As I see it, Progressivism says, “Our subjective values are worth pursuing in and of themselves just because it makes us feel good.
Citation needed. I don’t think that’s what Progressivism is about (especially given how the context here is explicitly political). In particular, progressives are not libertarians.
From a normative point of view, there are a LOT of differences between the progressive value system and the neoreactionary value system.
In general, what you describe as progressivism (humanity can master nature, humans have far-sighted discount functions, etc.) is quite different from what I see progressives say and do on the US political arena.
It’s an apt description of liberalism, of which progressivism is a species, which is defined by an open pluralism regarding what counts as the good. Progressives add a belief in systemic oppression—i.e., oppression by cultural norms and values, which they try to alleviate, but the goal is the same as classical liberalism: liberty from perceived oppression. Regardless, if you conceive of society as a power-structure, whether you take the classical liberal belief that we’re oppressed by state and church, the socialist belief that we’re oppressed by class structure or the modern progressive belief that we’re oppressed by sexism, racism, etc, then you want to alleviate those harms and typically the only way to do so is to use existing power structures.
It’s an apt description of liberalism, of which progressivism is a species, which is defined by an open pluralism regarding what counts as the good.
That’s classical liberalism and I don’t count contemporary progressives, at least in the US, as belonging to it. The contemporary progressives have very… fixed ideas about what counts as good and are quite intolerant of people who dare to think otherwise.
Not to mention that they have a love affair with state power.
All three projects—liberalism, socialism and progressivism—are related by common commitments that have their origins in Enlightenment political philosophy. Because progressives believe in systemic oppression, they have to alleviate systemic oppression in order to achieve liberty: we won’t be truly free until we’re free from racism, sexism, etc. They’re still committed to value pluralism. All three projects faced the (paradoxical) issue of having to attain state power in order to enforce their vision. Liberal democracy was often created on the back of violent revolution, for example.
Libertarians typically identify with classical liberalism and decry progressivism as statist and oppressive, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that progressives aren’t committed to liberty and value pluralism on their own terms. They have a different notion of what those things mean, they don’t reject them.
Yes, the common thread is the Enlightenment. See my response to Lumifer regarding who are the “progressives” I am talking about. They are not necessarily the people in America who flock to the Democratic Party. I don’t think neoreactionaries are just complaining about democrats when they go after “progressivism.” They have a far more broad target in mind—the Enlightenment, I guess, more or less.
rejecting the Enlightenment is one of the big NR themes...
It’s also a big thing in modern Progressivism on the grounds that the Enlightenment was a bunch of dead white men. The difference, and this is the reason why it’s so easy to get confused by the relationship between the Enlightenment and Progressivism, is that modern Progressives seek to reject the Enlightenment in the name of the Enlightenment.
...decry progressivism as statist and oppressive, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that progressives aren’t committed to liberty and value pluralism on their own terms. They have a different notion of what those things mean
Ah yes, we’ve been there. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Why, yes. To start with, it is not a slap in the face. To continue, it’s a reminder that people who are “committed to liberty … on their own terms” and “have a different notion of what those things mean” are usually committed to something other than what most people call liberty.
1984 is about Ingsoc, isn’t it? English socialism.
I think the distinctions we’re drawing here are a teensy weensy bit more subtle than the distinction between liberty and ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’.
Like, if an employer wants to fire a transgender person on account of that fact, does it better preserve liberty to let them do that, or not let them do that?
Any debate on this issue will be about just what is meant by ‘Liberty’, and from there the answer will fall directly.
Plus, there is little doubt that among other things, it IS a slap in the face - you quote something about different definitions by progressives and then say we’ve been there and quote a fictional totalitarian regime whose most salient feature is manipulating language. The interpretation that progressives have their definitions that twisted is, well, pretty direct and if you were not trying to make that implication, you should have been much much clearer.
I think the distinctions we’re drawing here are a teensy weensy bit more subtle than the distinction between liberty and ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’.
