Post Progressive

 

 Progress is a complex word with a complex history. The first intellectually serious book I both read and understood concerned progress and its relation to ideas of eternal recurrence. I will not burden my readers with these more general considerations. Of more immediate interest is the idea of progress as it seems to be understood among people who call themselves ‘progressives’. These are people who advance what Lyotard terms the ‘emancipatory narrative’. In North America the emancipatory narrative concerns advancing the interests of certain marginalized communities historically disadvantaged (often egregiously so) in Canadian and American society. This emancipatory project is selective in certain ways. No one, for instance, is worried about Jehovah’s Witnesses or other historically marginal sects. Still, EVERY political project must have shape and if it must have shape it must have boundaries. Part of this will indeed come down to which groups appeal to our sympathies and which do not. ‘Progressives’ are generally secular in orientation and find Jehovah’s Witnesses repugnant as people. Thus, if as in Catholic Quebec, we were to begin banning their activities or jailing them there would not be a peep from ‘progressive’ communities. This is to say that any politics founded on ‘sympathy’ or ‘solidarity’ or ‘empathy’ will always be exclusive if it not backed up by formal notions of ‘right’. Universal sympathy is impossible for most people because some people will always stubbornly insist on being themselves in ways that are vexing or frustrating. We may not fight against such people but nor would we be inclined to fight FOR them if push came to shove.

Progressivism in this sense has come to an impasse. It can go only so far but no further. It can change the language or tenor of certain institutions like universities but it cannot win elections. Since it cannot win elections it cannot challenge the power of capital. Worse, capital can easily appropriate the new sensitivities and decorum (in an external sense) and rob progressivism of one of its core issues. Yet progressives themselves identify capitalism as THE core vector of oppression. If progressivism cannot defeat capital then it has lost. All of its politics will reduce to materially empty gestures of ‘recognition’ or carving out fiefdoms in elite institutions like academia or the media. Now gestures of recognition are not a bad thing. It is better to have them than not. However, if progressivism has come to the limit of its power in THIS particular sphere, if it can advance no further in affecting real change, then it is overall a failed project. Frankly I think this is where we are. Left wing politics, if it to advance further the interests of the poor and oppressed must find a post progressive form. When corporations like Disney can appropriate pride flags then progressivism has been killed by its own success. It has been reduced to a performative style whose gestures can be aped by anyone. Worse, the legitimate concern of progressives with identity has been appropriated by the right with shocking ease so that now there is hardly a right winger in existence who has not learned how to cast himself as the ‘real’ victim.

And here I think WE must go back to a historical consideration and consider the Christian sources of our current predicament. Progressives who have learned that Christianity is a negligible, stupid thing for rubes in Alabama are going to have to be patient here because we are going to discuss victims and victimology in relation to the archetypal victim, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the innocent man, the best man, who is put to death as the worst man. He is put to death by right and due authority as humans understand this term. As such he radically overturns that authority and all it represents. He enables and liberates all ‘victims’ by sharing, even surpassing, their shame and exclusion. As Nietzsche saw with such clarity he had overturned all ‘values’ as antiquity had understood them. What are ‘values’ what are ‘civilized codes of morality’ if they put the Son of God to death? Nietzsche, with his characteristic brilliance, intuited exactly how this could go astray. The will to power will always express itself actively. If it cannot express itself actively it will do so passively. Jesus does not liberate the oppressed at all, he simply releases AND canonizes their will to revenge. This takes the form not of active struggle but of passive aggressive manipulation and control of the life energy of others. The victim becomes the new oppressor not by open, honest means but by subterranean ones, by ‘guilt tripping’ the strong and free into submission and draining them of life like vampires. This puts the victim in a curious position where the oppressor is concerned. Since the victim bases his identity on the moral purity assumed to go with victimhood he needs and indeed will always generate ‘oppressors’. He cannot be his thwarted, crippled self without someone to blame for thwarting and crippling him. This is why the victim can never take yes for an answer. Whatever external oppression is removed he will find a deeper, more insidious one for he is purely reactive and a creature of pure resentment. The great Christian poet William Blake protested against the same thing. He forever condemned what he called the ‘specter’: the negative, critical internal voice that ground the particulars of existence under the abstract categories of ‘good and evil’. For every sin or fault we can identify the specter will find ten more because it is his will to dissolve the particular in favor of the abstract or general. NOTHING can stand as good if it is anything at all. As one of Blake’s mythological characters complains “The infant joy is ghastly if looked into”.

