Progressivism is Hostile to Humanism
by Patrick Frank (March 2016)
In recent issues of Free Inquiry magazine, Ms. Greta Christina argued that atheism necessarily entails “social justice.” [1, 2] She defined “social justice” in terms of high-minded goals that only a greedy autocratic bigot could reject: “an end to extreme poverty, political disempowerment, government corruption, gross inequality in economic opportunity, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and so on.”
But if no one except a money-grubbing brute could possibly object to these goals, then what’s the point of linking them specifically to atheists? The point is to color the Humanist context of Free Inquiry with the politics of Ms. Christina. “Social justice” is a code-word for the progressivist program. Ms. Christina wants to equate Progressivism with Humanism. I will argue they are mortally opposed. What follows is not a critique of Ms. Christina’s values, but to illustrate a widespread ethical mindlessness that leads well-meaning people to pave the way into totalitarianism.
Enlightenment Humanism is the philosophical outcome of the inherent right to personal freedom. [3, 4] Corliss Lamont provides perhaps the most accessible definition of Humanism as, “a human-centered theory of life.” [5] It is informed by inquiry “into the major branches of the natural sciences, such as chemistry, astronomy, and biology, and likewise of the social sciences, such as history, economics, and politics.” Humanism requires free thought. It is open to new knowledge, accepts reasoned debate, and is prescriptively modest in the face of ignorance. Humanism necessarily honors the individual and abjures ideology.
In direct contrast Progressivism represents the anti-Enlightenment, insisting the community is supreme over the individual. [6] The central principle of Progressivism is that individuals do not have rights, but are privileged from their adherence to shared social goals. [7] The good society follows from a consensus communal morality made immanent through law. Subjection of the individual to common social goals is a progressive value that persists right up to the present through a century of tumultuous history. [7-12] To oppose the prescribed common social goals is to risk ostracism and, in an organized polity, to invite judicial attention. The principled contradiction with Humanism could not be greater.
As a corporate social-political philosophy, the progressivist vehicle for reform is necessarily government action. Plainly stated, social beneficence is produced by legislated doctrinal imposition. In the US, the early 20th century progressive movement pushed for harm reduction such as women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and the right to strike. The capacity to even recognize these goals as ethically worthy requires the humane political philosophy of the Enlightenment. [4] Therefore, the force of early progressive social arguments was carried by the same humanistic philosophy that undergirds the US Constitution. [13] Progressives called for Americans to live up to their principles.
However, things changed. Frustrated by democratic inefficiency, the Progressive program adopted centralized power as the road to social goodness. [14] Modern Progressivism is no longer about removing specific harms, but about legislating social, economic, and environmental justice. [15] No humanist accepts injustice, but words can be slippery. Progressivism says that equality, democracy, and justice are best achieved by communal regulation and ownership. [8-10, 16]
Progressive societies decide their normative morality by reference to axiomatic communal ideals. In contrast, a rational individualistic society finds normative morality by open debate and negotiation. Individualistic Humanism therefore represents a mortal challenge to Progressivism. They cannot coexist.
The Progressive counter-offensive against our innate individualism cleverly focuses on economics. The Progressive charge is that economic individualism nurtures greed, corrupts societies and people, rapes resources, is inexorably imperialistic, and produces endless violent conflict. [20-22] In their words, “Injustice and repression are inherent in capitalism, and evil policies are structural and systematic, not accidental and episodic.” [20] To eliminate capitalism, therefore, is to eliminate evil. This demonology has no factual basis, but nevertheless has become the ideological outlook of modern Progressivism.
Both Humanism and capitalism require and reward individual initiative. [23] The Progressive claim that economic and social justice require the destruction of capitalism, necessarily requires the destruction of individualism. Individualism is the target. Capitalism is the stalking-horse.
Capitalism as original sin leads to a useful analogy between Progressivism and religious creationism. Creationist dishonesty is well-documented. [27-30] And creationism is not just a radical Christian phenomenon. Harun Yahya’s Islam-inspired tracts are a monument to deceit. [31-33] (Ironically, secular progressives have become creationist bed-fellows. [34, 35]) Absolutist believers yearn for a Manichaeist world because without evil black hats, white-hat-ism has no cachet. So, religious ideology entails a corrosive morality that invents and then demonizes enemies. The polarization stokes inner certainty, provides satisfying slanders, and usefully coerces and inflames the partisan faithful.
