Post-Progressivism: A New Way Forward?

The Myth of Progress:

First, it will be necessary for me to state the original meaning of the word apocalypse, since I will be using this word frequently throughout this blog post and I need to disentangle it from its most commonly understood definition, i.e., as a catastrophic event that leaves immense death and destruction in its wake. An apocalypse is a concept specific to monotheism, and it means the “uncovering” of God’s glorious plan to humankind (Greek: apo – “un” + kalyptein – “to cover” = apocalypse – “to uncover”). An apocalypse, in other words, is divine revelation, in which the mysteries of God’s special purpose for humankind are made manifest.

For an Elect, the coming of an apocalypse means not catastrophe but salvation, and is therefore something to be desired rather than feared. Because God is pure goodness, an apocalypse is akin to utopia, for it illuminates to humankind the true and only pathway that leads to a celestial age in which harmony and justice reign everlastingly triumphant. In the history of religious thought, apocalyptic religions are extremely rare, and therefore quite unrepresentative of the predominating trends in human spirituality throughout the ages. Of the thousands upon thousands of types of religious experience humans have engaged in over the course of history, there are only four apocalyptic religions of note, all from the Middle East region: the three Abrahamic monotheisms already mentioned, plus Zoroastrianism, a now nearly extinct dualistic monotheism from ancient Persia that predates the Abrahamic monotheisms and was in many ways their forerunner. (The theological notions of heaven and hell, free will, and an apocalyptic end-time leading to a general resurrection of the dead and a paradisiacal renewal of the world are Zoroastrian innovations.)

Since the idea of progress developed concurrently with other ideas being propounded by seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers, such as religious pluralism and scientific empiricism, and since the Enlightenment was an event centred on western Europe and North America, and therefore in a socio-political milieu still very much dominated by Christian precepts and biases, when talking about monotheism going forward, my focus will be on the Christian monotheistic tradition as opposed to the monotheistic traditions of Judaism and Islam. While the worldviews of all three Abrahamic monotheisms are, in the broadest of senses, fundamentally the same, as they all view the progression of historical time as a morality play that will necessarily culminate in the emancipation, redemption and salvation of a righteous Elect, they differ significantly in many crucial aspects of doctrine, organization and ritual. For instance, both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions, whereas Judaism is not.

I here define progress as the belief that advances in technology, scientific knowledge, and socio-political organization are producing permanent improvements in the human condition. Progress is inherently teleological, because it interprets history as a linear process that is moving toward an in-built goal. Just like universally valid natural laws, such as evolution by natural selection or the theory of relativity, exist in the material sciences, progressives assert that universal laws in history, economics and society are also an accurate reflection of reality. The objective of any progressive project, then, is to first uncover the logical pattern that regulates the proper course of historical development, and then to remodel society on this logical pattern so that it is brought into harmony with the underlying purpose of human existence.

Progress is supposed to be founded entirely on rationalism, rejecting all supernatural explanations of events and phenomena as superstition. Basing any knowledge or social engineering programme on faith, even if just partially, is anathema to progressivism. Yet it is apocalyptic religion, especially Christianity, which progress most closely resembles in both structure and objective.

While Christians (and monotheists in general) interpret history to be moving in accordance to a benevolent and anthropocentric divine plan, i.e., Providence, progressives view history to be following a benevolent and anthropocentric rational plan. Thus, from the perspective of both providential Christians and “secular” progressives, history isn’t an endless cycle of tragicomic ups and downs, with the sound and the fury that these cycles inevitably bring about signifying nothing. Rather, humans are placed centre stage in an unfolding drama that will eventually see them triumph in a radiant and harmonious transformation of their own affairs. In consequence, history, the study of past events as they really happened, becomes “History”, an anti-tragic and predetermined story of transcendent human liberation.

It is important to point out here that most types of religious experience and most forms of non-Enlightenment and non-Western rationalist thought have viewed history cyclically, instead of in an apocalyptic or teleological manner. Indeed, the polytheism and idiosyncratic mystery religions of pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization were neither apocalyptic nor teleological. Nor are the surviving non-monotheistic religions of Asian origin: Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Taoism and Shinto. Another Asian religion is Confucianism; however it can just as easily be classified as a secular political philosophy and system of ethics as a religion. Although teleology wasn’t unknown to the rationalist thought of ancient Greek philosophers, they generally favoured a cyclical analysis of the nonstop procession of historical events over a linear one.

Besides seeing history as a tale of victorious human uplift, progressivism apes Christianity in four more essential aspects, albeit always in a secularized language of reason and science:

First, progressives have copied from Christianity the concept of egalitarian universalism – the idea that all humans are fundamentally equal. Because God is all-powerful and all-merciful and doesn’t make mistakes, and because all humans are made in God’s image and are therefore eligible to receive the promise of salvation, Christianity is both egalitarian and universalistic. Progressives, by being, at the very least, meritocratic, and sometimes egalitarian to a far greater extreme, and by being champions of a worldview that proclaims progressive principles of one kind or another to be universally valid and the building blocks for an eventual universal civilization, have inherited the egalitarian and universalistic convictions of the Christian religion.

Many religions and cultures are non-egalitarian or non-universalistic, or both. Hinduism, for instance, due to the caste system, categorically rejects equality as a tenet of social order. Furthermore, Hinduism is a “national” religion in the sense that it is for a particular people located in a particular place, namely the Indian sub-continent. There are no Hindu missionaries going abroad to seek out converts so that a universal Hindu civilization can be eventually realized. The Chinese people, too, have long held that Chinese civilization is separate and incompatible with other civilizations. Much of Chinese history has been dedicated to removing foreign contamination, brought to China by barbarian infiltration of one kind or another, from authentic Chinese ways. Yet China’s legacy of Confucian governance, based on the rule of an authoritarian bureaucracy selected via a rigorous examination process open to all (in theory), has historically made China more politically egalitarian than the West, where, until very recently, hereditary aristocracy dominated.