Nah. Given that the OP has explicitly said that the Soviet communists are the most full-blooded progressives and given that 1984 was written looking at Stalinist Russia, no, I don’t think there is any need to pretend the distinctions here are subtle. They are not.
That… that’s an incredibly lazy line of reasoning.
The OP is not Word of God on other peoples’ politics. Moreover, if the OP said that, it wasn’t here, so I can’t see context. The intensifier ‘full-blooded’ is very suspect in particular.
You see we almost all agree on a lot of things… and so, these things cease to be considered political. In the space of what people want, to a great extent we’re co-linear, with subtle deviations. Political movements define themselves by the difference from other political movements, and pull in a particular direction. So, two people can appear to be the same politically because they are pulling the same way. Alice, however, would stop after reaching her goal, which is close enough that she is still in substantial agreement with the common values, while Bob, who is more ‘full-blooded’ would continue pulling the same way until EVERYTHING was the difference he had from the common values, quite possibly orthogonal or facing the opposite way. Murder less important than keeping the soft boiled egg pointy side down, so to say.
Being ‘full-blooded’ in politics means you’re a misguided horrible freak, no matter the party.
That being seen, it doesn’t even stop there. The Stalinist Soviet Union was not even an over-extrapolation of Progressive values. What happened to the progressives in the Soviet Union?
They were murdered. Purged. They weren’t even necessarily specifically targeted—almost everyone political was killed, jailed permanently, or (understandably) intimidated during the rise of Stalin. So by the time you get to Stalin, there are no movements allowed other than ‘Whatever the State Says, Goes’ and Stalin decides what the state says. This is undesirable for any political movement, and Stalinist-Russia is a cautionary tale to them all.
But if you don’t buy that and think there were still political movements afloat, then… let’s look at what Stalin did and compare it to Progressive values.
Stalin’s most objectionable policies—murdering/imprisoning the opposition, and even people who had no political opinions for the crime of being inadequately productive, forcing people to work in specific ways, banning private ownership, preventing people from leaving or even having free movement...
These are diametrically opposite progressive values, by their own definitions.
The only one that comes even vaguely close is a regrettable tendency for some Progressives to place a low premium on privacy from the state. And that has become less popular lately (check progressive reactions to the NSA some time, you might be surprised).
ETA:
1) there are some who believe that Stalin was lied-about and misrepresented in the west. For them, they may support their imaginary version of Stalin, but they don’t actually support what everyone else means when they think of Stalin)
2) Movements change over time. 80 years ago, a noticeable portion of progressives were eugenicists. Merely 35 years ago, Republicans’ expectations of the proper tax rate were what modern Republicans now call Socialist.
3) Orwell wasn’t simply recounting Stalinist Soviet Union—he was extrapolating out even from there. So even if your facts and opinions were all correct, it was an exaggeration. When playing on hard mode such as we are, avoid exaggeration.
Agreed. The only way I can see that progressivism relates to pursuing subjective values is in sexual politics, supporting gay sex and birth control and thereby saying sex has value ‘just because it feels good’ rather than for the more objective purpose of reproduction. I suppose that pushing back against the objective values found in religion could be argued as well, except that many progressives are religious.
I am not trying to describe the value system of American progressives (whom I would call “social democrats” to use terminology that is consistent with European nomenclature). I am using the word “progressive” in a much broader, more philosophical sense—close to the sense in which neoreactionaries use the term.
I know that that game of re-defining terms sounds like a cop-out, but there’s not really another word I could use to describe this worldview that I am trying to sketch and compare with neoreaction.
Good question. I think the best representative of “progressivism” in the sense that I am using it would be Karl Marx. When Marx says at the end of chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” he is painting a picture of a society where each individual will have the freedom and ability to pursue the things that he/she subjectively values (insofar as it is compatible with others doing likewise).
