By: Andrea Shea King
The Radio Patriot

I recently was invited to join a group via email and forum. It’s a bit like wandering into a gentleman’s lounge where conversations are contemplative, given to delving into cause and effect, history and events, and the nature of man — good and evil.

Their ruminations are interesting and reading them, one can imagine being in a salon redolent of brandy and cigars, overstuffed wingbacks, the soft glow from a fire in the hearth.

Threads typically begin with a thought spawned from an observation, a book, or a television program. With permission, I’ll republish them here from time to time. I think these ruminations worth sharing. Maybe you’ll agree.

Dave P kicks it off:

G. K. Chesterton on “progressives”–

“Progress is simply a comparative about which we have not settled the superlative.”

What are we progressing to? What is the goal? When will we say we have arrived? If progress is to be invoked always, for the purpose of calling any present tradition or situation antiquated or uninformed or passe or some such, does the word still have any real meaning? Can someone claim progress without ever being forced to admit what it is he proposes to progress TO? Obama used the word “change” in the same deliberately muddy way. From what? To what? Chesterton is brilliant here in the very early 20th century–

“We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress- that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.

Progress, properly understood, has indeed a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth.

Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible, or at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction, and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.

Never perhaps since the beginning of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word “progress” than we.”

C. S. Lewis, a great admirer of Chesterton, wisely counseled us that when we have taken the wrong road at the fork, the only way to make REAL progress is to go backwards at full speed until you arrive at the fork, and then take the RIGHT road. Backwards movement is most certainly progress, when you are correcting ERRORS.

Jason:

Very interesting quotes, and I may have to add Chesterton to my list, along with that C. S. Lewis book sitting unread on my shelf.

As we all know, progressives call themselves such because they believe that the arrow of time points in one direction: theirs. It doesn’t occur to them, as it does to us, that the path of time can also be one of decay and destruction, and not to a better tomorrow where we’re all happy and living in peace in a world of moral ambiguity.

There’s an excellent and interesting movie by Elia Kazan that came out in 1957 called “A Face In the Crowd” starring Andy Griffith (who now works as a lackey for ObamaCare). Griffith plays a character called Lonesome Rhodes, a hobo who gets “discovered” and turned into a media sensation, and ultimately a political candidate.

I’m not entirely sure what Kazan’s politics were (he was involved in rooting out communists in Hollywood, and today he’s hated by many of the Hollywood left for that), but the movie does take what appear to be some humorous jabs at conservatives (the obvious right-wing candidate says things like “Social security? All Daniel Boone needed was a knife and a gun, and he made his own way.”)

More interestingly, this same candidate keeps talking about “change” and how the “people want change, tired of the same old etc etc etc”. The point is that this was 1957. This talk of “change” has been going on forever, yet in 2008, which happened to be when I watched this movie, it was treated as something fresh and original.

I know we all hold the MSM with extremely low regard, but I always marveled at the fact that hardly anyone ever stopped to ask those basic questions, like “change from what, to what?”. We knew what he meant, but the platitudinousness was a blank slate for others to project whatever they wanted. In fact, I don’t even remember a Republican asking this question until a late debate when Giuliani did, and later Sarah Palin did at the convention. But this language had been going on for months and months at that point.

For progressives, progress really means deconstruction. It is a road built on moral relativism, and the end result is nothingness. Look at art, and the movement toward the Modern. Art, specifically painting, had truly progressed through the Medieval period, took huge strides during the Renaissance, and continued to flourish in the Romantic Period. The skill of the artist had grown more pronounced, and shape and form and light and shadow created a realism never before achieved. Value was placed on skill, artistry, and workmanship, and it showed.

As we move into the Progressive Era of the last century and the move toward Modernism, we see far less emphasis on all of the above.

Modernism was a movement away from the ornate, the sacred, and the divine, and a movement toward the minimal, the vague, and the open.