Completing the analogy, the Progressive faithful are rallied to belief by their own secular priesthood, such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who use the same tried-and-true play-book. In 1979, NY Times correspondent Paul Robinson called Mr. Chomsky “arguably the most important intellectual alive today,” [36] and many still defend that grant. [37] However, Mr. Chomsky’s work evidences a program of character assassination. [24, 38, 39] His targets are perfectly depicted capitalist heavies as seen through the lens of Progressive ideology: irremediably imperialistic, racist, hard-hearted, and callous to suffering and death.
Two examples suffice to illustrate the manufacture of calumny. [40] On page 31 of “The Washington Connection and Third-World Fascism,” Mr. Chomsky imputed USIA official John Mecklin to be a racist, writing that Mr. Mecklin derided the Vietnamese as having the mentality of mumbling six-year olds and a vocabulary of a few hundred words. [41]
Mr. Howard Zinn apparently followed the same programmatic vein by constructing defamatory tales in his A People’s History of the United States. [48] Mr. Zinn purported that there was no important distinction between Nazi fascism and Anglo-American democratic principles, that African Americans were largely hostile or indifferent toward helping the American effort during World War II, and that the American use of atomic weapons against Japan was mass murder driven by cynical Cold War calculations.
The rationale for his choices is disclosed in a 1994 interview with Ms. Barbara Miner. Mr. Zinn said that, “Objectivity [in History] is neither possible nor desirable.” [53] His reasoning was that prejudicial factology is acceptable because historians choose the facts they like anyway, and in any case objectivity itself is undesirable if one wishes to “have an effect on the world.” Evidently for Mr. Zinn, professional integrity combines the adolescent ethic ‘they all do it, so I can too’ with the slightly more mature and ever seductive, ‘ends justify means.’ [24] Progressive historians should speciously misconstrue the past in order to tendentiously misinform the present.
Most relevant to our subject, Ms. Miner then asked, “How can a Progressive teacher promote a radical perspective within a bureaucratic, conservative institution?” Progressivism apparently instructs the teacher to be a political propagandist. Rather than correct this view, Mr. Zinn answered sympathetically.
This all reveals a congruence of mentality between the creationists and the progressives: falsehood in service to ideology. Willful blindness, cherry-picked data, or outright lies, the conclusion-mongering of Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Zinn (and of Edward Said [54]), display all the best banalities of the creationist intellectual, and Ms. Miner of the creationist teacher.
Apparently Ms. Miner’s progressive “radical perspective” for education is rooted in the, “Neo-marxist, Marxist, critical theory, radical democracy, foucauldian, post-structuralist, pragmatist, and anarchist traditions.” [55] This attractive philosophy of childhood education is the modern decoction of a long-standing recipe for Progressive social engineering, [56] increasingly applied in public schools over the last 40 years. [57, 58] It exactly analogizes the creationist program of propagandized education, but has been far more successful and far more corrosive. Progressive educational justice requires strict social promotion of student cohorts, which has necessitated abandoning academic standards and prerequisites. This is the osmotic pressure behind the huge high-school cheating scandal lately emergent in Atlanta, Georgia. [59]
In larger perspective, the 20th century proved the progressive left vastly more lethal than the authoritarian right, [63] more widely seductive, [64-66] and thus more dangerous. Progressives in free societies indulged an uncritical love affair with the most repressive regimes of the 20th century, most notably Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, because they believed the cause was good. [65, 67] This cause is social justice and the utopian “new man”: communal, selfless, and altruistic rather than individualistic, selfish, and cruel. [26, 68]
In this cause, progressive radicals embraced Maoism despite that Mao Zedong supervised the murder of millions during his Cultural Revolution, [69, 70] following the millions killed through his collectivizations and Great Leap Forward. [46] Chè Guevara in poses of élan still adorn the walls and T-shirts of progressive affects, [71, 72] despite that he was Castro’s hatchet-man and a pathological enthusiast of political murder. [73-75]
In a free society, a social Progressive is to secular moralizing totalitarianism as a liberal Christian or a moderate Muslim (wherever he is [81]) is to religious moralizing totalitarianism. Their adherence normalizes and perpetuates a logic of intolerance, their sentimentalized language makes it look pretty, and their incessant pressure lubricates its descent into tyranny.