The novel thing about Marx is, the idea that this would be a good state of affairs needs no justification beyond itself. Marx just says, “Wouldn’t this be nice?” He does not say, “This is the perfection of man that God commands.” He does not say, “This is what Natural Law commands.” (Of course, Marx did not trust such appeals to universal absolutes, always seeing class motivations lurking underneath such language.) Marx just says, “Doesn’t this sound nice? Let’s do it.”
You can find this idea among other Enlightenment thinkers. I guess the closest synonym to “progressivism” would be “the Enlightenment.” For example, Thomas Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Yes, I know that Jefferson is justifying this by appealing to a “Creator,” but that’s him throwing a bone to the religious of his time to make it more palatable. Did Jefferson really believe that his Deist version of the “Creator” would have any bearing on this stuff? No. Earlier he says that these truths are “self-evident,” which I think is Jefferson’s real justification. Once again, subjectivism. And I know that “pursuit of happiness” is a last minute replacement for “property,” which sounded to petty and narrow. Even so, the idea that life is about the “pursuit of happiness” is one that has widely caught on all the same, and this I consider to be synonymous with subjective values and the road to wireheading (“happiness” being conceived in the most all-encompassing sense).
If you want another person expressing “progressivist” ideas about normative value being subjective, I would point you to Jean-Paul Sartre or any of the existentialist and their idea that we create our own meaning in life.
Finally, there’s the constant message of capitalist advertising to “enjoy yourself” as the ultimate purpose in life, as that brilliant fraud Slavoj Zizek has done the service of pointing out and dissecting.
So, although it is difficult to pin down very many people who fit the ideal type of a “progressive” in all of its facets that I have drawn here, we are all more or less swimming in “progressive” notions insofar as we are swimming in Enlightenment, existentialist, and/or capitalist ideological messages about life having no ultimate meaning beyond one’s enjoyment.
Edit: I would add secular humanism as another source of what I am calling “progressivism.” For example, the secular humanist idea of, “Just be good for goodness’ sake.”—what can that vapid phrase even mean, beyond “Do good things because they will promote things that you find good in the long run”?
I think the best representative of “progressivism” in the sense that I am using it would be Karl Marx.
Interesting. Would it mean, then, that marxists would be the prototypical progressives?
I am also not sure that Marx (late Marx, in particular) is that keen on everyone going off doing his own personal thing. He does seem to stress the class consciousness and doesn’t like bourgeois pursuits much. Other people of his time—like Proudhon, for example—were much more individualistic/anarchist since that’s the side you’re focusing on.
we are all more or less swimming in “progressive” notions
Well, your whole post is devoted to comparing progressives and neoreactionaries. Who represents the progressives—now, in the XXI century? We can easily point to leading neoreactionaries starting with Moldbug. You’re comparing them with whom? not with Karl Marx, hopefully?
I would say that the most full-blooded “progressives” around today would be communists. No, not the Confucian Mandarins in China that try to pass themselves off as “communists” nowadays. I’m talking about communists who were / are at least as vaguely connected to the actual writings of Marx and Engels as the Soviet communists were. They are the ones who wanted / want to make “heaven on Earth.” They are the ones who had / have the most supreme confidence in humankind’s ability to eventually “master nature” in principle. They are the ones who had / have the most confidence in their designs to re-engineer human society and “lift the world.” They are the ones neoreactionaries truly loathe.
As much as neoreactionaries wail about the decline of Western Civilization now, imagine what they would be like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War...if they had subverted all Western governments and the U.S. was now run by a communist Poliburo. I think neoreactionaries’ heads would explode.
That said, the numbers of real fire-breathing communists in the West nowadays is minuscule, so that is probably why neoreactionaries do not frame them as their ultimate enemy. Instead, neoreactionaries focus on ideologically combating the social justice types, who usually hail from a slightly less extreme part of the left associated with “democratic” socialism, social democracy, and maybe the left wing of the Democratic Party. They are less-extreme “progressives” in that they do not push the whole philosophy of “progressivism” to its most extreme conclusions, but because they are more numerous and more of a threat, they are who gets tarred with the label “progressivist,” and that is why neoreactionaries talk about “progressivism” rather than “Enlightenment-ism” or “communism,” and hence why I have chosen to use the label “progressivism” in this thread.
