Forms of Progressivism

Progressivism comes from the word “progress”. It is a term related to “evolution”, although they do not mean the same thing. Evolution is the development of potentialities that exist from the beginning, although Herbert Spencer, in the 19th century, changed its meaning, considering it a natural process by which matter dissipates movement and generates organization. It is a concept that Darwin took as his own, although he did not give it the same meaning.

However, progress is not evolution, because evolution is considered a natural process, while progress is cultural. There are those who consider that its modern use began with the Sketch of a historical picture of the progress of the human spirit by Condorcet, a French enlightened philosopher (Condorcet, 1980, p. 79 et seq.). We know that the Enlightenment adopted the slogan of daring to know ("sapere aude", as Kant said) and it has its clearest manifestation in the work of the liberal Locke and the Anglophile French thinker Voltaire. Progressivism, as a political movement, originates in liberalism, and has the French Revolution as its bastard daughter, the model of all the socialist revolutions that came later. We could say that socialism is a descendant of liberalism and republicanism, although it has stated that the same impulse that led to consolidating the power of the bourgeoisie should be responsible for replacing it with the power of the proletariat.

If we go to the origin of liberal modernism, we must go back to the New Atlantis, a utopian work by an Englishman, the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon (Bacon, F., 2017). That is, before progressivism became French, it was first English. In this work, Bacon imagines a society in which religion has been replaced by science and technology, a society managed by wise men, organized in a planned way, which enjoys the technological fruits of a science capable, for example, of accumulate the energy of the Sun. It is curious that at the same time the greatest caricature of progressivism emerged, also from the hand of an Englishman: Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels (Swift, J, 2014, p. 177 et seq.). This satirical novel, among the new worlds discovered by an explorer, describes the city of Laputa. In it, the wise men fly over the territory on a floating island guided by a magnet, and are so immersed in their meditations that they have servants who hit their ears with a bladder tied to the end of a stick to indicate when they should listen, and in the mouth when they must speak. In that region, strange experiments are carried out, such as trying to reconstruct food from human feces, or storing solar energy in watermelons. There is also a mechanism of wires with letters attached to wheels that allow them to change their position on a board, and every time the letters form intelligible words or phrases, scribes write them down, building encyclopedias with all the knowledge possible.

Bacon described a utopia, a non-place where he projected his fantasy of a better State, dedicated to the earthly well-being of man through the use of technical scientific knowledge, and this is one of the definitions of what politics calls "progress."

But if we want to look for an older antecedent, we must go back to Gnosticism (Hutin, S., 1984). The Gnostic sect is represented in the Bible in the version of Simon the Magus. This man wanted to buy from some Christian saints the power to impose the Holy Spirit. Failing this, he managed to convince Nero that he could perform the same miracles that Christian priests did, using mechanical devices, for example, to show that he could fly. He is perhaps the first figure who seems willing to accept any knowledge capable of granting him power. The Gnostics did not have a single thought, but they were elitist, they believed that salvation was the result of knowledge for a few. They believed that the body was bad, that it was a prison for a soul that had no gender. They sought to return to the original hermaphrodite condition in which there was no fall or fault. Even in the Renaissance, a doctor like Paracelsus thought that eating and reproducing were the result of the fall, and that primitive man did not need them because he was eternal. Hence the search for an elixir of eternal life. All this seems to be reborn in the ideas of creating a new humanity, which is no longer Marx's new man, freed from alienation, but a post-organic man (Sibilia, P., 1999), capable of acting on his biological nature thanks to the technology.

The truth is that what was seen by Bacon as an end in itself, the development of science and technology, today is seen by progressives as a means. A means of the objective at the service of a subjectivity that becomes the fundamental right, characterized by two variables: pleasure and self-perception.

The issue of subjectivity seemed to have been eclipsed during modernity. However, it was the necessary companion of objectivity, since Descartes distinguished between the res cogitans, that is, the soul, and the res extenso, the body. Within the res cogitans he located all sensations, feelings and affects, that is, everything about which current progressives seek to legislate, while he considered that natural laws were only applicable to the res extenso, understood as matter in motion.

Although materialism discarded res cogitans as an unnecessary hypothesis, based on the positivist progressivism of the 19th century (with its slogan “order and progress”) and the communist progressivism of the same century (with its materialist slogan of “abolition of private property and creation of the new man"), the truth is that a progressive would not dare, today, to deny having a soul to his favorite pet, as Descartes did, for whom animals were only complex machines. Nor would progressives accept today that progress is something exclusive to humans, as demonstrated by ecological trends, which seek an economy that is technological, yes, but sustainable, and that does not harm nature. Progressivism is against the use of those fossil fuels that, paradoxically, promoted progress during the first and second industrial revolutions, and also against the atomic energy of the post-war technological revolution, although it loves technological products that allow the entry to the realm of virtuality, which has turned us into something similar to the wise men of Laputa who forgot to listen and speak. In any case, her idea of nature is purely imaginary: it is a non-violent, maternal and feminist Pachamama, more similar to the description of the pre-fall paradise that appears in Genesis, than to that apparently calm meadow that hides a permanent and bloody struggle for survival, of which Darwin spoke crudely in The origin of species.

So the idea of the progressives is to use the progress of science and technology at the service of subjectivity. What differentiates libertarians from leftist liberals is whether they understand that subjectivity as individual or collective. It seems like a big difference or a small difference, depending on what yardstick you measure it by. From the economic perspective, it establishes the opposition between those who defend free economic competition, and the supporters of a present State, which provides social justice through the redistribution of wealth. While liberal progressives maintain that it is the creation of the tax burden of the State that prevents free enjoyment, which is one of the two variables of subjectivity as a bearer of rights, for the progressive left it is the inequality generated by the oppression of some groups over others what makes some have more (things, rights, privileges) and that true justice consists in returning to a group what was historically (mythically) taken from it by the other. For left-wing progressivism, by belonging to an identity group the individual subject is a mere avatar of the collective subject of which he is the spokesperson, sharing its virtues or its miseries, a karma similar to that which characterized belonging to this or that caste of India. Justice consists of compensating for the damage by inverting the pyramid, putting the outcast at the top and making the elite the caste of contempt.

