Modern progressives disavow it, but the original Progressives were devout Christians and the heirs to American Puritanism. It was Nietzsche who expounded on the nihilism bound to result when the values of the West, tied to Judeo-Christianity were severed from God.
Activist left progressives tend to be young and so have grown up on screens. This makes them at once ahistorical and transhumanist. That is, they have "become" their devices which "tell" them everything. Which also means they are beyond reason. Thus, their atheistic, puritanical morality is unassailable. It's quite disturbing.
Brilliant! Your systematic exploration of three foundational falsehoods of left progressivism covered everything, and covered it so well!
Thus, just for completeness: a while back I ran into this classification of four socialisms (class socialism - like the Soviets, etc.; fascism as civic duty socialism; National Socialism - enough said; and intersectional socialism). With progressives propagating intersectional socialism, I worry about the current and - I am afraid to think - what future disasters it may bring to human flourishing.
While looking into it again a few days ago, I found this: "Intersectional Socialism: A Utopia for Radical Interdependence" (https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/book/56501). The abstract in the link is worth reading - it is a deadly serious academic trash - and reflects a lot of what Lorenzo criticizes.
I think Kipling's poem summarizes what Lorenzo stated in a way that has been and will be true for ages:
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
1
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
2
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
3
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
4
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
5
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
6
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
7
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
8
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four–
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
9
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
10
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Here's a question: is the quasi- religious and clearly utopian goal of a society free of oppression and alienation the most dangerous ideology of our time? I ask as the propulsive force of liberatory utopian thinking is seemingly unlimited.
The egalitarian steamroller has no brakes and no OFF switch, and there will never be a shortage of people, usually opportunists, charlatans, and some species of the disaffected, who want to climb onboard and drive it full-speed over their enemies.
The Soviets only stopped once they hit social and ecological disaster; the Khmer Rouge only stopped once the pile of corpses grew too high to conceal; the Jacobins only stopped after everyone who'd erected the guillotine had been fed to it.
There is just this potent vestigial belief in human societies, most likely rooted in the deep, dark midsts of our Paleolithic past, that Person A having more or being more than Person B is deeply unfair, is a violation of the social compact, and this usually sets up a triad: the Envied Other, the lesser person filled with envy and resentment, and then the sociopolitical entrepreneur who has the instincts to turn this supposed evidence of "oppression" into a shield and sword, into a way for them to gain followers and start a crusade for Justice, which only ever means "I want what (and who) you are, it rightfully belongs to me, and watch me take it."
Yes, "the propulsive force of liberatory utopian thinking is seemingly unlimited," absolutely yes. And this seems paradoxically even more intense in our modern liberal democracies, which promise a transcendence that no humans or their govt could ever deliver. Or maybe it's just that if humans have nothing to build, they will turn to destruction instead.
Brilliant, that just about stabs into the heart of this beast. Horkheimer uses fancy words to discuss man's cognitive dissonance yet the logical solution to this problem is to end mankind. That sure would solve a lot of man's problems, no doubt about it. If not for one tiny little imperfection...
To riff further on the point, the beautiful vision is ever unattainable and demands ever greater destruction of all that impedes the realization of it. Since you can't destroy what doesn't exist - the future - you must destroy what you can, the present (which was all created in the past).
There is an irony floating through this - the dichotomy of competitiveness/conflict versus cooperation (and conformity). The feminine is considered to be better characterized by the latter and masculine toxicity is to be found in the former. Yet, it is women who are far more status conscious than men and there is no greater zero sum game than place in the pecking order. How often are men manipulated and maneuvered into attaining higher status (at whatever cost to themselves) to please the woman in their life?
Excellent essay. The three claims you identify (blank-slate anthropology, conflict-centric social analysis, and an activist relationship to information) explain much of the doctrine’s internal logic.
One additional piece of context that may help explain its rise is the preceding philosophical collapse.