Edit: Also, one might object that communists talk a great deal about “serving the people” and not being selfish and all that. Surely they would not fit the mold of normative subjectivism (“Whatever I like, I define as “good.”) But here again, you are getting confused by our modern-day Confucian Mandarin knock-offs. To a certain extent, even Soviet communism was polluted with all sorts of quasi-Eastern Orthodox sentiments. If you go back to “Real Communism”(tm) in the writings of Marx and Engels, you find that communism is about finding a collective solution to what is a shared, but essentially individual problem of an individual worker’s alienation from his labors and his feeling of unfreedom. Marx cannot be easily separated from his contemporaries Pierre Joseph Proudhon (anarchist) and Max Stirner (egoist). Although Marx disagreed with them at length, his idea of communism was definitely influenced by them and other Enlightenment thinkers.
At some point along the way, communists mixed up the ultimate goal (individual liberation from unfreedom and alienation) with proximate means like “serve the people” or “das Partei hat immer Recht!” (The Party is always right!) (And these were poor proximate means at that, to judge by the fact that they did not bring society one inch closer to communism).
They are the ones who had / have the most confidence in their designs to re-engineer human society and “lift the world.”
Right. No sacrifice was too great for that noble goal.
if they had subverted all Western governments and the U.S. was now run by a communist Poliburo. I think neoreactionaries’ heads would explode.
From being shot into the head at close range, yes, probably.
Instead, neoreactionaries focus on ideologically combating the social justice types … They are less-extreme “progressives”
Well, that’s where we started—I said that your description of progressivism in the OP didn’t sound much like the American progressives and you agreed. But now it seems that you do have them in mind, too. Can you clarify?
Yes...I think American progressives (what Europe would call our “social democrats”) share most of the assumptions that I’ve highlighted in this thread, as do communists. But American progressives aren’t as willing to be frank with themselves or others about following the assumptions towards their icily-logical endpoints. American progressives are more likely to have some conflicting sentimental attachments to religious ideas of objective value, or ideas of “human rights” being a pseudo-objective value (I say “pseudo-objective” because, unless they are arguing from religion, the only basis they really have for asserting that such-and-such is an objective “human right” is their own moral intuition (in other words, what makes them feel good or icky, which is back to subjectivism even if they don’t realize it. Like I said, they don’t always follow their thoughts to the logical conclusion)).
So, American social democrats are not as “full-blooded progressives” as communists are, but their ideas lead in the same direction.
American progressives are more likely to have some conflicting sentimental attachments to religious ideas of objective value, or ideas of “human rights” being a pseudo-objective value (I say “pseudo-objective” because, unless they are arguing from religion, the only basis they really have for asserting that such-and-such is an objective “human right” is their own moral intuition (in other words, what makes them feel good or icky, which is back to subjectivism even if they don’t realize it. Like I said, they don’t always follow their thoughts to the logical conclusion)).
In particular, modern progressives are perfectly willing to invent new human rights and declare them “objectively” good (e.g. gay marriage) or take rights that have been considered human rights for centuries and demote them (e.g. free speech).
Could you spell out the connection, I don’t see it.
Eliezers essay looks at humanism, looks at the reasons for it and than argues that those reasons apply to transhumanism. The article you linked to starts with a model of marriage that has already abstracted away all the reasons for it existing in the first place and goes from there.
“Love is good. Isolation is bad. If two people are in love, they can marry. It’s that simple. You don’t have to look at anybody’s gender.”
Um, marriage isn’t just about love, also the nature of heterosexual and homosexual “love” is very different.