Neither Christians nor progressives, though, have a track record of perfect consistency when it comes to egalitarian universalism. In previous centuries, through the doctrines of the “Curse of Ham” and Pre-adamism, some Christians found theological cover for racial discrimination against non-whites, especially people of black African descent, as well as for anti-Semitism. Granted, these were always fringe doctrines, and Christian orthodoxy consistently judged them to be heretical.

When it comes to progressivism and the abandonment of egalitarianism in favour of exclusionary bigotry, there’s the sad and lethal legacy of scientific racism. A distinct strain of progressive thought, with its heyday spanning from approximately the early-to-mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, scientific racism ranked different racial groups according to a hierarchical scale, with the white race, which was perceived to be the most dynamic, intelligent, and morally upright race, being placed at the top. In order to maintain good racial hygiene, wherever significant numbers of “superior” whites and “inferior” non-whites intermingled in the West, steps were taken, either formally or informally, to prevent the intermixing of blood between the races and to keep non-whites in a state of subservience to whites, because it was feared that if the races weren’t kept separate and if non-whites weren’t subjugated a mongrel race of half-breeds would result, causing the progressive trajectory the white race was on to regress back into semi-barbarism. With the introduction of Jim Crow segregation in the American South following the U.S. Civil War, which both disenfranchised African Americans and humiliatingly restricted them to separate, substandard facilities and services, the United States became a partial racial state, notwithstanding the fact that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, explicitly prohibited discrimination of that sort. Scientific racism, a progressive ideology that rejected equality between humans on the basis of different skin colour hues and other racial characteristics, rationalized these patently unjust laws against African Americans. While Americans pioneered state-sponsored racism, it would be two other states, Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, which took racism to another level, becoming full-fledged racial states in 1933 and 1948, respectively.

In the case of Nazi Germany, it was to take scientific racism to unparalleled extremes, committing genocide against 6 million Jews – the foremost target of the Nazi regime’s fanatical racial hatreds and fears. After the unspeakable crimes of Nazi Germany became common knowledge in the immediate postwar period, scientific racism was quickly rebranded pseudoscience in the West, and thereafter no self-respecting progressive could possibly even entertain such an obviously ridiculous and wicked idea as scientifically-sanctioned racism. To be sure, even during its zenith, most progressives probably considered scientific racism an abhorrent idea. Nevertheless, there was a time, and not all that long ago, when to be both progressive and racist not only socially acceptable, but widely practiced.

The second feature that progressivism borrowed from Christianity is anthropocentrism, which is the belief that humankind is the most important element of existence. From the anthropocentric perspective shared by both progressives and Christians (and monotheists generally), humans have been granted, via either the advancement of technology and scientific knowledge or by God’s decree, dominion over the natural world. Because both progressives and Christians agree that humans posses a special destiny, it naturally follows that humans are separate from other life-forms in what it is that motivates their actions. Non-human creatures only function on base instincts, such as procuring food from the wild, bonding with one another in order to improve defences against predators, fighting each other over territory or potential sexual partners, and procreating. Humans, on the other hand, are different, progressives and Christians maintain, for they exist to fulfill a higher noble purpose that will ultimately see them rise above their corrupt natures and environment.  

Humankind’s exulted place in the cosmos that both monotheism and progressivism accepts as unassailable truth is a very peculiar belief. Practically all non-monotheistic religions and all non-progressive philosophies do not view humans as being separate from other animals and nature. Moreover, the idea that, at some point in the future, humans can or necessarily will release themselves from their flawed natures is regarded as dubious at best. For people who believe in neither a monotheistic creed nor a progressive ideology, human nature is intractable, for it is permanently expected to remain in the faulty state it has always been observed to be in – that is to say, prone to selfishness and acts of cruelty, as well as to self-deception and flights of foolish overindulgence.

The third attribute that progressivism imitated from Christianity is its missionary zeal. Since Christianity is a universal religion that professes to explain the true and only purpose behind human existence, it is obligatory for Christians to spread the gospel – “the good news” – so that all humans have a chance of hearing God’s redeeming message, and thus to convert to the one true faith before it is too late. Progressives, by viewing the creation of an ideologically uniform universal civilization as the final stage of historical development, are also predisposed to proselytization. Ignorant and irrational ideas that run counter to progress (or to one particular progressive sect’s understanding of progress) must be fervently rebuked and corrected, so that humankind can continue unmolested on its long trek to the sunlit uplands of progressive deliverance.     

As mentioned above, Islam is the other Abrahamic monotheism that zealously tries to spread its system of beliefs to the entire world by proselytizing. Also, there’s Buddhism, a non-monotheistic missionary religion. Buddhism is here grouped with Christianity and Islam, because the Buddhist message on how to achieve permanent death – that is, death without an afterlife – from life’s endless cycles of suffering is meant for all humans. Other than Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, however, virtually all other surviving religions are without missionaries, because they neither make doctrinal claims to universal truth, nor do they forecast humankind, or at least a righteous remnant of humankind, being united in fellowship on some future date, as Christianity and Islam (but not Buddhism) do.

All progressive ideologies, like the three aforementioned missionary religions, engage in proselytization. Since every progressive ideology has universalistic aspirations, their adherents are always energetically engaged with disseminating their views to as many people as they can possibly reach about history’s encoded human-centric and beneficent rational design. Consequently, all progressive ideologies are also missionary ideologies.

Finally, the fourth commonality linking progressivism to Christianity is the central role creedal doctrine plays in each. A creed is a statement of shared beliefs of a religious community that summarize core doctrines, like the Apostles’ Creed in Christianity and the Shahadah in Islam. A creed, in other words, says such-and-such about God, scripture and/or Providence, and its disciples are expected to devoutly follow it to a tee. Creedal religion is specific to monotheism. Of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Christianity, especially western Christianity, i.e., Catholicism and Protestantism, is the most creedal, whereas Judaism is the least. Islam occupies a middle ground.  

Non-monotheistic religions are without creedal beliefs. Although some Asian religions, such as Buddhism, do possess substantial and sophisticated doctrines, they do not possess systematic creeds. In place of creeds, non-monotheistic religions are based on rituals and practice, making it easy for them to both borrow from and coexist with other forms of religious experience.

