Transcript

“Come now, and let us reason together,” saith the Lord. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool. If you be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.”

Hello, and welcome once again to Faith and Philosophy. This week’s topic is: The Naked Public Square, Part Four: Orthodoxy and Progressive Politics. I’ve had a couple of recent requests that I revisit the topic of ecumenism, and that would certainly fit within this present series. But I had a prior request from an old seminary friend of mine to do a podcast on progressivism, and I thought I would tackle that one first. Expect another look at Orthodox participation in ecumenical dialogue in the coming weeks.

Let’s begin with a definition of progressivism. To be sure, the word means different things to different people, and people who self-identify as progressives do not always agree with one another about which public policy is or is not progressive. Historically, American progressives were tied to theories of racial and cultural superiority, which no contemporary progressive today would dare admit. By the way, the second iteration of the Klan, from 1916 to around 1930 was as the armed wing of the progressive movement. Nevertheless, I still think we can delineate the basic characteristics of what constitutes a truly progressive outlook on life.

As the word suggests, progressivism is the doctrine that humanity is moving ever onward toward some future goal. There has to be a goal, otherwise movement would be mere random change, not progress, and random change is not change we can believe in. Ultimately, the goal toward which progressivism is moving is equalitarianism. Now this may seem odd, considering progressivism’s undeniably racist past, but the goal has always been thus. What changed in the ‘40s and ‘50s was simply the fact that non-Europeans were invited to the equality party, whether they were ready for it or wanted it or not. Now this goal of now-universal human equality has considerable public policy implications, since human beings are quite obviously not equal.

This is where the progressive state comes in. Its overriding function is to help make people equal. This, as I’m sure you can appreciate, is a thankless task. The public school system is a prime example. The entire system is predicated on the thesis that all children are equally educable. If we just throw enough money at the system, provide the students with breakfast and state-of-the-art computers, they will achieve, and no child will be left behind. The fact that some children are naturally, that is, biologically, smarter than others—their brains are simply wired differently—does not seem to bother progressive educators. Even nature herself can be overcome with the right amount of effort and technology.

I define the progressive in this way. The progressive believes, as a matter of doctrine, that humanity is evolving culturally as well as physically, that this progress is an inherent good, and that the tell-tale markers of human progress signify our liberation from natural distinctions and limitations, and that, given the inherent goodness of progress, man is fully justified in using political power to eradicate any and all obstacles blocking his path to utopia.

From this definition, it should be clear that progressivism is a theological heresy and a historical absurdity and a psychological malady. The word “heresy” means choice, and in a theological context it means making the wrong choice. In Old Testament terminology, it means choosing the way that leads to death rather than life. The first such heresy was made by our primeval parents in the garden. The serpent presented Eve with a choice: she could continue to obey God or she could eat of the fruit of the tree, become an initiate in the knowledge of good and evil, and ultimately become as God. That is, she was told that she could achieve deification on her own. This is the ancestral sin, the primal heresy. But is this not, in essence, the lure of progressivism, the promise that man can, on his own, surmount all natural and biological obstacles to human equality and ultimately to equality with God, as man defeats even death through technology?

There is and can be one and only one sense in which we can rightly speak of human progress, and that was the progress that took place from Eve to the Annunciation to our most-holy Lady. In the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman. Our Lady Theotokos is that fullness of time, the New Eve, the one human creature capable of responding to God in complete purity and simplicity of heart. It is through her that God comes to dwell among men, making the future kingdom a present reality. It is simply impossible for an Orthodox Christian to speak of progress in any other sense. And yet, there have always been those within the Church—in the Church, but not of her—who have imagined that they could build the kingdom of God on their own. Surely millennialism has proved to be the most persistent and pernicious heresy of them all. Ultimately, of course, this is the religion of the antichrist, who will sell himself precisely as the Messiah, inaugurating his kingdom.

By speaking of human progress, then, the modern progressive recapitulates in himself and in his policies the very heresy of Eve. It is particularly disturbing then, when Orthodox Christians—much less clergy—align themselves, even identify themselves, with the forces of progressivism, forces that can only be considered the precursors to antichrist.

Now, leaving theological considerations aside for a moment, taken simply as an historical doctrine, progressivism is, to borrow a phrase from my friend Don Livingston, absurdity on stilts. In what way can humanity can be said to have truly progressed? Oh, we claim to know more about the world and how to manipulate it than did the benighted humans of ages past, but let’s remember: those primitive Native Americans aren’t the idiots who built dams on all the major rivers and then built cities in the flood plains. They also didn’t build nuclear reactors on top of fault lines. All of the hallmarks of our so-called progress are examples of our conquest of nature, and yet, in the end, nature always wins. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and our inability to predict, much less control the weather, are sufficient proof.