From the article I linked above:
Marriage: Originally, within the lives of older married people, an irrevocable commitment to live together and raise the resulting children. Now the point of marriage is divorce, the legal authority of the wife over a husband on pain of confiscation of his assets and income. Some people attempt to use Church and social pressure to enforce old type marriage, but hard to find an old type church. Because “gay marriage” means a pair of gays cruising together to pick up boys, an effort is under way to redefine marriage yet again as a pair of people of either sex cruising for pickups but it is probably that this redefinition will fail, because it is hard to get a good wingwoman. Therefore, probably will continue to mean matrilineality and female headship. The feminists and the gays are fighting over this one. Feminists want “marriage” to refer to the female headed family, while gays want it to refer to cruising for pickups.
Citation needed. I don’t think that’s what Progressivism is about (especially given how the context here is explicitly political). In particular, progressives are not libertarians.
From a normative point of view, there are a LOT of differences between the progressive value system and the neoreactionary value system.
In general, what you describe as progressivism (humanity can master nature, humans have far-sighted discount functions, etc.) is quite different from what I see progressives say and do on the US political arena.
It’s an apt description of liberalism, of which progressivism is a species, which is defined by an open pluralism regarding what counts as the good. Progressives add a belief in systemic oppression—i.e., oppression by cultural norms and values, which they try to alleviate, but the goal is the same as classical liberalism: liberty from perceived oppression. Regardless, if you conceive of society as a power-structure, whether you take the classical liberal belief that we’re oppressed by state and church, the socialist belief that we’re oppressed by class structure or the modern progressive belief that we’re oppressed by sexism, racism, etc, then you want to alleviate those harms and typically the only way to do so is to use existing power structures.
That’s classical liberalism and I don’t count contemporary progressives, at least in the US, as belonging to it. The contemporary progressives have very… fixed ideas about what counts as good and are quite intolerant of people who dare to think otherwise.
Not to mention that they have a love affair with state power.
All three projects—liberalism, socialism and progressivism—are related by common commitments that have their origins in Enlightenment political philosophy. Because progressives believe in systemic oppression, they have to alleviate systemic oppression in order to achieve liberty: we won’t be truly free until we’re free from racism, sexism, etc. They’re still committed to value pluralism. All three projects faced the (paradoxical) issue of having to attain state power in order to enforce their vision. Liberal democracy was often created on the back of violent revolution, for example.
Libertarians typically identify with classical liberalism and decry progressivism as statist and oppressive, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that progressives aren’t committed to liberty and value pluralism on their own terms. They have a different notion of what those things mean, they don’t reject them.
Yes, the common thread is the Enlightenment. See my response to Lumifer regarding who are the “progressives” I am talking about. They are not necessarily the people in America who flock to the Democratic Party. I don’t think neoreactionaries are just complaining about democrats when they go after “progressivism.” They have a far more broad target in mind—the Enlightenment, I guess, more or less.
No need to guess, rejecting the Enlightenment is one of the big NR themes...
It’s also a big thing in modern Progressivism on the grounds that the Enlightenment was a bunch of dead white men. The difference, and this is the reason why it’s so easy to get confused by the relationship between the Enlightenment and Progressivism, is that modern Progressives seek to reject the Enlightenment in the name of the Enlightenment.
Ah yes, we’ve been there. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Is this post anything other than a slap in the face?
Heh. It is interesting that you choose to interpret it solely in this way. Do you have a point, by any chance?
Actually, I don’t know what you mean, but that was all that occurred to me. IS it anything other than a slap in the face?
Why, yes. To start with, it is not a slap in the face. To continue, it’s a reminder that people who are “committed to liberty … on their own terms” and “have a different notion of what those things mean” are usually committed to something other than what most people call liberty.
1984 is about Ingsoc, isn’t it? English socialism.
I think the distinctions we’re drawing here are a teensy weensy bit more subtle than the distinction between liberty and ‘a boot stamping on a human face, forever’.
Like, if an employer wants to fire a transgender person on account of that fact, does it better preserve liberty to let them do that, or not let them do that?
Any debate on this issue will be about just what is meant by ‘Liberty’, and from there the answer will fall directly.
