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.
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..