I do not take these critiques as the last word but I do take them as A word.  Part of the reason I remain a Christian is that I think there are forms of solidarity and empathy that are not forms of enabling. Nietzsche did not see this distinction BUT, and here is the problem, nor do many of the proponents of his counter-part Marx. They still think in terms of the binary of good and evil with the good as the ‘passive’ and the evil as the ‘active’ (just as Blake asserts in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Now at the core of Marxism is the joy of productive action not the fetishization of suffering though this seems to escape many current progressives. Played out politically this attitude translates to the view that if the victimizer is evil then the victim is good. Indeed, the victim’s words and deeds now escape all scrutiny because any such scrutiny is simply an act of ‘revictimization’. In fact, the victim will go out of his way to provoke opposition precisely to be ‘re-victimized’. This provides him with the confirmation bias he needs to enhance his own sense of specialness and moral worth. I have read no funnier account of this than David Sedaris’ brilliant story ‘Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter’. The voice of the oppressed is the voice of God. Now I DO in fact think the voice of the oppressed is the voice of God but NOT in this way of easy canonization. Still, if you wanted to generate counter-claims and reactionary counter narratives that oppose the narrative of emancipation there is no surer way to do it than to than to present that narrative in the form of abstract moralism and the will to revenge. 

There is a deeper problem however that does FAR more to vitiate ‘progressivism’ and that is its underlying moralism. Progressivism is a form of moral exceptionalism for which failure to persuade, failure to move, failure to WIN becomes an essential moment. The moralizer proves he is too good for this world by losing, just like Roland in the ancient poem attains martyrdom by going down (purposefully) to defeat.  Rarity is a mark of distinction and if the great cause becomes popular it thereby becomes common. The moralizer then begins his litany about ‘selling out’ and ‘compromising’ and ‘giving comfort to the enemy’. Part of this is, in fact, a secret fear of the responsibility of power. Power reveals who we are like nothing else and for this reason we may well wish to avoid it, especially if we can pat ourselves on the back for the purity of our unsullied motives. This moralism also lies behind the endless fracturing of movements into more and more sects. Moralism is, to use Girard’s term, a form of mimetic rivalry. The moralizer must, if he is human, have a sense of his own limitation and indeed his own guilt. His response to this anxiety is performance, in both senses of that word. He must forever demonstrate his purity by separation from the other and surmounting of the other. The circle of the good must only, ever, shrink so that HE can remain at the heart of it. This means the moralizer turns on his ‘allies’ with far more viciousness than he would ever turn on his enemies. He is in competition to advance in the ‘movement’ by outdoing not his enemies but his friends. This is why a movement has ‘taboos’, semi-rational or indeed non-rational boundaries of speech or behavior that are just vague enough that any one at all can be found on the wrong side of them when the ‘purity’ of the group needs to be enforced by an ‘excommunication’ or expulsion of a scapegoat. Again, as Blake and indeed Hegel saw concrete, determinate freedom must always be sacrificed to abstract and unfulfillable ideals. In the terror this took the literal form of a string of executions where yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. 

What would a post-progressive emancipatory program look like? Well, one thing it will require, alas, is a re-engagement with the theological for so many of the problems with progressive politics are grounded in theological illiteracy, indeed a theological illiteracy that is PROUD OF ITSELF AS SUCH. This means minimally a new secular engagement with the complexity of our religious traditions in the form of attention (to use Weil’s term) rather than cheap polemic. Secular as we may want to be we must still contemplate the mysteries or wallow in self-thwarting, self-frustrating ignorance. I do not at ALL mean that this re-engagement need be confessional or even involve conscious belief. I mean that to move forward past our current impasse we must also engage in recollection and retrieval. If we do not do this un-thought theologies or religious and mythic assumptions will simply dominate us and determine our actions without conscious control. If we do this though we might well find a form of ‘emancipation’ that is grounded not in moralism and its contradictions but in the genuine solidarity of forgiveness. This was Blake’s dream when HE became disenchanted with the ‘progressivism’ of his day and found it was only a source of new oppressions. We might at least, for our own ultimate benefit, give him a hearing.