Plus, there is little doubt that among other things, it IS a slap in the face - you quote something about different definitions by progressives and then say we’ve been there and quote a fictional totalitarian regime whose most salient feature is manipulating language. The interpretation that progressives have their definitions that twisted is, well, pretty direct and if you were not trying to make that implication, you should have been much much clearer.
Nah. Given that the OP has explicitly said that the Soviet communists are the most full-blooded progressives and given that 1984 was written looking at Stalinist Russia, no, I don’t think there is any need to pretend the distinctions here are subtle. They are not.
That… that’s an incredibly lazy line of reasoning.
The OP is not Word of God on other peoples’ politics. Moreover, if the OP said that, it wasn’t here, so I can’t see context. The intensifier ‘full-blooded’ is very suspect in particular.
You see we almost all agree on a lot of things… and so, these things cease to be considered political. In the space of what people want, to a great extent we’re co-linear, with subtle deviations. Political movements define themselves by the difference from other political movements, and pull in a particular direction. So, two people can appear to be the same politically because they are pulling the same way. Alice, however, would stop after reaching her goal, which is close enough that she is still in substantial agreement with the common values, while Bob, who is more ‘full-blooded’ would continue pulling the same way until EVERYTHING was the difference he had from the common values, quite possibly orthogonal or facing the opposite way. Murder less important than keeping the soft boiled egg pointy side down, so to say.
Being ‘full-blooded’ in politics means you’re a misguided horrible freak, no matter the party.
That being seen, it doesn’t even stop there. The Stalinist Soviet Union was not even an over-extrapolation of Progressive values. What happened to the progressives in the Soviet Union?
They were murdered. Purged. They weren’t even necessarily specifically targeted—almost everyone political was killed, jailed permanently, or (understandably) intimidated during the rise of Stalin. So by the time you get to Stalin, there are no movements allowed other than ‘Whatever the State Says, Goes’ and Stalin decides what the state says. This is undesirable for any political movement, and Stalinist-Russia is a cautionary tale to them all.
But if you don’t buy that and think there were still political movements afloat, then… let’s look at what Stalin did and compare it to Progressive values.
Stalin’s most objectionable policies—murdering/imprisoning the opposition, and even people who had no political opinions for the crime of being inadequately productive, forcing people to work in specific ways, banning private ownership, preventing people from leaving or even having free movement...
These are diametrically opposite progressive values, by their own definitions.
The only one that comes even vaguely close is a regrettable tendency for some Progressives to place a low premium on privacy from the state. And that has become less popular lately (check progressive reactions to the NSA some time, you might be surprised).
ETA:
1) there are some who believe that Stalin was lied-about and misrepresented in the west. For them, they may support their imaginary version of Stalin, but they don’t actually support what everyone else means when they think of Stalin)
2) Movements change over time. 80 years ago, a noticeable portion of progressives were eugenicists. Merely 35 years ago, Republicans’ expectations of the proper tax rate were what modern Republicans now call Socialist.
3) Orwell wasn’t simply recounting Stalinist Soviet Union—he was extrapolating out even from there. So even if your facts and opinions were all correct, it was an exaggeration. When playing on hard mode such as we are, avoid exaggeration.
Agreed. The only way I can see that progressivism relates to pursuing subjective values is in sexual politics, supporting gay sex and birth control and thereby saying sex has value ‘just because it feels good’ rather than for the more objective purpose of reproduction. I suppose that pushing back against the objective values found in religion could be argued as well, except that many progressives are religious.
The inevitable has happened: The NRx definition of Progressive as “not reactionary” has got confused with the common meaning.
I am not trying to describe the value system of American progressives (whom I would call “social democrats” to use terminology that is consistent with European nomenclature). I am using the word “progressive” in a much broader, more philosophical sense—close to the sense in which neoreactionaries use the term.
I know that that game of re-defining terms sounds like a cop-out, but there’s not really another word I could use to describe this worldview that I am trying to sketch and compare with neoreaction.
