Where are freedom and secularism leading us? Part 2

Concept

Progress has meant a movement toward the fulfillment of a particular form of society where individuals are unhindered by social mores, so that everyone picks their way of life and being as freely as they can without government and social interference, and everybody else tolerates completely the decisions made by everyone else, nobody feeling grudges at the choices of others. In few words, everybody’s particular pursuit of happiness has no negative or positive influence in the pursuit of happiness of anyone else living in the same place. In few words, progress is a moral agenda. The practical consequences of this moral agenda will be discussed in a further entry. It only suffices to say that it depends on the destruction of any notion of a common good that depends on a shared system of values and traditions.

There is another understanding of progress which I consider misleading: progress as economic development. We owe this notion to the British, who at the opening of the modern revolutionary times triggered the massive economic development of the industrial revolution. Some people commit the tempting fallacy of arguing that the more economic development, society progresses toward the moral ideal described in the previous paragraph. I will not develop my ideas concerning this notion. It suffices to say that I disagree with it. Development and progress are two different things, and if there is a casual relationship between them we don’t know.

Conservatism aims in the opposite direction; first it was expressed as reactionary ideology and behavior: avoiding the moral and social changes posed by progress. Later it was expressed as nostalgia: recovering the traditions that a decaying civilization was destroying. Today is almost depressing pessimism: the memory of a social identity almost gone. This is also a moral stance, not an economic one. The mingling of the word conservatism with economic neoliberalism is nothing but confusion, and it has coinage strange expressions as “fiscal conservatism” (simply neoliberal would fit better, especially because it literally means what it says).

Being a moral stance, conservatism is antagonistic with liberal progressivism. One aims at an imaginary society, assuming that that society is possible, but with little empirical reference whatsoever. Conservatism aims at a real society: ours. It refers to a historically empirical experience.

The real problem lies in our concepts of justice and fairness. The truth of the progressive discourse lies in the injustices and unfairness of the old society, and it is in this critique that their entire agenda bases itself. Conservatives usually lack an effective response to this criticism, because after all the old society was filled with many if those so-called injustices. This is the main reason why conservatives are usually labeled as members of what used to be the group of people privileged by the old status quo, and many times it is an accurate remark.

Where are freedom and secularism leading us? Part 1

The question that haunts my mind...

  

History

Two hundred years ago, when the Ancient Regime was still powerful and pervasive in the Western Civilization, the revolutionary idea of dethroning royal families and removing cardinals and bishops from public offices was a noble quest. The royal families ruled despotically, the caste society was unfairly repressive, the church had lost the spiritual function to which it was intended. For a middle class bourgeoisie of the time there was no better option than being more or less revolutionary. Things had to change. And they changed.

Seeing history backwards always helps understanding where we are now. But comparing the ideals of those times to the ones of today also helps gauging the value of our own time. The question goes: Where are we? And by “we” I mean the Western Civilization. I’m explicitly discounting the worlds of Islam, Hindu, Africa, East Asia and maybe the Slavic Orthodox societies. I’m counting in most of Western Europe and its former colonies (except those in Africa). In few words, I’m talking about the array of national societies that emerged from Roman Christianity some way or the other. Where is the Western Civilization going? To me it seems to have disappeared almost entirely. And to me that is a sad, unfortunate and tragic fact.

We can divide the history of the Western Civilization as before and after the French Revolution of 1789, because it was in the French Revolution where the modern debate of freedom and secularism slammed into our history not to leave the center stage ever again. In every country this event manifested itself in various forms, but given that France was then the peak of European civilization, a momentous social movement like this spread like wildfire. Even the Anglo American revolution of 1776, which began more than a decade before its French counterpart, was a consequence of the intellectual and social forces that where being cultivated in Paris’ slums.

From the French Revolution of 1789 emerged the revolutionary ideal that convinced so many people from Jefferson, Hegel, Bolivar and Proudhon, to Juarez, Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara, and so forth. Paris’ massive rebellion became an icon, then an ideal, then a conviction, then a way of living. If we look at the French Revolution as nothing more than a successful plebeian rebellion in the capital of a particular civilization at the moment of its cultural peak, we start to wonder if everything that came afterwards was nothing but a misinterpretation, if not a huge misunderstanding. It was just a rebellion like many others in the history of mankind; however, this one was interpreted as a definite moment in a historical phenomenon usually referred to as “progress”. And it was the impression that there was a historical progress that put so many bright minds in the path of searching the direction of this phenomenon.

But if we consider the possibility that there was never a progressive movement; if we consider the option that this impression was nothing but an idiosyncratic feature of a civilization reaching its peak of self fulfillment; maybe then we can understand why we seemed to be at a complete lost today: because we were looking for something, and framed the most comprehensive discourses about something that we were sure was there, when it wasn’t. This is the most paradoxical feature of all progressive political discourses and movements today: that they move an agenda based on a north that is purely ideological.