Non-monotheistic religions also tend to be highly syncretic, being capable of incorporating the rites and beliefs of other religions into their own without difficulty. For instance, the age-old jumbling of Shinto practices with Buddhism in Japan. (Monotheism generally views syncretism as heresy.) Because non-monotheistic religions interpret history cyclically, with humans, like other animals, going nowhere in particular, there’s little point for them to fret over the melding of different religious customs and practices.

Of course progressivism doesn’t have creeds, but it does have ideology, here defined as visionary speculation on humankind’s ultimate purpose. Ideology serves the same function to progressivism as creedal belief does to monotheism – namely, giving an absolute, heartening and triumphalist answer to the question why humans exist. Just like apocalyptic monotheism, but based on rationalism and science instead of faith and scripture, progressive ideology aims to illuminate to humankind the lone reason behind historical advance. Yet progressive ideologues take it for granted that history has an overarching goal built into it.

As belief in Christianity (and Judaism) has withered in the West beginning with the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, progressive ideology has often filled the emotional emptiness left by the loss of faith in a divine ordering of the universe. Progressive ideology, like Christianity (and Judaism), imparts an optimistic and coherent meaning to the lives of believing Westerners and imbues them with an overall sense of mission. The Enlightenment sparked the rise of the “isms” – progressive ideologies that claim to be the riddle of “History” solved: Marxism, liberalism, democratic socialism, anarchism, positivism, Social Darwinism, libertarianism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and the like. All of these progressive ideologies, except neoconservatism, originated in the salons, academies, cafes, and libraries of western Europe. As the North Atlantic world became, concurrent with the development of progressivism, the epicentre of global empire, Europeans and Americans spread progressive ideologies to the “four corners” of the globe, which often led to competition with Christian missionaries for the hearts and minds of non-European peoples. (But occasionally the transmitters of progressive ideology and the evangelizers of Christianity were, especially after the rise of the Social Gospel movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one and the same.)

In one very important instance that is germane to contemporary world affairs, instead of an ideological commitment to an abstract ideology, progressives have projected their salvationary hopes on to a nation-state – namely, the United States. Beginning with the United States’ rationale for its entry into the First World War, a new progressive “ism” arrived on the world scene: Americanism. In terms of ideological categorization, Americanism can be classified as liberalism with American characteristics. One result of the ascendency of Americanism in the postwar political culture of the United States is that the occupant of the Oval Office is no longer merely the president of the United States of America. Rather, he (or she) is a global political messiah, tasked with being the supreme guardian of the “Right Side of History”, which more or less amounts to promoting and safeguarding the inexorable Americanization of the world. Neoconservatism, the only progressive ideology to have not been created in western Europe, can be seen as a more belligerent strain of Americanism.

As already stated, Americanism arose as a result of the peculiar manner that the United States chose to enter the First World War. While the haphazard, and therefore entirely avoidable, way the First World War broke out made it a tragedy writ large, once combat had been entered into, the two camps of combatants risked everything at their disposal in their war efforts, turning the war into the world’s first industrialized total war. It was understood by both sides that to lose the war meant a punitive postwar peace would be imposed on the defeated party, because, as the old truism goes, to the victor go the spoils.

By early 1917, with the war on the Western Front in stalemate and with Britain teetering on the brink of insolvency (Wall Street had been underwriting the British and French war efforts), the United States decided to intervene, officially on the grounds of protecting “neutral rights”, but that was merely a pretext. The then sitting U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, due to his Social Gospel and liberal internationalist predilections, and due to his earlier calls for a “peace without victory”, decided to not enter the war for the postwar aggrandizement of either the United States or its allies, whom he viewed to be as nearly treacherous as the Central Powers, but instead to lead an American crusade to deliver the world from evil. The upshot was an American apotheosis – the transformation of the United States into a progressive God. But, due to the realities of power, Wilson’s plans for a just and peaceful postwar world order were dashed. The peace treaties forced on the Central Powers after the war were made in a spirit of vengeance, and the United States ended up not entering the League of Nations over Wilson’s unwillingness to compromise with Congress on some minor details regarding the League’s covenant. In the interwar period, the leadership of the United States reasserted their country’s pre-war tradition of diplomatic independence (not “isolationism”, which is impossible to implement in an open society like the United States).

Incidentally, the year 1917 witnessed the arrival of not one, but two, redeemer republics on the world stage. Joining a newly minted messianic American republic was, following the Bolshevik seizure of power, a revolutionary Soviet Russia, which had pretensions of being the catalyst for the long prophesized transformation of the globe into a workers’ paradise. Whereas the ultimate goal of Americanism was to create a worldwide federation of democratic republics led by the United States, the ultimate goal of Marxism-Leninism, the progressive ideology rationalizing the Soviet state machinery, was to remake the world into a federation of communist republics led by Soviet Russia. Both the United States’ and Soviet Russia’s attempts at parlaying the catastrophic devastation wrought by the First World War into the attainment of their respective versions of “History” – that is to say, an idealistic international settlement that enabled the escape from the vagaries of actual history – failed spectacularly. Moreover, both retreated from the world stage during the interwar period; both were the primary victors of the Second World War; and both engaged in a nuclear armed ideological standoff with one another, i.e., the Cold War, once the Second World War had finished. The United States and Americanism ended up outlasting Soviet Russia and Marxism-Leninism. Most recently, the United States has been unleashing a decidedly militarized variety of Americanism on the peoples of the Greater Middle East, trying to remodel that godforsaken, yet oil-rich, region in America’s image, albeit hitherto without success.

Closely tied to Americanism is the concept of globalization, at least as it is commonly understood today. However, there are actually two kinds of globalization. The first kind was inaugurated when intrepid mariners of European origin had discovered and charted all the landmasses of the world by the eighteenth century at the latest, a legitimate European achievement. As diffusion of a reasonably accurate map of the world spread everywhere on the planet, connections between different peoples from any part of the world became a possibility for the first time. This is globalization-lite, if you will, and it will remain in effect so long as humans inhabit the Earth.