Without a doubt, this is an important difference, but basically a universal is shared in both cases, which is that of progress, which puts the objective at the service of subjectivity, which, as we said, has two axes that are involved. mutually, the hedonistic axis (seeking pleasure and fleeing from pain), and the identity axis (I am how I perceive myself, the rest is contingent and can be modified using will or desire as the only criterion).

For the progressive, to be is to be desired. The mother's desire, for example, automatically causes a bag of cells to become a possible child, a sustainable child. That is the ultimate and absolute metaphysical foundation of all being, which does not need justification. Whoever does not yet desire will be because of the desire of another. And the one who desires will in turn make sense by desiring himself. Every possible being is due to the desire of an existing being. And this is because of the desire it has to be. That is, he desires himself, and what he desires is what gives him his identity. As The only one and his property, by the anarchist Stirner (Stirner, M., 2004), the progressive gives being to himself. That being is subjective, that is, it is pure spirit, and its body is a contingency. But depending on how you take it, according to certain traits, that body can be a subject of pride or rejection. For progressives, there are three identity axes, which can be a matter of acceptance or rejection, and if it is rejected, it must be adequate so that its objective appearance fits its subjective essence (after all it is a more or less contingent avatar, following the idea Gnostic origin of a pleroma or spiritual plenitude without fault and without stain):

• Gender: is the sum of two non-correlated issues, which are, what sex do I identify with, and what sex produces desire in me. When we talk about sex we are not talking about biological sex, but about hybrid sex between the spiritual and the physical. For example, a person may identify as a woman, as a woman in a man's body, as a man, or as a man in a woman's body. You can accept yourself as a hybrid between man and woman, or modify your bodily sex to adapt it to your spiritual sex. But you can never, ever, do therapy that modifies your self-perception, that is, the sexuality with which you identify, which is predominantly subjective. Subjective or spiritual sexuality is what dominates, even if it is a reflection of a real or possible bodily sexuality, and in the queer position there is simply no sexuality, it is essentially asexual.
• The race: the superior race is the black, the Indian, the indigenous. White people are inferior beings. However, they can be tolerated if they pay homage to other races and apologize for belonging to the identity group that stains them with the crimes of their ancestors. With respect to the orientals there is no defined position.
• Culture: the highest culture and religion is Muslim. Christians and Jews can be tolerated if they pay homage and apologize for the crimes their culture committed against Muslims. There is no position taken regarding other religions and cultures.

The theory of the progressive left indicates that the original sin of humanity was the creation of the system of heteropatriarchal white and capitalist domination. He even proposes rewriting history to show that capitalism already existed in ancient times, which is ridiculed by liberals, for whom the enemy has no race, no culture, no defined identity, and is simply anyone who opposes another person's life. the way you want and enjoy your property. That is to say, they are not equal in terms of the importance they give to the origin of evil and the identity details of that founding myth. Clearly, left-wing progressives consider it necessary to tell an account of how evil appeared in the world, because only in this way is it possible to know how to make it disappear. Theirs is an idea of the fall and redemption of humanity, while the liberals understand that there is no fall, but rather an initial state of helplessness and ignorance that has been progressively overcome with the development of science and technology, which no moral or religious scruples should interfere. Being technocratic, the libertarian considers that the problems of technology can be overcome with more technology, and tends to follow the ideas of the creator of positivism, Auguste Comte, by thinking that humanity goes through three stages: theological, metaphysical and positive. He is an illuminist and tends to consider that man is a brain that thinks, although he also has rights that must be defended. First of all, the right to knowledge as a way to eliminate superstitions, which includes everything that is religious.

So much for theories. In practice, on the part of left-wing progressivism there is a defense of Foucault's idea that capitalism is insurmountable, and that the only way to win the fight against oppression and inequality is to gain power. This is achieved in different ways:

• Appealing to ethics, showing the goodness of the cause being defended, presenting it, either as something that will result in an improvement in everyone's life, or as a just cause for the defense of defenseless and vulnerable people.
• Pressing political parties to use their slogans as a means to gain adherents, making their demands a transversal element to several traditional political parties.
• If nothing works, using any act of violence publicized in the media and directed against a member of your group, to carry out acts of vandalism and take to the streets, generating fear in some and support from others, under the slogan of destroying the current order for generate a new and better one through a pantomime of revolution that forces a change of agenda in the institutions in charge of sanctioning or applying certain laws, even going so far as to propose a reform of the very constitution of a State.

In the case of free progressives, on the other hand, there is an appeal to morality, progress and the search for solutions through institutional means, in a non-radicalized way, and that does not endanger private property.

With this we have shown a general overview of the origin and current state of the issue of progressivism, as a first approximation that does not pretend to be exhaustive, and that the other articles of the work will help to clarify, deepen, and, if necessary, correct. .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon F. (2017). The new Atlantis. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund.

Condorcet (1980). Sketch of a historical picture of the progress of the human spirit. Madrid: National Editor.

Hutin S. (1984). The Gnostics. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA.

Sibilia P. (1999). The postorganic man. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund.

Stirner M. (2004). The only one and his property. Buenos Aires: Libertarian Utopia.

Swift J. (2014). Gulliver's Travels. Mexico: Sixth Floor Editorial.