So, um, who do you call “progressives”, then? Can you point to a few of such people, maybe link to their defining works/rants/manifestos?
Good question. I think the best representative of “progressivism” in the sense that I am using it would be Karl Marx. When Marx says at the end of chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” he is painting a picture of a society where each individual will have the freedom and ability to pursue the things that he/she subjectively values (insofar as it is compatible with others doing likewise).
The novel thing about Marx is, the idea that this would be a good state of affairs needs no justification beyond itself. Marx just says, “Wouldn’t this be nice?” He does not say, “This is the perfection of man that God commands.” He does not say, “This is what Natural Law commands.” (Of course, Marx did not trust such appeals to universal absolutes, always seeing class motivations lurking underneath such language.) Marx just says, “Doesn’t this sound nice? Let’s do it.”
You can find this idea among other Enlightenment thinkers. I guess the closest synonym to “progressivism” would be “the Enlightenment.” For example, Thomas Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Yes, I know that Jefferson is justifying this by appealing to a “Creator,” but that’s him throwing a bone to the religious of his time to make it more palatable. Did Jefferson really believe that his Deist version of the “Creator” would have any bearing on this stuff? No. Earlier he says that these truths are “self-evident,” which I think is Jefferson’s real justification. Once again, subjectivism. And I know that “pursuit of happiness” is a last minute replacement for “property,” which sounded to petty and narrow. Even so, the idea that life is about the “pursuit of happiness” is one that has widely caught on all the same, and this I consider to be synonymous with subjective values and the road to wireheading (“happiness” being conceived in the most all-encompassing sense).
If you want another person expressing “progressivist” ideas about normative value being subjective, I would point you to Jean-Paul Sartre or any of the existentialist and their idea that we create our own meaning in life.
Finally, there’s the constant message of capitalist advertising to “enjoy yourself” as the ultimate purpose in life, as that brilliant fraud Slavoj Zizek has done the service of pointing out and dissecting.
So, although it is difficult to pin down very many people who fit the ideal type of a “progressive” in all of its facets that I have drawn here, we are all more or less swimming in “progressive” notions insofar as we are swimming in Enlightenment, existentialist, and/or capitalist ideological messages about life having no ultimate meaning beyond one’s enjoyment.
Edit: I would add secular humanism as another source of what I am calling “progressivism.” For example, the secular humanist idea of, “Just be good for goodness’ sake.”—what can that vapid phrase even mean, beyond “Do good things because they will promote things that you find good in the long run”?
Interesting. Would it mean, then, that marxists would be the prototypical progressives?
I am also not sure that Marx (late Marx, in particular) is that keen on everyone going off doing his own personal thing. He does seem to stress the class consciousness and doesn’t like bourgeois pursuits much. Other people of his time—like Proudhon, for example—were much more individualistic/anarchist since that’s the side you’re focusing on.
Well, your whole post is devoted to comparing progressives and neoreactionaries. Who represents the progressives—now, in the XXI century? We can easily point to leading neoreactionaries starting with Moldbug. You’re comparing them with whom? not with Karl Marx, hopefully?
I would say that the most full-blooded “progressives” around today would be communists. No, not the Confucian Mandarins in China that try to pass themselves off as “communists” nowadays. I’m talking about communists who were / are at least as vaguely connected to the actual writings of Marx and Engels as the Soviet communists were. They are the ones who wanted / want to make “heaven on Earth.” They are the ones who had / have the most supreme confidence in humankind’s ability to eventually “master nature” in principle. They are the ones who had / have the most confidence in their designs to re-engineer human society and “lift the world.” They are the ones neoreactionaries truly loathe.
As much as neoreactionaries wail about the decline of Western Civilization now, imagine what they would be like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War...if they had subverted all Western governments and the U.S. was now run by a communist Poliburo. I think neoreactionaries’ heads would explode.