The second kind of globalization is a belief that the globalizing process is a natural, even inevitable, culmination of the past. With the emergence of industrialization, it is understandable why people would want to believe this to be true, because in order for industrialized and industrializing countries to maintain the pretence of being modern, they most have constant access to cheap industrial raw materials and cheap foodstuffs from abroad. But, as mentioned earlier, there really isn’t any globalization of this sort. Instead, there’s the globe-spanning informal American empire, which provides enough stability in the world to allow for a situation of international resource arbitrage. Indeed, the word globalization didn’t come into common usage until the 1970s. In truth, globalization of this type is a synonym for Americanization, and it will not survive the downfall of Pax Americana.

While I’ve just identified five attributes that progressivism and Christianity share – teleology; egalitarian universalism; anthropocentrism; missionary zeal; and creedal/ideological belief – there are two critical areas where they radically diverge from one another:

Christianity interprets history in a providential manner. However, to what extent divine providence can be understood by humans is an open question for Christians. Occasional eruptions of righteous fanaticism notwithstanding, the general view taken by Christians is that divine providence is largely inscrutable to humans. Because of the incorrigibly mysterious nature of God’s special plan for humankind, doubt is a major aspect of Christianity – a Christian who takes his or her faith seriously will question it constantly.

In contrast to Christianity, progressivism takes an evolutionary, progressive approach to understanding the advancement of history. Unlike the enigmatic divine plan of Christianity, the logical plan that history abides by and that progressivism is constructed from is fully intelligible to humans through the use of reason and science. Indeed, it has to be this way, because the idea of progress is a rationalist concept, being based on real-world observable reality rather than otherworldly supernatural forces. Progress, unlike Christianity, needs scientific verification, because otherwise it is just a superstition based on blind faith.

The second difference between Christianity and progressivism has to do with when and how humankind’s salvation is expected to occur. Believers in Christianity (excluding a relatively small minority of Christian millenarians) strive to save their eternal souls on an individual level by forsaking sin, with the hopes of reuniting their saved souls with their deceased bodies once a general resurrection of the dead occurs on Judgement Day, which is then to be followed by a celestially sublime world to come. For non-millenarian Christians, salvation is not of this world and is achieved on an individual basis. The apocalyptic end-time begins on no knowable date, but simply whenever God decides to initiate it.

For progressive ideologues, however, humankind’s salvation is forecasted to happen on a collective level and terrestrially. By reorganizing a polity to run on the rational laws found in history, economics and society, progressives imagine that humans can abolish, once and for all, the old-time scourges of the human condition: material scarcity, tyranny, war, imperialism, bigotry, and the like. Moreover, some progressives, through the advances being made in science and technology, even think achieving human immortality is a realistic future possibility. From the perspective of progressivism, salvation is collective, embracing all of humankind, and earthly.

The widespread adoption of progressive outlooks in the West over the past couple of centuries has resulted in millenarian expectations becoming normalized. Formerly, when Christian orthodoxy dominated the mind of the West, Christian millenarians were persecuted as heretics. Prophesies found in the Book of Revelation about the looming creation of a thousand year Godly kingdom on earth were interpreted by church officials symbolically rather than literally. Instead of millenarianism, Christian orthodoxy put an emphasis on the doctrine of original sin, with man’s fallen state precluding the possibility of a heaven on earth being established. The rejection of millenarianism for original sin, plus the generally agreed upon inscrutability of providence, imparted a generally tragic view of history to mainstream Christianity when it came to worldly matters. This conferred to Christianity an historical outlook similar to that found in pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization, as well as to the views on history that predominated everywhere outside of the West until progressivism went global.

It was through the unwitting influence of a Christian heresy, millenarianism, that progressivism built its foundational theories from. Given the overall progressive temperament of the West today, any idea that challenges the progressive worldview of earthly salvation through reason and science, and thereby fails to flatter the human ego, is either ignored or treated as an atavistic curiosity.

If God can be said to be the sum total of these three concepts: emancipation, redemption and salvation, then perhaps core, theoretical tenets of progressive ideologies, for example “dialectical materialism” in Marxism, or “mutual aid” in anarchism (of a Kropotkin bent), or the “efficient market hypothesis” in neoliberalism, amount to an accidental metamorphosis of God into man-made abstractions by a progressive intelligentsia? This is not as wacky a speculation as it might seem at first blush, for the intellectual link sandwiched between Christian orthodoxy and progressivism is Deism and Freemasonry. Both Deism and Freemasonry can be called proto-progressive, since they upheld a belief in a single deity, using euphemisms like “Prime Mover”, “Supreme Architect”, and “Author of History” in place of mentioning God directly, but they rejected fundamental principles of the Christian faith, like the divinity of Christ, miracles, and a God that actively intervenes in human affairs. As belief in God became increasingly unfashionable, and as advances in knowledge in the material sciences accumulated, progressive ideologues jettisoned any reference to a deity, even by euphemism, and adopted secular scientific rationalism as their intellectual lodestar. If this is true, then rather than killing off God, the Enlightenment, through the ascendency of its leading idea, progress, gave birth to a plethora of new Gods, all mutually antagonistic to one another. While Christians submit to the will of an all-powerful and all-knowing God, progressive visionaries, by way of the emancipative and redemptive ideas found in their ideologies, play God.

The idea of progress is supposed to be based on a foundation of science. But for the idea of progress to be scientifically valid, a natural inclination in the material world towards greater order, with human betterment being the primary object, is necessary. Yet the theories in the material sciences, in their present configuration, supply no evidence to support this view. Indeed, if anything, these theories collectively refute the possibility of progress, since an up-to-date scientific view of biological evolution and of the physical workings of the universe is of a non-linear and non-goal-seeking randomness. Modern science has exposed the material world to be chaotic and indifferent to human desires and suffering, not orderly and anthropocentric. Beyond primal and life-sustaining urges for survival and reproduction, there’s no rhyme or reason underlying the endless succession of human events. This is very uncongenial news for the idea of progress, because without a discernibly logical pattern guiding historical development in a direction that caters to human desires and ambitions, progress becomes a myth. The ball is now in the court of progressives, and has been for some time. The onus is on them to discover material evidence that disproves the material world’s randomness. Why haven’t they attempted to do this?

