This is part of a larger area I've been studying in the past few months (origins of political conflict) and is a definite work in progress. Consider it a few errant notes for your consideration.
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Twenty minutes of internet searching
found the most reliable statistical analyses and guesswork concluding that
there are between 6.85 and 10.5 billion Bibles in usable print. We can estimate
that the Qur’an, Hadith, and Bhagavad Gita number in a significant fraction thereof.
The Bible’s oldest book, that of Job, is a scribed story told between 2,000 and
1,400 B.C. The Gita was written around 150 B.C. and the Qur’an between 610 and
632 A.D. The great works of philosophy and politics are similarly ancient with
Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Gautama Buddha, Zhuangzi, and Confucius all
teaching 2,300 years ago and earlier. It has been said that the succeeding
works in each established line have merely been commentaries on the original
discourses. Why is it that we study and follow such old ideas?
That question is laughable
to some but highly relevant to others and one’s response is based on how one
views history. The Progressive, as per his name, tends to see history as the
story of progress to the ‘deimos’ or ‘divinely-appointed
time:’ the here and now. The people in such a high story grow fundamentally
better as the species goes on. A Progressive thinks knowledge and morality compound
over time, especially when technology jumps to a more advanced level. With this
understanding, the above books and authors should be rejected as outmoded, old
fashioned, and to blame for the world’s problems.
As they never lived in an
era of modern technology, we are far more suited to make judgments about the
human existence as we know more of the secrets thereof. The ancients made
assessments of humanity based only on the tiny number of people they came
across in person; even then their interactions were distorted by manners and tiny
vocabularies. How could they know that much about people when they never
encountered a mass sociological study or networked with hundreds on the
internet? Their conclusions should not be trusted, either, given their
origination in mileu of sexism,
racism, homophobia, class biases, castes, etc. The Progressive thus says we
should flush out references to such ancient ideas from not only our educational
systems, but our ‘society,’ as their makers were far more morally tainted and
intellectually deficient than we are today. We can then proceed with ‘modern’
understandings of justice and fairness until we’ve built utopia! The small,
nitpicked problem with this perspective is that it’s dead wrong in every way.
Most people view history as ‘didactic,’
as a teaching resource, with its characters combating flaws in their static
human nature. People 2,300 or 4,000 or 16,000 years ago were just not that
different from us. Their examples and experiences can tell us how to see and
confront problems involving the same flaws in ourselves. Their thoughts on the
deepest questions of life help us to see from new eyes. This description,
though, is not entirely incompatible with the Progressive’s view.
Knowledge would thus
compound over time and those who contain more of it –meaning those who are more
educated- are the most advanced morally. They should thus lead and organize the
rest of us in a sort of technocratic aristocracy. It’s spooky that the
Progressive’s thinking stops here and all of their policies (from Obamacare to
environmentalism to labor) follow the goals set by the academic elite, the
methods acceptable to the academic elite, and direct enrichment/empowerment/employment
of the academic elite. One can make a very detailed historical critique of this
mentality and show well how immoral and stupid the ‘rule of the virtuous’ has
been. The Progressive rejects it because, in his view, the educated have learned
from those experiences and won’t screw it up this time (when they do, men like
Obama and Carter blame the public for not being as subtle and sophisticated as
them). The Progressive would have to check his ego if he had taken his thinking
one more step, as most people do.
That step is considering the
implications static human nature has on individuals’ experience. It is to say
that, as human nature remains the same, a person’s experience also remains the
same. Naturally this is not an economic judgment because not everyone acquires
the skills to thatch a roof, churn butter, build a computer, or genetically
modify a pear tree. It does imply that everyone, everywhere, pan-temporally is
confronted with the same metaphysical questions and the same interpersonal
situations. Everyone that has ever been has had the same capacity to answer the
Book of Job’s question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” because they
all operated entirely on relativism.
What you find to be “good” and “bad,”
positive and negative is entirely based on what you have encountered and
personalized in your experience. For example I’m currently out of milk. I have to
drive my car for five minutes to the store and spend some insignificant
fraction of my wealth to purchase a pasteurized, refrigerated,
attractively-packaged gallon of 2%. I can’t help but see this as a burden. I’m
behaviorally comparing my situation to my childhood, when my mother always kept
milk in the refrigerator and I had no idea where it came from. In short I don’t
have magic milk and I see that as a tolerably bad thing. Similarly, someone who
had to raise their own cow and milk it themselves -having had someone else do it
earlier in their lives- would see their situation in the same light of tolerably
bad. Despite major differences in the quality and speed of access to the
product, our attitude and the experience we take away is pretty much the same. Even
if my milk had always been delivered for me, I’d still have to wait for it to
get there, etc., and I’d be even more particular about the burden of pouring
and tasting my milk. Perhaps I’d be turn my attention to its quality, whether
it was grown with “hormones(!),” what the attitude (happy or sad) the cow had,
etc.
Here are more examples of this equivalence (be sure to think from the
appropriate cultural perspective):
-‘Safety-net’ advocates said a century ago that a federal government spending
4-7% of the national income can’t effectively help the poor. Today, ‘Occupy’
moonbats say with the same ferociousness that a federal government spending 53%
of the national income can’t effectively help the poor.
-George Takei says that North Carolina’s decision to not pay
gays for coupling is a “shame.” I’m sure that was the attitude of passive onlookers
as their town’s stableboy was hanged for being in some way queer.
-The complacent attitude about Michelle’s vacations: “Well
she is first lady” with a shrug. The attitude of those who carried Xerxes’
throne on their backs: “Well he is a god” without, of course, a shrug.
-Disapproval/defense of abortion today, disapproval/defense
of drowning ‘unfit’ babies yesterday.
-Present disapproval of what we call 'public nudity,' the Puritans’
disapproval of women rolling up their sleeves for work.
-I’ll add more as complaints roll across my Facebook home
page.
I don’t
mean to make the situations equal, I mean to equate the attitudes about
different situations. From our own perspectives we view things as more
severe/reasonable differently than others, especially our ancestors. A person’s
attitudes about scope and scale are completely relative their past experiences
alone, not the past experiences of the species. One may spend his whole life in
the attempt to internalize the conditions of a single place at a single point
in history, but no one can presume to speak for the broad experience of humanity.
This is where the Progressive fails in his ideological hopes to remake the
world. He overestimates his personal experience and actually believes his
professors’ egotistical tangents about him being “elite.” This makes him quite
a bit more unwise than the rest of us as he would reject potential gains from
the 'wisdom of the ages.'
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Further reading on this subject:
-
Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions"
-
Steve Pinker's "The Blank Slate"
-
Ralph Emerson's "History"
