Steven Parmenius

On a recent podcast I made some comments about progress and progressivism. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdjtv5wD-fM&t=168s) These concerned my doubts and hesitations concerning whether ‘progress’ was really so good a framing for understanding things like social justice or equity. After all, cultures that do not frame time in the linear western fashion are as capable of striving for justice as we are. That there are different concepts of time is something I learned a long while ago when, as a teenager, I read what might have been the first serious book from which I learned something. This was Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade. From this book I learned about the figuration of time as cyclical. Rather than a linear progression from point A to point B time was, in many non-western cultures, figured as returning or reverting on itself in a repeating pattern. This contrasts with at least two other figurations, absolute return (as to a golden age) and eschatology or the projection ...

  Progress is a peculiar word. It is a core word for our discourse about things like politics or science and, as is usual with such core words, we tend not to examine it. Progress is our model for understanding good things that happen. It is a symbol for good things that happen, of course, because MANY good things that happen have nothing to do with it. It is a framing word not a direct signifier and, as such, its use is oblique and non-literal. A pot hole in a road is filled. That’s progress we might say except it isn’t. Filling a pothole is regress for the road is being returned to its original state. We don’t say this however because the word regress has the wrong connotations. To go back to something is bad and to go forward to something is good. This means that all desirable ‘returns’ are actually motions forward. We can spell this out with a bit more exactness. Why is filling a pothole a good thing? Well, it is part of an overarching process: a ‘meta-narrative’ if you like. ...

    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...

  There are public intellectuals who are decorous in debate, nuanced and careful in their arguments, cautious in their assertions and meticulous in researching the subjects they comment on. Then there is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a man with a megaphone who models, lavishly models, basic intellectual irresponsibility. Like Ben Shapiro (his right wing equivalent) he cultivates radical stupidity and sells it to the public as cutting edge intelligence.   Years ago when I first picked up the God Delusion I realized not five pages in that it was the work of an intellectual fraud (this is because religion and philosophy are my ACADEMIC specialties- sorry to pull rank).   I have no reason to think this fraudulence extends further than his popular works on religion and other topics. Dawkins is famous because he published a book with selfish in the title at the cusp of the Reagan/Thatcher era. It was read and admired, I am told, by CEO’s who suddenly found their narcissism and gr...

  In philosophy we have a series of idealized positions and arguments about which we argue like nominalism, realism, idealism, materialism and so on. This is both good and bad. It is bad because the use of such categories often distorts the complexity of individual thinkers. Historical positions aren't pure examples of idealized conceptual stances. A rationalist may have empirical elements in his thought and vice versa. One person’s realism or nominalism may be more radical than another’s and a philosopher, who after all is not an all knowing machine, may build doubts and hesitations into his position. He may even have unresolved contradictions. He may even have contradictions he does not WANT to resolve as (after all) what is a contradiction but an unfinished thought? That said it is sometimes necessary to paint in broader strokes as all analysis can’t be carried out at the individual level. This is as much as to say that in history there are broad movements that cohere over time ...

                  Protestants  and atheists (with a smattering of Thomists) do this thing called analytic philosophy of religion in which I have very little interest. It is rigorously discursive, highly formalized and, as far as I can tell, utterly a-historical. As a historicist, then, it does not get to first base philosophically, at least where I am concerned. There are those with a taste for such things but I, alas, am not one of them. Nor will I EVER be one of them. That said, I do recall one bit of discussion generated by Plantinga et.al. and that concerned the Great Pumpkin from the Peanuts cartoon strip. Plantinga held that certain beliefs could be ‘properly basic’. A properly basic belief might be a belief in something like the principle of induction: i.e. that we can generalize from experience. Notoriously, post-Hume, there is no agreed on ‘proof’ of the principle of induction which does not presuppose the principle of inductio...