For much of the twentieth century, universities operated under the shadow of logical positivism, which at least attempted to anchor knowledge in universal empirical verification. When that project collapsed in the mid twentieth century, it didn’t produce a stable replacement. Instead, the intellectual world split.
One branch went in the direction you describe: postmodernism and Critical Theory, which treat knowledge primarily as an instrument of power and social transformation. I think this was largely opportunistic in the sense that it started with an activist end in mind (and indeed the theory itself says it is impossible to do it any other way!).
The other branch went in a radically different direction: Bayesian and technocratic frameworks that seek to rebuild epistemic authority through probabilistic reasoning, models, and decision theory. Essentially, "humbler forms of scientific realism."
Both are, in a sense, children of the same rupture. Once the positivist consensus broke, the academy fragmented into competing ways of reconstructing authority over truth.
That deeper philosophical bifurcation helps explain why the conflict you’re describing now shows up across institutions rather than remaining confined to a few departments.
If only academia could make the observations that it is a tertiary function of civilisation and not a foundational one. It may then have realised that not being anchored in the essence of human behaviours, it lost itself up its own arse.
I recently commented in another thread that it was remarkable to me how academics, of all disciplines, somehow completely ignore plentiful evidence that socialism (and communism even more so), fails every time it is tried and results in comparatively (and sometimes absolutely) destitute societies, while at same time capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Queue a response of elaborate whataboutery attempting to poo poo that thesis with ‘but capitalism is way worse, has killed way more people and created vastly more poverty’. These ‘progressive’ people simply are not redeemable. They are zealots and as such dangerous. And they more or less run the vast majority of our tertiary education system as well as dominating the teaching unions and much of our state school bureaucracy. This is a recipe for societal decay and it is one we are now suffering badly from.
Restacked. This helps explain a great deal. From how the progressive left entrenched their power to how that power is religiously enforced, filling the God-shaped hole that our society has created.
Fantastic analysis. We're at the point we're solutions need to start being generated, and identifying key branches in the woke blob.
Alinksy's 13th rule is ""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." This is a good start, picking 3 tenets and rejecting them entirely. It also allows complex gotcha questions with spurious framing to be rejected wholesale. "So do you believe that immigrant transgender Women's increased employment opportunities in Southern Ameristan leading to a 5.44% increase in widget GDP is a bad thing?"
Can just be answered with "That questions stems from blank slateism and is a faulty premise in its entirety"
Very EXCELLENT summary! Yet, at the same time, missing something. Did I not, as a young person, help to build the future we are living in now, and find irritating, as an old .. fart?
If you have read Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals" , he makes a point about Marx's personality, which includes a disregard for truth and taste for violence, among other negative traits.
I had saved a photo of the full quote because I liked it so much (one reason being that the very same traits seem to be reproduced in other socialists), alas I can't find it now.
Maybe I should re-read the book, it was quite amusing, even if it seemed exaggerated at times.
His book on self-deception is a mixed bag. Very good when he is being an evolutionary theorist, much less so when his personal politics shines through.
But his parental investment theory was a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of sexual selection.
Concepts are living habits, not fixed foundations. Truth emerges from communal process—not from declaring static falsehoods while ignoring that all thought shapes the world it claims only to describe.
And we shouldn't underestimate how much of the progressive worldview is, essentially, a set of class prejudices and biases...
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-progressive-agenda-as-pure-class
Modern progressives disavow it, but the original Progressives were devout Christians and the heirs to American Puritanism. It was Nietzsche who expounded on the nihilism bound to result when the values of the West, tied to Judeo-Christianity were severed from God.
Activist left progressives tend to be young and so have grown up on screens. This makes them at once ahistorical and transhumanist. That is, they have "become" their devices which "tell" them everything. Which also means they are beyond reason. Thus, their atheistic, puritanical morality is unassailable. It's quite disturbing.
Brilliant! Your systematic exploration of three foundational falsehoods of left progressivism covered everything, and covered it so well!