Paintings went from three dimensions to two, and ultimately to one. The definition of painting shrank and shrank and shrank, along with the palettes and the canvasses they were created on. In fact, who needed canvasses? So conventional . . At some point, an empty frame passed for a “work of art”, actually a step below a single straight line on a nothing background. Then, the “artist” didn’t have to create anything at all, he merely needed to place an object, created by someone else, in “context”, like Duchamp’s urinal.

Progressives moved art from an expression of the sacred and profound to the empty and profane. Its artistic minimalism is matched by its philosophical minimalism. It seeks to destroy, break down, and deconstruct all that came before.

Progressive art is a foretelling example of what they have in store for the rest of society. They seek to destroy the bonds created by tradition, religion, and a common culture; their tools are multiculturalism, atheism, and moral relativism. They destroy so that they don’t feel judged in all of their moral inferiority, and they seek to lower everyone else to their level.

The quote by Lewis is true because moving forward in time does not equal progress; without sunlight and water, a plant will slowly die as it moves through time. It is possible to return back to that fork, but only if one understands what it is that’s being destroyed.

JF joined the conversation:

I read Chesteron’s Orthodoxy. Really enjoyed it. While I appreciate what Mr. Lewis has said, and I’m a huge fan of his, I don’t think we’ve taken the wrong fork. Historically speaking we’ve gone backward.

The farther back you look backward in history from the founding of the US, you find societies with greater dependence on their masters and a greater group mentality. Real human progress points toward man being free and independent as an individual. We have stoves, so we don’t need to use the communal fire for cooking. We have private property, so we can earn our own living, rather than giving all of our produce to some potentate who then gives us back some small portion of our own goods to in order to survive another year.

My professors always argued a sort of cyclical pattern of political history that goes from state of nature/anarchy to despotism to democracy/republicanism to despotism to state of nature/anarchy. Rinse and repeat. Progressives would try to break the cycle (which is their own intellectual construct) by creating a sort of composite freedom/despotism system, where property is theft, but late term abortions are celebrated with a ribbon cutting ceremony. The people’s true liberty is taken in exchange for basic physical comforts and they are kept docile with token liberties like gay marriage, abortion and the like. Essentially, they trade private property and freedom of religion for “rights” that dehumanize and further break down the traditional pillars of a culture. You can’t impose soft or any other kind of tyranny without a denigration of the fundamental philosophies that keep a culture strong.

The Romans, by the standards of the Classical Period, were the second most conservative major culture after the Israelites. If you read the historical books of the Old Testament or any of the Roman Historians, the pattern that emerges is one of deteriorating cultural mores immediately preceeds state failure.

The Romans gave up their moral culture in exchange for bread and circuses and making the non citizens fight their wars. They ended up losing their Republic and their empire. The Israelites would lose their moral culture by entertaining foreign practices long considered taboo. Every time, they would have a bad king (Ahab and Jezebel) or get invaded.

You can see a similar pattern in man’s development on a spiritual level (from a Christian perspective). If you look at how Judaism developed and the advent and development of Christianity, you see a story of the maturation of humanities relationship with God. In the beginning, man had to offer sacrifices and follow complex rules. God had to raise manking like a parent raises a child.

“When the fullness of time had come”, as the Good Book says, Christ came. God became man, elevating man and allowing for a real relationship between God and man. Mankind was growing up. As a result, the rules got smaller and the emphasis on faith and love for God and man increased. Like a child man had to follow strict rules until he understood “why” those rules made sense (i’m not including dietary laws, of course). Since the Advent, there has been a lot less smiting and such, just like you don’t spank your college age kid. You take his keys away.

The point is, man has been moving toward adulthood. The chief characteristic of adulthood is independence and the progressives hate independence like Ivey hates lazy PA’s. And, folks, that’s quite a bit.

Progressives are trying to put an adult in a daycare and tell us it’s the most wonderful thing to have ever happened and we’re lucky they sorted it out for us. I’m not ready for my cookies and nap right now.