Eighteenth Century England. The Whigs won the battle of history and wrote history as though it had a providential direction towards the Hanoverian state. This was taken up as a sort of pseudo-science and spawned the social Darwinism of Spencer, the Dialectical Materialism of Marx and Engels and the liberal assumption that society will become ever-more liberal and ever-more free. The irony is that such philosophies of blind faith in blind progress have led to persecution, eugenics, concentration camps, class war, the GUlag and the destruction of freedom under the heel of the jack boot of the modern state.
It is to these dangerous roots that the modern Progressive consciously or unconsciously receives the succour for his ideology. And the key point is that while religious faith is rejected as superstitious and as contradicted by empirical evidence, the Progressive himself places a blind faith in an ever-improving society as state power, censorship and bureaucracy increase, despite the overwhelming lesson of history that from Oliver Cromwell, through to Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler, the radical rejection of inherited society in favour of state-enforced progress has led to misery for countless millions. From the French Terror to the millions dead in Ukraine from the collectivisation of farms, this blind and superstitious faith in progress has led to misery.
At root is the heresy often criticised by the late Seraphim Rose, the American convert from atheism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity - the heresy of Chiliasm. That heresy was the belief that God's Kingdom could be created on earth, by political action. Like so many heresies it moves away from orthodoxy by only the slightest degree, yet the consequences of the original error increase exponentially, so the last state is far worse than the first. The second commandment of loving one's neighbour is distorted to create an ultimate solution for all our neighbours even at the expense of love of God. The result has always been and always will be misery. Utopia on this earth is impossible and to achieve it shows a lack of genuine faith and instead a dangerous blind faith in the inevitability of progress resulting from political action.
The answer to this serious error in Western thinking is to view society as being better or worse depending upon how much it participates in Truth. This then removes the philosophical error of assuming history is going in one direction. Further, rejecting this premise makes us aware of the danger of decline and decadence, and helps us to look for ways to maintain and achieve human flourishing through inherited wisdom.
Man lives a more flourishing life the closer he conforms to Truth, not as a result of being more modern or forward thinking. This living life in a full and flourishing way can appear reactionary or old-fashioned - for example living life in the vocation of a husband and father or housewife and mother. It can also be progressive, but not for the sake of being progressive. William Wilberforce did not fight slavery through an appeal to abstract theory or the demands of progress; he fought and defeated slavery by an appeal to the internal and inherited traditions of Western civilisation - Christian values. One might say Judaeo-Christian values when one thinks of the emphasis in the Old Testament on God freeing His people from slavery to a human master in the form of Pharaoh.
It is quite simply shallow to place one's faith in an ill-defined concept of progress. We need to ask rather, does this social or political reform bring us closer to or further from the Truth? An idea of progress for the sake of progress cannot help here. We cannot know whether a change is for good or bad unless we turn to inherited tradition and personal faith (if these two work against each other something is very wrong with a civilisation and culture).
To give a specific example, there is a lot now said about the role of the male gender in a society. The aggressive assaults upon our cultural understanding of what it is to be a male role model by the feminist ideologues has confused many. They have conflated men when they fail, are violent, drunk or purposeless with the Gentleman. The Gentleman is close to the Truth, tracing his antecedents in the idea of the Christian Knight, that civilised savage, courteous and true, yet strong and brave. To be fully-developed as a man is to look back to that inherited wisdom, which taught men to use their superior physical strength to defend the weak. To avoid degenerating into a brute men should not be emasculated, but fulfil their potential as Gentlemen. Here then we see that looking back enables us to reach closer to the Truth, as opposed to the confused situation resulting from progressive ideologies such as feminism. When men behave as gentlemen it will be far more difficult for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world to misbehave - their behaviour would reveal them as cads because of the stark contrast with a social norm of chivalry. Our current progressive and socially-liberal milieu allowed cads and scoundrels to pass unnoticed for many years.
Progress as an idea is a false and shallow chimera. It is superstition and nothingness. It is far more irrational than faith placed in a personal God, discovered in personal revelation through the institution and inherited traditions of the Church. The progressive really should stop projecting their own flimsiness in their faith upon those who follow a deep, prescriptive and traditional religion. The empirical evidence is clear, a belief in Utopia rather than Heaven has caused the greatest levels of misery in history, while those social reforms that have endured - equality under the law, the abolition of slavery, political freedom all rest upon an ancient and inherited notion of each man being made in the image of God.
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