We also claim to have conquered human nature. We have eliminated racism and sexism, and we’re working on look-ism; and have attained the most perfect system of government imaginable: liberal democracy, with freedom and justice for all. This certainly did not start out as the best possible of all worlds, but human progress has made it so—right? Oh, now stop it, Carlton. You are knocking down straw men. Of course, things aren’t perfect, but if we could just get a more fair distribution of goods and services, if all the people could enjoy the same advantages enjoyed by PWPs—that’s “privileged white people”—then everything would just be hunky-dory. If only those selfish Tea Partiers would let government raise taxes, the ship of state would be back on the right course. Frankly, I am no fan of the Tea Party. It appears to me to be composed primarily of aging Republicans who are afraid that Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility is endangering their own social security and Medicare. Where were they during Bush’s irresponsibility is what I’d like to know.

Nevertheless, I find it amusing and somewhat bewildering that people on both sides seem to think that capitalism in general and the Republican party in particular are somehow obstacles to this progressive utopia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is, as I have said before and will continue to repeat, a radical, nay, revolutionary economic system. And the Republican party has historically been the real progressive party. Moreover, look at the degree to which the Left is in bed with corporate capitalism. Who finances moveon.org and the even more nefarious Open Society project in eastern Europe? Uber-capitalist and financier George Soros, a noxious parasite who made his billions from hedge funds and currency arbitrage. Soros, by the way, may not be the antichrist, but he could very well be the antichrist’s John the Baptist.

Who do you think is bankrolling the current movement pushing gay marriage? People with same-sex attraction are less than five, probably less than three percent of the population. Even with all of their vaunted disposable income, they couldn’t create a social movement like the one we are seeing. This is being pushed, not just by the secular media, but by corporate America, especially Big Finance. After the crash of 2008, there was a lot of talk about banking reform. And yet, even with Mr. Change taking over the White House, nothing substantive happened. Why? Well, in part because almost everyone at Treasury is a Goldman-Sachs alumnus, and also because Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer, two of the biggest lefties in Congress, are completely in the back pocket of the big banks. The world economic system, this fruit of human progress, is on the brink of collapse. Have you been paying attention to the stock markets lately? And yet, we are supposed to congratulate ourselves and pat ourselves on the back for our progress.

To be a progressive in the face of the shambles the world is in, a shambles largely the making of progressives who were going to usher in a new age of human equality in cooperation—remember the war to make the world safe for democracy?—requires either breath-taking ignorance, congenital stupidity, and—I do not say this lightly—moral corruption of the grossest kind.

Which leads me to my last point. Progressivism is a psychological malady, a psychosis, to be precise. It is the delusion that we know more than our forebears, that somehow the accumulation of information is the same as wisdom. But this is not simply a psychological malady; it is a spiritual malady, and it is the exact opposite of the mindset of humble obedience toward which we are called as Orthodox Christians. Wisdom is the accumulation and distillation of experience. Our tradition, even if we took the Holy Spirit out of the equation, which I certainly do not, is the accumulated experience of some of the most remarkable men and women the world has ever seen. Moreover, its fruit is a way of life whose efficacy for turning out stable, loving, and mature human beings and families has been proved time and time again. On a purely secular level, inherited prejudice is almost always correct, or at least closer to the truth in the vain imaginings of those who are deluded enough to think that they can think outside of their own language, culture, and tradition. David Hume saw this clearly already in the 18th century, and dubbed the psychosis of modern man as one of “philosophical melancholy and delirium.”

Of course, as Orthodox Christians, we do not believe that our tradition is true simply because it is old and venerable. We believe—and one would think this would be axiomatic for Orthodox Christians—that this is a tradition illumined by the light of the Holy Spirit, and that our Fathers were, like Moses, truly God-seers. It is hubris in the extreme, therefore, to claim, as I have heard people claim, that the Fathers didn’t know anything about psychology or human development, so we can dismiss their teachings about sexuality in favor of the current thinking, whatever that happens to be. Well, I can assure you, the Fathers knew more about human psychology and development than any modern Ph.D. The only way to truly access this tradition, however, is through a life of humble obedience, to accept the dogmatic teachings of the Church as sure and immovable boundaries, and to follow the ascetical way indicated to us by our Fathers. Then and only then will we be able to experience the tradition from the inside, and our very obedience will become the confirmation and verification of our path.

Progressivism, however, is the antithesis of this method. It is the assumption that we exist in a greater state of intellectual, moral, and social development than our forebears. It is the assumption that our own prejudices are not prejudices at all, but scientifically verified truth, and that our unchecked passions, which are the real source of our modern prejudices, express nature at its highest function. This is spiritual delusion of the highest order, and it is precisely this delusion that will hand unprecedented power to the antichrist when he appears.

Our problem, as I have already said in these podcasts, is that we have no real social and political debate in this country. Or rather, we have only internecine warfare between different progressive factions. It is almost impossible to hear a real traditional conservative voice in a modern America. Pat Buchanan tries, but when push comes to shove, he almost always ends up pimping for the Republican party, that is, the original progressive party.

It occurs to me that I need to explain this in a bit more detail, particularly in reference to economics, for capitalism and socialism have more or less morphed into the same thing. Next time I will continue these thoughts and consider the nature of the marketplace. I will also offer some genuinely conservative alternatives to the faux dichotomy of progressivism versus capitalism. Until then, may our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, through the intercessions of St. Innocent of Alaska, of the Blessed Sophrony (Sakharov), and of all the saints, have mercy upon us and grant us a rich entrance into his eternal kingdom.