Thus, just for completeness: a while back I ran into this classification of four socialisms (class socialism - like the Soviets, etc.; fascism as civic duty socialism; National Socialism - enough said; and intersectional socialism). With progressives propagating intersectional socialism, I worry about the current and - I am afraid to think - what future disasters it may bring to human flourishing.
While looking into it again a few days ago, I found this: "Intersectional Socialism: A Utopia for Radical Interdependence" (https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/book/56501). The abstract in the link is worth reading - it is a deadly serious academic trash - and reflects a lot of what Lorenzo criticizes.
I think Kipling's poem summarizes what Lorenzo stated in a way that has been and will be true for ages:
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
1
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
2
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
3
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
4
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
5
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
6
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
7
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
8
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four–
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
9
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
10
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
For some reason every time I read that line, "the Dog returns to his Vomit", I think of Bill Clinton.
Here's a question: is the quasi- religious and clearly utopian goal of a society free of oppression and alienation the most dangerous ideology of our time? I ask as the propulsive force of liberatory utopian thinking is seemingly unlimited.
The egalitarian steamroller has no brakes and no OFF switch, and there will never be a shortage of people, usually opportunists, charlatans, and some species of the disaffected, who want to climb onboard and drive it full-speed over their enemies.
The Soviets only stopped once they hit social and ecological disaster; the Khmer Rouge only stopped once the pile of corpses grew too high to conceal; the Jacobins only stopped after everyone who'd erected the guillotine had been fed to it.
There is just this potent vestigial belief in human societies, most likely rooted in the deep, dark midsts of our Paleolithic past, that Person A having more or being more than Person B is deeply unfair, is a violation of the social compact, and this usually sets up a triad: the Envied Other, the lesser person filled with envy and resentment, and then the sociopolitical entrepreneur who has the instincts to turn this supposed evidence of "oppression" into a shield and sword, into a way for them to gain followers and start a crusade for Justice, which only ever means "I want what (and who) you are, it rightfully belongs to me, and watch me take it."
Yes, "the propulsive force of liberatory utopian thinking is seemingly unlimited," absolutely yes. And this seems paradoxically even more intense in our modern liberal democracies, which promise a transcendence that no humans or their govt could ever deliver. Or maybe it's just that if humans have nothing to build, they will turn to destruction instead.
Brilliant, that just about stabs into the heart of this beast. Horkheimer uses fancy words to discuss man's cognitive dissonance yet the logical solution to this problem is to end mankind. That sure would solve a lot of man's problems, no doubt about it. If not for one tiny little imperfection...
Thanks!
Isn't that just like a theorist to want to erase all that doesn't confirm his theory?
Lord save us from the professed saviors of humanity!
To riff further on the point, the beautiful vision is ever unattainable and demands ever greater destruction of all that impedes the realization of it. Since you can't destroy what doesn't exist - the future - you must destroy what you can, the present (which was all created in the past).
Put that Nietzsche away and pick up your Bible my friend.
I'm fairly familiar with that Book, even if I don't believe it has all of the answers.
I read em both!
I know, everyone around here has.
There is an irony floating through this - the dichotomy of competitiveness/conflict versus cooperation (and conformity). The feminine is considered to be better characterized by the latter and masculine toxicity is to be found in the former. Yet, it is women who are far more status conscious than men and there is no greater zero sum game than place in the pecking order. How often are men manipulated and maneuvered into attaining higher status (at whatever cost to themselves) to please the woman in their life?
Or, better yet! How many man have maneuvered and manipulated the truth, in order to get themselves some tits and ass? Not me!
Excellent essay. The three claims you identify (blank-slate anthropology, conflict-centric social analysis, and an activist relationship to information) explain much of the doctrine’s internal logic.
One additional piece of context that may help explain its rise is the preceding philosophical collapse.
For much of the twentieth century, universities operated under the shadow of logical positivism, which at least attempted to anchor knowledge in universal empirical verification. When that project collapsed in the mid twentieth century, it didn’t produce a stable replacement. Instead, the intellectual world split.