That said, the numbers of real fire-breathing communists in the West nowadays is minuscule, so that is probably why neoreactionaries do not frame them as their ultimate enemy. Instead, neoreactionaries focus on ideologically combating the social justice types, who usually hail from a slightly less extreme part of the left associated with “democratic” socialism, social democracy, and maybe the left wing of the Democratic Party. They are less-extreme “progressives” in that they do not push the whole philosophy of “progressivism” to its most extreme conclusions, but because they are more numerous and more of a threat, they are who gets tarred with the label “progressivist,” and that is why neoreactionaries talk about “progressivism” rather than “Enlightenment-ism” or “communism,” and hence why I have chosen to use the label “progressivism” in this thread.
Edit: Also, one might object that communists talk a great deal about “serving the people” and not being selfish and all that. Surely they would not fit the mold of normative subjectivism (“Whatever I like, I define as “good.”) But here again, you are getting confused by our modern-day Confucian Mandarin knock-offs. To a certain extent, even Soviet communism was polluted with all sorts of quasi-Eastern Orthodox sentiments. If you go back to “Real Communism”(tm) in the writings of Marx and Engels, you find that communism is about finding a collective solution to what is a shared, but essentially individual problem of an individual worker’s alienation from his labors and his feeling of unfreedom. Marx cannot be easily separated from his contemporaries Pierre Joseph Proudhon (anarchist) and Max Stirner (egoist). Although Marx disagreed with them at length, his idea of communism was definitely influenced by them and other Enlightenment thinkers.
At some point along the way, communists mixed up the ultimate goal (individual liberation from unfreedom and alienation) with proximate means like “serve the people” or “das Partei hat immer Recht!” (The Party is always right!) (And these were poor proximate means at that, to judge by the fact that they did not bring society one inch closer to communism).
Right. No sacrifice was too great for that noble goal.
From being shot into the head at close range, yes, probably.
Well, that’s where we started—I said that your description of progressivism in the OP didn’t sound much like the American progressives and you agreed. But now it seems that you do have them in mind, too. Can you clarify?
Yes...I think American progressives (what Europe would call our “social democrats”) share most of the assumptions that I’ve highlighted in this thread, as do communists. But American progressives aren’t as willing to be frank with themselves or others about following the assumptions towards their icily-logical endpoints. American progressives are more likely to have some conflicting sentimental attachments to religious ideas of objective value, or ideas of “human rights” being a pseudo-objective value (I say “pseudo-objective” because, unless they are arguing from religion, the only basis they really have for asserting that such-and-such is an objective “human right” is their own moral intuition (in other words, what makes them feel good or icky, which is back to subjectivism even if they don’t realize it. Like I said, they don’t always follow their thoughts to the logical conclusion)).
So, American social democrats are not as “full-blooded progressives” as communists are, but their ideas lead in the same direction.
In particular, modern progressives are perfectly willing to invent new human rights and declare them “objectively” good (e.g. gay marriage) or take rights that have been considered human rights for centuries and demote them (e.g. free speech).
Gay marriage is a straightforward simplification of marriage.
If you think of marriage as merely a database entry or XML tag with no connection to how the participants act or should act in the real word, yes.
I was trying to draw a comparison to Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism—Universal Marriage as simplified Hetero Marriage.
Could you spell out the connection, I don’t see it.
Eliezers essay looks at humanism, looks at the reasons for it and than argues that those reasons apply to transhumanism. The article you linked to starts with a model of marriage that has already abstracted away all the reasons for it existing in the first place and goes from there.
Eliezer’s essay then makes the case that transhumanism is preferable because it lacks special rules.
By analogy: “Love is good. Isolation is bad. If two people are in love, they can marry. It’s that simple. You don’t have to look at anybody’s gender.”
Elegant program designs imply elegant (occam!) rules.
Um, marriage isn’t just about love, also the nature of heterosexual and homosexual “love” is very different.
From the article I linked above:
If you think if words as having intrinsic connections to Platinum Forms..