Humanism can not countenance replacing thought with sentiment. It is immiscible with defamations, dishonesty, and communal repression. Individual freedom is its bedrock. By its own allegiances and apologetics, Progressivism is the self-proven mortal foe of Humanism. Communalist ideology cannot coexist with individual freedom. Utopianism cannot tolerate pragmatic mindfulness.
References:
[3] Cassirer, E., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Trans. F.C.A. Koelln and J.P. Pettegrove. 1968, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
http://www.corliss-lamont.org/philos8.htm.
[6] Sternhell, Z., The Anti-enlightenment Tradition, Trans. D. Maisel. 2009, New Haven: Yale University. 544.
[7] Rodden, K.A., Review: The Lost Promise of Progressivism by Eldon J. Eisenach. Oklahoma Politics, 1995. 4 p. 83-86.
[10] Fonte, J., Liberal Democracy vs. Transnational Progressivism: The Ideological War Within the West. Orbis, 2002. 46(3): p. 449-467.
[14] Goldberg, J., Liberal Fascism. 2007, New York: Broadway Books.
http://progressive.org/mission.
[23] Appleby, J., The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. 2010, New York and London: W. W. Norton.
[26] Sternberg, E., Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For. Orbis, 2010. 54(1): p. 61-86.
[29] Pigliucci, M., Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism and the Nature of Science. 2002, Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/my-hero-noam-chomsky-charles-glass.
[41] Chomsky, N. and E. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. 1999, Boston, MA: South End Press (cf. p. 31).
[42] Mecklin, J., Mission in Torment: An Intimate Account of the U.S. Role in Vietnam. 1965, Garden City, NY: Doubleday (cf. pp. 74-94).
[43] Chomsky, N., Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. 2000, Cambridge, MA: South End Press (cf. Ch. 1, pp. 3-4).
[44] Panné, J.-L., et al., The Black Book of Communism, ed. M. Kramer, Trans. M. Kramer and J. Murphy. 1999, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
[45] Gellately, R., Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. 2007, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
[47] Satter, D., It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past. 2012, New Haven and London, CT: Yale University.
[49] Handlin, O., Arawaks. The American Scholar, 1980. 49(4): p. 546-550.
[51] Maddox, R.J., ed. Hiroshima in History: the myths of revisionism. 2007, University of Missouri: Columbia, MI.
[52] Sewall, G.T., The Howard Zinn Show. Academic Questions, 2012. 25(2): p. 209-217.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0705/America-s-biggest-teacher-and-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-in-Atlanta.
http://www.multivu.com/mnr/55353-atlanta-journal-constitution-nationwide-standardized-test-results-2011.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/30/us/former-school-chief-in-atlanta-indicted-in-cheating-scandal.html
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM.
[64] Gross, P.R. and N. Levitt, Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science. 1994, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University.
[65] Hollander, P., Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society 4th ed. 1998, New Brunswick: Transactions.
[66] Lilla, M., The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. 2001, New York, NY: The New York Review of Books.
[68] Chen, T.H., The New Socialist Man. Comparative Education Review, 1969. 13(1): p. 88-95.
[70] Elbaum, R.M., Revolution in the Air: Sixties radicals turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che. Haymarket Series, ed. M. Davis and M. Sprinker. 2002, London: Verso.
http://cubaarchive.org/home/.
[77] Revel, J.F., Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, Trans. D.V.C. Cammell. 2000, New York, NY: Encounter Books.
[78] Haynes, J.E. and H. Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. 1999, New Haven: Yale Nota Bene.
[79] Haynes, J.E. and H. Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. 2003, San Francisco: Encounter Books.
Patrick Frank is on the scientific staff of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SLAC, Stanford University. Apart from professional work, he has published critical assessments of the intelligent design myth, the science is philosophy myth, the noble savage myth, and the human-caused global warming myth.
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