One branch went in the direction you describe: postmodernism and Critical Theory, which treat knowledge primarily as an instrument of power and social transformation. I think this was largely opportunistic in the sense that it started with an activist end in mind (and indeed the theory itself says it is impossible to do it any other way!).
The other branch went in a radically different direction: Bayesian and technocratic frameworks that seek to rebuild epistemic authority through probabilistic reasoning, models, and decision theory. Essentially, "humbler forms of scientific realism."
Both are, in a sense, children of the same rupture. Once the positivist consensus broke, the academy fragmented into competing ways of reconstructing authority over truth.
That deeper philosophical bifurcation helps explain why the conflict you’re describing now shows up across institutions rather than remaining confined to a few departments.
I mapped that upstream story here:
https://theliminallens.substack.com/p/the-perilous-dance-of-philosophy?r=dvftt
I also gave an associated presentation here:
https://youtu.be/w2XTYD7tTGg?si=9RD4yxFxQW5Gp3YM
Really insightful observations.
If only academia could make the observations that it is a tertiary function of civilisation and not a foundational one. It may then have realised that not being anchored in the essence of human behaviours, it lost itself up its own arse.
Well said.
Reminds me of Taleb “In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is”
Progressivism is Christianity for atheists but with no God at the top there is no limit to the mischief they can get up to.
I recently commented in another thread that it was remarkable to me how academics, of all disciplines, somehow completely ignore plentiful evidence that socialism (and communism even more so), fails every time it is tried and results in comparatively (and sometimes absolutely) destitute societies, while at same time capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. Queue a response of elaborate whataboutery attempting to poo poo that thesis with ‘but capitalism is way worse, has killed way more people and created vastly more poverty’. These ‘progressive’ people simply are not redeemable. They are zealots and as such dangerous. And they more or less run the vast majority of our tertiary education system as well as dominating the teaching unions and much of our state school bureaucracy. This is a recipe for societal decay and it is one we are now suffering badly from.
The Left marched through the institutions and destroyed every institution and in some cases nation they marched into…
Fortunately for workers and soldiers they are shirking, weak and cowards.
They can DO nothing and enforce nothing.
Forward councils of workers and soldiers!
🤣
Restacked. This helps explain a great deal. From how the progressive left entrenched their power to how that power is religiously enforced, filling the God-shaped hole that our society has created.
This is brilliant Lorenzo. The best analysis of the attempted self annihilation of the progressive left I think i have come across.
Love this, thank you
Fantastic analysis. We're at the point we're solutions need to start being generated, and identifying key branches in the woke blob.
Alinksy's 13th rule is ""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." This is a good start, picking 3 tenets and rejecting them entirely. It also allows complex gotcha questions with spurious framing to be rejected wholesale. "So do you believe that immigrant transgender Women's increased employment opportunities in Southern Ameristan leading to a 5.44% increase in widget GDP is a bad thing?"
Can just be answered with "That questions stems from blank slateism and is a faulty premise in its entirety"
Very EXCELLENT summary! Yet, at the same time, missing something. Did I not, as a young person, help to build the future we are living in now, and find irritating, as an old .. fart?
If you have read Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals" , he makes a point about Marx's personality, which includes a disregard for truth and taste for violence, among other negative traits.
I had saved a photo of the full quote because I liked it so much (one reason being that the very same traits seem to be reproduced in other socialists), alas I can't find it now.
Maybe I should re-read the book, it was quite amusing, even if it seemed exaggerated at times.
Surprised by Trivers popping up in your bibliography.
I read some of his non academic "discourse" just this week in the release of certain emails...
His book on self-deception is a mixed bag. Very good when he is being an evolutionary theorist, much less so when his personal politics shines through.
But his parental investment theory was a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of sexual selection.
Concepts are living habits, not fixed foundations. Truth emerges from communal process—not from declaring static falsehoods while ignoring that all thought shapes the world it claims only to describe.