Material progress, the idea that humans can conquer nature in order to enduringly satisfy their material needs and wants, is today arguably the most widely believed in version of progress. Faith in material progress has led to the present-day fetish with technology. But technology cannot on its own sustain the modern, i.e., industrialized, way of life. A necessary prerequisite for modernity to endure is expanding supplies of energy. For modern, industrial civilization to be not a fleeting one-off but a permanent condition in human affairs, scalable alternatives to digging or pumping fossil fuels and uranium ores out of the ground on a finite planet are obviously required (as a group, coal, petroleum, natural gas and uranium make up over 90 percent of the world’s energy supply). Yet, despite the stunning growth in technological advances made since the year 1900, technology has managed to unlock the potential of only a single energy source of any significance, uranium. This has been accomplished by, one, inventing techniques to enrich uranium to the fissile isotope U-235, and two, the development of nuclear fission power plants.

A belief in a technological mastery of the material world inevitably runs into the problem of thermodynamic limits. The first law of thermodynamics rules out the possibility of humans creating energy. Instead, humans can only change energy from one form to another, with a resultant degradation in energy quality (entropy) occurring with each transformation. Thus the first law of thermodynamics gives scientific credence to the old cliché that you cannot get something from nothing. As opposed to being unbounded prometheans, modern physics places humans in a finite world of hard limits and hard choices, in which decay is inescapable.  

Furthermore, modern science renders any attempt to attain sustainability a progressive fantasy. While there’s homeostasis, which maintains a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent internal bodily functions in organisms, this physiological process is dependent on the life-form preserving good health and nutrition. In addition, because all life is ephemeral, an organism achieving homeostasis cannot do so ad infinitum. When it comes to entire ecological systems, they’re constantly being disrupted by cycles of population overshoot and crash, not exactly a benign process. The Earth’s long history, both with and without humans, is a story of nonstop chaotic flux. Sustainable development is an oxymoron, for no development can be sustained indefinitely.  

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the modern Western mindset is this: The only way to make a progressive interpretation of historical development work is for progressives to abandon scientific rationalism for a faith in a higher power. In other words, progressives need a God in order to give plausibility to their beliefs. Of course this wouldn’t be the old God of prophetic revelation and holy scripture, but rather a new God of humanitarian progress. Without a “God of Progress”, so to speak, progressives condemn themselves to a lifetime of trying to fit square pegs into round holes, because from a rationalist perspective derived from the material sciences, the idea that history is being benignly guided by an anthropocentric rational plan just ain’t so. Paradoxically, progressives need to enter into an alliance with Creationists and champion Intelligent Design. But, alas, they seem to be either too maladroit or too intellectually incurious to figure this out.

In the apocalyptic West, it is taken for granted that history advances according to an inner logic. A few centuries after a certain babe was born in a certain manger, an apocalyptic mindset became the default lens by which reality is perceived in the West. The primary consequence of the ostensibly secular Enlightenment was to see an alteration in the course of apocalyptic thinking, not its overthrow. The foremost idea to come out of the Enlightenment, progress, is a salvationary apocalypse that uses secular and scientific terminology to disguise its true origin. Unlike Christianity, however, which views human pride as a sin that is destined to lead to folly, progressivism holds fast to the delusion that humans have a godlike capacity to create their own reality.

So, in terms of the West and its civilizational legacy, revolutionaries on the far left, like Marxists and anarchists, are not the earth-shaking radicals they are often portrayed as and, indeed, often claim themselves to be, but instead are very much conventional Western thinkers, in that their way of viewing the world is severely constrained by apocalyptic patterns of thought. In truth, these forms of “radicalism” are symptoms of a deeper malady in the West, instead of a foreign menace to the Western way of life. What is more, observant practitioners of the three Abrahamic monotheisms are semi-radicals. Their beliefs clash with the dominant progressive worldview well enough. However, the religious traditions of monotheism provided the wellspring for progress, and therefore both monotheists and progressives share several fundament similarities in how they comprehend the world around them. In the contemporary West, then, true radicalism can only be a stoic acceptance of chaos, and therefore a rejection of both providence and progress.

I hope that I’ve made a solid case that the idea of progress is a problematic idea, to say the least. The belief that human history is following a script that is certain to have a happy ending (so long as the right social engineering programme can be put into place), along with the beliefs that limitless growth is an achievable goal and that human nature is either non-existent, benign or infinitely malleable, receive no verification from the material sciences. These beliefs are not valid scientific theories, but rather are myths that exert a powerful hold on the Western psyche. Unlike religious myths, though, which generally impart wisdom and restraint, myths based on progress lead to hubris and unnecessary suffering and destruction, as the vast wreckage of the twentieth century demonstrably shows. Due to their allegiance to various strains of progressive thought, it is my contention that the conventional political spectrum of conservatism-liberalism-social democracy is no longer tenable, and needs a major shakeup. My attempt here at trying to launch a distinctly post-progressive new type of politics is an effort to realize this end.  

The Global Economic Situation:

In this section, I will give my interpretation of the current state of the global economy, because I think it presents a rare historical opportunity for far-reaching change. In order for me to try and put our current economic situation in its proper context, it will be necessary to go back to the start of postwar global capitalism and then quickly move forward to today.

In terms of banking and finance, the years under the stable and prosperous Bretton Woods system – the name of the American-led postwar international economic order that lasted until 1971 – were an historical anomaly. Formerly, industrial capitalism had been periodically ravaged by deflationary depressions, popularly known as “panics”, with the Great Depression being merely the most recent of these.

