I have often tried to understand why a whole culture, with its politicians and
media out front, is so content to naively wade deeper into debt. Somewhere at
the root of the thinking behind this is the philosophy of “progressivism”, that
is that we just gotta be getting better and better. I hadn’t thought of this
until I noticed my son always referring to the “left” as “progressives”. It
seems like a good thing to be, just as being “gay” or “liberal” or “pro-choice”.
Of course this is all marketing spin and rhetoric, as is most of the election
process. (following the US debates just convinces me again of this latter
thought). But the idea that we can have today whatever we want, and that it will
be paid for down the road has to be linked to an underlying assumption of how
the world works.
Last year I finally got around to Darwin’s Origin of
Species, and was interested to see this philosophy of “progressivism”
permeated the work. Darwin essentially seemed to believe that all environmental
change was good because it must ultimately result in species that were more fit.
Of course every environmentalist today would cringe at that, but in that thought
is the notion of “progress”. Marx took the same idea, and applied it to social
and political processes. And these assumptions are rooted in us generally in the
West.
The other assumption, which is linked to the first, is that people do
what we do as a reaction to our environments. This is social Darwinism, but is
so ingrained that there seems little reason to challenge it. I’ve been reading
recently some creationist arguments regarding how environments do not produce
adaptive change in creatures, but rather it is the built-in engineering of
creatures that allows them to modify both themselves and their offspring to make
the best of changing environments. “Progressives” believe that we will produce
more humane people by legislating an optimal social environment for them. When
there is a deviation of behaviour, it points to a failure of the social
engineers to design the perfect social environment.
I appreciate the first premise in the local conservative candidate’s
brochure, that is that (even though a just society tries to care for the
weak) each individual is first responsible for their own provision and actions.
Collective bargaining, whether for mill-workers or doctors, seems to
try to impose an artificial pressure on what goods and services should be worth.
This gives the illusion that the workers are getting more return for their time,
whereas in reality it just fuels the necessary inflation to keep people buying
stuff we don’t need today, hoping it will be easier to pay for tomorrow, and
somehow convince us all that the emperor’s clothes are indeed
beautiful. -philw
