Progress and Power

A key characteristic of those who believe themselves to be progressives and to be on the right side of history is that they are sure they are good.  Progress as a notion though has done away with an idea of a Form of Goodness.  What is good is calculated and made sense of in a strictly temporal way.  Virtue has no real place and God is seen as a primitive idea. 

Progress as a concept is really based upon impoverished metaphysics.  The paradigm is predicated on meaning being reduced to power battles.  What is progress is really a debate as to how best to distribute, award or manage power.  There is no longer an understanding of Man's telos or purpose being participation in the Good through virtue and character, prayer and worship.

Of course some ideas of progress are somewhat unworldly with heterodox ideas of Heaven on Earth.  This in itself can lead to very dangerous places.  A large tendency in progressive thought though is essentially materialist with no focus on the transcendent or the life after death.  Indeed an orientation towards life after death can prove a distraction from the worldly and secular goals of the progressive.  The progressive is in reality a materialist, focused upon building a new Tower of Babel.  Man tries to be God without repentance, but with hubris.

With the English Medieval idea of nominalism we were consequently detached from the Good.  Instead of our telos being participation in The Good, with no universals all that was left was arbitrary power.

A key underlying theme of progressive thought is liberation from oppressive controls of authoritarian and "outdated" power structures.  This idea is revelatory of the underlying assumptions in progressive thought.    That is that history has a linear and benign direction ( a far greater leap of faith than that required by any of the world religions); thereby making anything old necessarily oppressive by definition.  Further, insofar as what came before was by definition benighted, so the freedom achieved is one of not being held back by tradition.  Self expression and self realisation are the inevitable liberation of breaking out of outdated power structures.  Power of course is the only way to make sense of any traditional structure, because higher meanings are discounted.    

We do live in a fallen world and that means that many of the traditions that held us together did fall short and were open to abuse.  The corollary of traditions being compromised by dint of existing in a fallen world is that revolution will also be subject to abuse and corruption, but without any participation in the transcendent that the earlier societies could depend upon to mitigate against abuses.

While Enlightenment thinking looked at inherited social forms to one degree or another as means of control, most powerfully expressed by Marx, but before by Rousseau's chains  - by overthrowing them all that was left was naked power.  

The only question now for Western Man, having cut himself off from the transcendent, was how to manage the raw power that was left.  The European intellectuals chose reductive power and cold abstract theories and rejected the opportunity of participation in the Good.  They rejected the gift of Easter - God becoming Man opening the way to us for men to become gods.  Instead, hubristically, with faith in their own powers of reason, the philosophers made themselves God through a revolutionary power grab, not repentance.  It was the old temptation of the serpent to become like God without God.

This liberation then has really meant negotiating mere and base power.  The only questions left were  who should dominate whom and how much I should be dominated by another?  Should the proletarian class seize power from its oppressor?  Should the strong man seize power?  Should I as an individual have full power over my own life through autonomy.

We think like this because we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of participation in The Good.  We no longer understand that true freedom lies in virtue and worship.  Freedom is to participate in the Good.

That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community.  It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.

Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.

This reduction of all to power battles has meant inevitably that liberalism too, the great victor of the battles of modernity, has become power hungry.  Liberal societies that prided themselves on their supposedly self emptying granting of freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle and freedom of speech have also descended into authoritarianism, albeit soft and subtle.  

It is in liberal countries now that speech must be managed and core beliefs about what it means to be human in religious terms must be extirpated from the public square.  Secular liberalism softly, softly is using overweening power.  Unlike the Church when believers got it wrong or failed, this is not a human failing corrupting and tarnishing a transcendent truth.  This is because when you scratch the secular-liberal surface all there actually is in progressive thought is not the Good, the True or the Beautiful, but bare power.  And so liberalism, like its modern ideological cousins, Fascism and Communism, (that seem so different but are really all offspring of post Enlightenment modernity) really boils down to one more interpretation of life as power.  The individual does not participate in a telos of seeking The Good, he is simply an absolutist tyrant in his own life, living an arbitrary existence in a freedom that is really just slavery to the passions.