Industrial capitalism before Bretton Woods was an era of unrestrained finance capitalism, a consequence of what happens when a fractional reserve banking system is left to its own devices. Just like Apple makes money selling IPhones and McDonald’s makes money selling Big Macs, commercial banks make money selling loans to prospective borrowers. To be more precise, through the magic of fractional reserve banking, which effectively allows commercial banks to loan money into existence, commercial banks make their profits from the higher rate of interest they change borrowers than they pay out to depositors in return for being able to use their deposits as seed capital to make new loans with. In a fractional reserve banking system, the total value of outstanding loans will always greatly exceed the total value of deposits. At its core, fractional reserve banking is a confidence game, with belief in tomorrow’s expansion providing the collateral for today’s debt. Indeed, the Latin origin of the word credit, credo, means “I believe”.

When faith in future growth gets crushed for whatever reason, a financial system based on fractional reserve banking will enter into a state of panicked meltdown, as debt defaults, a tightening credit supply and falling asset prices interact with one another and cause a self-reinforcing feedback loop to develop. More debts go into default, triggering credit to be tightened further, causing asset prices to fall more. Rinse and repeat. If left to work itself out on its own – that is, if there’s no government and/or central bank intervention to try and stop it – the financial tailspin doesn’t stop until the amount of debt outstanding is readjusted to realistic future growth prospects, which is usually on a far lower level than had existed before the crash.

In periods of finance capitalism, it would be more accurate to call fractional reserve banking, “unlimited-credit-creation-banking”, because under such a scheme the amount of credit that can be created is untethered from deposits. Like other corporations, commercial banks are under constant pressure to aggressively expand profits by shareholders. Consequently, if nothing is stopping them from doing so, they engage in predatory lending – that is to say, they start lending too much money into existence, which sets off a rapid appreciation in the value of assets, particularly those that are routinely bought with credit, such as stocks, real estate and college tuitions. A combination of hype and leverage causes asset prices to wander away from fundamentals, such as their underlying profitability or long-term affordability. In a mania, both the banks and the momentum chasing speculators are euphoric, since they are being made artificially rich from financial puffery in asset prices – the so-called “wealth effect” – that excessive amounts of credit creation produce. So long as highly leveraged speculators can either roll over their debts or find greater fools to sell their overpriced assets to so that they can recoup the stupendous capital gains they’ve made by doing essentially nothing at all, and so long as financiers can find a sufficient number of new suckers to take on too much debt in order to prop up and further inflate asset prices, all is well.

Sooner or later, however, the naysayers and their irksome focus on fundamentals are proven right. All financial bubbles burst eventually. As the famous nineteenth century American diarist, George Templeton Strong, once quipped, the most expensive sentence in any language with regard to financial matters is “this time is different”. For one reason or another, the buoyant market psychology eventually dissipates and confidence in further growth in asset values comes to an abrupt end. Greed and delusion suddenly switches to panic as a credit event materializes seemingly out of nowhere. A dreaded period of price discovery takes place, forcing people to rediscover that, indeed, profits and/or long-term affordability are of vital importance to a market economy. Not only do idiot bankers and idiot speculators get ruined, but so do many innocent bystanders as well, because the bursting of a financial bubble invariably leads to lots of collateral damage in what is a highly interconnected financial system. A cascade of debts being defaulted on means that capital parked in investment funds, like pensions, annuities and mutual funds, disappear into thin air. Furthermore, savings at a bank do likewise (deposit insurance is a bluff that governments cannot possibly honour in an all-out collapse of a financial system). In a deflationary depression, the only safe haven financial asset is physical cash kept outside of the banking system (and perhaps precious metals).

Setting it apart from previous eras of industrial capitalism, which experienced deflationary depressions every ten years on average, the Bretton Woods era was an economic golden age of nearly uninterrupted expansion. Very high growth rates were sustained over this period as well, yet this was due to unrepeatable historical factors (e.g. a baby boom, cheap and plentiful energy). Under the Bretton Woods system, an emphasis was placed on keeping the manufacturing and financial sectors of each country national. For instance, constraints were placed on moving capital from one country to another, i.e., capital controls. In the non-communist world, national currencies were tied to the value of the US dollar, and the value of the US dollar was fixed at $35 per ounce of gold. The Bretton Woods system was quite restrictive; however it was probably due to this very restrictiveness, along with the pre-eminence of the postwar American economy vis-a-vis the other economies of the world, which made this era so economically stable.

In place of finance capitalism, the Bretton Woods era had, for lack of a better term, production capitalism. Price movements were more or less kept in line with fundamentals. Stringent regulation, as well as still fresh memories of the Great Depression, made the banking sector as boring as the insurance industry. In the United States, for example, the “3-6-3 Rule” was in play: bankers paid 3 percent interest on deposits, charged 6 percent interest on loans, and were teeing off at the local golf club by 3 p.m. every weekday. During the Bretton Woods era, commercial banks were no longer “dynamic” or “innovative” – that is to say, they were prohibited from turning the economy into a giant Ponzi or pyramid scheme. Instead of having these characteristics themselves, commercial banks were restricted to financing the dynamism and innovation of other sectors of the economy through prudential lending practices.

But by the late 1960s, due to myriad factors, the American economy began to underperform in relation to its industrial rivals. In consequence, the US dollar’s fixed exchange rate to gold was coming under attack. As an alternative to lowering the exchange rate, which would have resulted in considerable economic hardship for Americans, the Nixon administration ceased convertibility of the US dollar into gold, thereby allowing the US dollar to float freely. This decision was the death knell of the Bretton Woods era. A global regime of free-floating fiat currencies came into existence – a situation that still exists today. Yet the US dollar remained the world’s reserve currency, largely thanks to its exclusive use in the economically crucial worldwide petroleum trade – the “petrodollar”.

The 1970s was a transition decade in many respects. In terms of the global economy, the 1970s was a period of low growth, high unemployment and high inflation. The neologism, stagflation, came into popular usage to define this economic period. Despite the high rate of inflation throughout the 1970s, asset prices still moved more or less in line with profits and wages, i.e., there were no debt-fuelled financial bubbles.

By the late 1970s at the latest, a sea change had occurred regarding elite views on the banking sector. An irresistible push was now on to set capital free via deregulation. Deregulation friendly Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Britain in 1979, while equally deregulation friendly Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States the following year. The upshot was the coming to power of the New Right, which was as much of an Enlightenment (re: progressive) project as the welfare-state/New Deal liberalism it replaced. First Britain and the United States unfettered their respective financial systems, and then country after country elsewhere followed suit. An unencumbered free market, it was believed, knew best how to allocate resources, including levels of credit creation. Commercial banks were to be no longer stifled by needless regulations proscribing their ability to “innovate”. Finance capitalism, now known as neoliberalism, had made a roaring comeback. Thus the postwar global informal American empire can be divided into three specific eras: (1) the Bretton Woods/production capitalism era; (2) the stagflation interregnum of the 1970s; and (3) the neoliberal/finance capitalism era that is still in existence today.

Following the global recession of the early 1980s – until then the deepest and longest recession to rock the global economy since the Great Depression – an eruption of high growth occurred in the advanced industrial countries in the mid-1980s. No doubt many people in the West were genuinely relieved by the return of prosperity, since it earlier had seemed like stagflation and overall economic decline were an unavoidable predicament. This new burst of growth had a major problem, though. The reappearance of growth wasn’t made possible by a rediscovery of markets, as champions for deregulation insisted, but instead by a rediscovery of leverage. Beginning in the early-to-mid 1980s, levels of private indebtedness skyrocketed, and have continued to climb right to the present day. This enormous upswell in debt was not just facilitated by commercial banks, but by shadow banks as well, i.e., non-regulated and non-depository institutions and markets engaged in loan making activities.  

Like the 1970s, inflation was to remain a major problem for the global economy throughout the 1980s and beyond, although it changed appearances. In the 1970s, inflation was broad in scope, with price increases affecting nearly all asset classes. In the post-1980 neoliberal era, however, a handful of asset classes, typically those bought with leverage, rapidly increased in value, whereas most other asset classes fell in value due to various reasons, not least of which was the accelerated outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to cheaper labour markets overseas.

The prevailing (and American-based) economic orthodoxy in the West, neoclassical economics, cannot comprehend the persistence of inflation post-1980. This is because neoclassical economists focus on something called “core inflation”, which excludes assets like real estate, equities, bonds, commodities and student tuitions from their calculations of the rate of inflation. Yet these asset classes are the ones that financial bubbles most routinely appear in, since they’re normally purchased, in part or in full, with the use of credit.

Neoclassical economics, moreover, is clueless on how the banking system, and therefore money, actually works. While a neoclassical economist understands that commercial banks always have far more loans outstanding than deposits on hand due to the fractional reserve process, he or she makes a major error thinking that commercial banks conform to the money multiplier theory, which places limits on the amount of new credit a commercial bank can create at any given moment. According to money multiplier theory, commercial banks are neutral intermediaries, shifting the excess savings of “patient” savers to cash-strapped “impatient” borrowers, who are looking to invest in something but possess insufficient funds to do so without access to credit. Under this view of the banking system, everything more or less balances itself out in the end. But this is an inaccurate view of how the banking system really operates. Commercial banks don’t intermediate loans but originate them, extending credit to prospective borrowers without any consideration of reserves and leverage ratios. Reserves, in other words, are irrelevant in a fractional reserve banking system – until, that is, a bank needs to try and find a sufficient amount of them in a hurry because it is coming under financial duress for having over-extended itself.  

Late in President Reagan’s second presidential term, an early indicator that not all was well with the brave new world of neoliberalism became apparent with the 1987 Wall Street Crash. On a single October day, the Dow Industrial Average plummeted by more than 20 percent. This was, and still remains, the greatest one day crash ever recorded in the United States. Alan Greenspan, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, decided to intervene. Interest rates were cut and liquidity was pumped into the financial system. Shortly after Greenspan’s intervention, risk assets resumed the upward trajectory they had been on before the crash, and all was soon forgotten. Thus began the so-called “Greenspan Put”. A new monetary orthodoxy had crystallized, which centred on the idea that central banks would rekindle risk-taking after large market sell-offs by dramatically slashing interest rates and flooding the financial system with liquidity. When a financial bubble was inflating, it was to be a financial wild west in which anything goes. After the bubble popped, the central bank would rush to the rescue and, through various monetary measures, revive asset price appreciation.

A far more inauspicious event for neoliberalism than the 1987 crash was the slow but steady financial collapse in Japan starting in the early 1990s. In response to the Plaza Accord in 1985, which required Japan to allow the yen to significantly rise in value against the US dollar, the Bank of Japan engaged in expansionary monetary policies to ensure the export-dependent Japanese economy escaped a deep recession. This action led to the creation of two enormous financial bubbles, one in Japanese real estate and the other in Japanese stocks. Both of these bubbles burst simultaneously in the early 1990s. In order to fight against deflation, the Japanese trailblazed a number of policies that world be widely adopted by European and American leaders after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis: zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and the suspension of mark-to-market accounting rules. At best, however, these measures helped the Japanese economy avoid a complete collapse. In other words, they were palliative, not curative. In 1995, the GDP of the Japanese economy, in US dollars, was $5.5 trillion; in 2015, twenty years later, it stood at $4.4 trillion. Japan’s “Lost Decade” in the 1990s has morphed into a Lost Quarter Century. Rather than monetary stimulus and the legalization of accounting fraud kick-starting a revival of the comatose Japanese economy, it has been gigantic amounts of fiscal stimulus that has kept the Japanese economy afloat. Japan’s national debt, as a percentage of GDP, has skyrocketed from under 40 percent of GDP in the late 1980s to over 250 percent of GDP today, giving the country by far the highest public debt-to-GDP ratio in the world.

Policy makers outside of Japan seemingly paid no attention to Japan’s post-1990 economic plight, as they continued to bet the farm on neoliberalism. A watershed moment for the neoliberal era was the repeal, in the United States, of Glass-Steagall in 1999. Shortly thereafter, however, the dot-com bubble burst, with the NASDAQ ultimately falling 86 percent from peak to trough. To limit the financial fallout of several trillion dollars worth of tech stock equity being wiped out, the Federal Reserve drastically lowered interest rates, holding them at 1 percent until mid-2004.

Artificially subdued interest rates led to an enormous misallocation of capital, as large institutional investors – pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies – began gobbling up bonds made up of American subprime mortgages in a desperate search for yield. These subprime mortgage bonds had been scandalously rated as investment grade by the bond rating agencies. So long as house prices continued to rise, everything was fine, since homeowners could tap into the appreciating equity of their homes to pay bills or to fund lifestyles centred on conspicuous consumption. But many of the subprime mortgage bonds were adjustable rate mortgages, and in that laid the trigger for imminent financial mayhem.

Starting in 2004, the Federal Reserve began steadily ramping up interest rates. An increasing number of homeowners who held adjustable rate mortgages found they could no longer afford their monthly mortgage payments, which led to surging numbers of foreclosures and a consequential steep fall in home prices. Global concerns over the solvency of the American financial system, heavily exposed to the behemoth U.S. mortgage market, eventually caused the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

In response to the Global Financial Crisis, American and western European governments and central banks copied the various measures Japan had earlier implemented to stave off a full-blown deflationary depression. In consequence, the United States and western Europe started “turning Japanese”, as they entered into a new era of Japanese-like stagnation of low growth, low productivity, flat wages, and rapidly rising public indebtedness from fiscal stimulus initiatives and bank bailouts.

With Japan, the United States and western Europe now all financially emasculated, China became the last major engine for global growth. The Chinese economy, however, was dangerously dependent on exports to the United States and western Europe. During the early stages of the Global Financial Crisis, American and western European imports contracted sharply. In response, China pivoted to a consumer-driven economy that was underwrote by a historically unparalleled expansion of credit, provided mainly by its shadow banks. China’s sudden shift from production capitalism to finance capitalism allowed it to withstand the Global Financial Crisis surprisingly well, with annual growth rates continuing to hover around pre-crisis levels. But by 2015 problems began to surface. Sky high private debt levels caused a stock market bubble to pop. A yet to burst real estate bubble is also of great concern. As a result, the Chinese economy slowed down to nearly half the pace it had been growing at before. Officially, in 2017 the Chinese economy grew by 6.9 percent, however most independent observers think the real number is considerably lower. While China has to some extent reflated, i.e., used fiscal and monetary policy to reawaken asset price appreciation, this action is only delaying the next leg down.

With China in the process of “turning Japanese”, and with the United States and western Europe having already done so in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, the four economic powerhouse units that comprise approximately three-quarters of global GDP output – Japan, the United States, western Europe and China – are stagnating. The United States, for instance, hasn’t had one year, including 2017, of 3 percent GDP growth or greater since the mid-2000s, despite adding over $12 trillion to its national debt over that period. Earlier in the neoliberal era, achieving at least 3 percent GDP growth was routine in the United States.

Central bank financial repression has led to some pretty bizarre and unheard of situations, such as globally more than $7 trillion of bonds yielding negative – negative! – interest rates. Moreover, just a short while ago European junk bonds had interest rates lower than 10-year U.S. treasury notes, which means that central bank manipulation had caused one of the safest risk assets in the world today, U.S. treasuries, to be deemed more risky than junk bonds, which is just about the riskiest asset class there is. These are colossal misallocations of capital that cannot possibly end well. Neoliberalism has gone full-retard

The sluggish growth that the global economy has experienced since the Global Financial Crisis has been made possible by allowing private and public debt levels to rise to unprecedented heights. In aggregate, there’s been no deleveraging. Any turbulence to the debt-ridden and fragile global economy can quickly spell disaster, causing the global Ponzi scheme to unravel and the prevailing ethos of spendthrift narcissism to come to an abrupt, ignominious end. With the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates, albeit tentatively, after more than five years of zero interest rate policy, the arrival of the next financial crisis is in the works. In all probability, the Federal Reserve won’t get close to normalizing U.S. interest rates to their historical average, which is around 6 percent (they’re in the 1.25-1.50 range now, in early 2018). The Federal Reserve could always renege on hiking rates if the market begins to turmoil and asset prices start to fall, but the post-2008 “recovery” is already long overdue for a downturn, so it may not matter what the Federal Reserve ends up doing once market instability returns with a vengeance.

Much of the post-1980 neoliberal era can be viewed as a series of stopgaps trying to postpone a global deflationary depression – and thus postpone the demise of the globe-spanning informal American empire. Each stopgap has required more extreme fiscal and monetary measures. The end-result has been slower growth and rising inequality. It turns out that basing an entire economic order on predatory lending is a bad idea. To be sure, governments and central banks will do their utmost to keep the show on the road, so to speak, given the initial global anarchy that will occur once the American-led international order falls apart. But they cannot extend and pretend forever. In all likelihood, a day of reckoning is approaching, assuming some cataclysmic geopolitical event doesn’t spark a worldwide discontinuity before the neoliberal/finance capitalism endgame does.

Transnational economic relationships are easily broken. The financing of letters-of-credit, for instance, which is a vital precondition for any trade that moves across national borders, is vulnerable to severe, global scale financial instability. If an importer cannot secure a payment-guaranteeing letter-of-credit to give to the bank of an exporter, trade stops. Furthermore, if an exporter has concerns over the solvency of the importer’s bank, trade stops. No letters-of-credit means international supply chains and trade in critical raw materials and foodstuffs grind to a halt. Needless to say, a situation in which global trade has collapsed would be dire for all concerned. In the end, perhaps the only advantage to being rich may be getting to starve in more spacious and opulent surroundings.

Admittedly, my anticipation of an impending global financial Gotterdammerung is just a guess, even if an educated one. Like everyone else, I don’t know exactly how the future is going to unfold. Nevertheless, my overall impression that we are living at the very end of an age lends a sense of urgency to what I’m trying to do. I think this is an opportune moment in history to try and do something different, hence my attempt to start a new political movement based on post-progressivism. Both in a rational and in an intuitive sense, it seems to me very likely that something is about to give.

General Policy Ideas :