The deception of the idea of progress

Not always what is “more” or comes after is better, as the dominant thought would have us believe. The ideological and moral surrender of the left

“It’s progress! It cannot be stopped! ». This is the hallucinating, silly, decerebrated, commonplace that from Positivism onwards, therefore for about 150 years, has been pronounced by ordinary people, by the people, without distinction of class and culture, in the face of every emerging novelty, even imbecile and pejorative of the status quo. Progress and science have been assumed to new dogmas, indeed to new divinities. And, in the case of medical science, we saw how dangerous this deification was during the coronavirus epidemic.

Particularly in the West, it is as if people, having lost their religious faith, have it replaced with others, more terrible than. And here is the blind myth of progress. What happens later on the chronological level is necessarily better than what existed before and which, more often than not, is replaced. Corollary: even what is “more” is better. More production, larger vehicles or aircraft, mammoth constructions. You go in search of the record, whatever it is and whatever it may mean. At the outset, at least one key concept needs to be clarified. Even if they are confused, progress does not always require development; and, on the contrary, development does not always involve progress. These are different ideas, related to quality and quantity. The progress it is a real improvement in quality. For example, the quality of a person’s life, food production, the air one breathes in a big city; or, in a different context, the aesthetic level of a nation’s art. Development instead, it is characterized by numbers, by the quantitative increase: more gross domestic product of a nation, more bank branches, more supermarkets, more TV channels, more books or produced films, etc.

The Enlightenment philosophy, which first emphasized the idea of progress, seeing it even as an unlimited upward curve over time, he thought more about the qualitative fact. Moreover, that progress should never stop was and still is a pure illusion. In history and in culture declines have existed and exist, as we can see in our times from the current deterioration in the West of the living conditions of citizens and of the state of culture and education. As he stated Jean-Claude Michéa, the nineteenth-century left adhered uncritically to the enlightenment ideology of progress: dogmatically and fanatically affirmed that better situations occur afterwards and that the new is automatically superior to the old (not only the machines, but the culture, the evolution social, etc.). So much so that today the post-Marxist left are identified as a whole as progressives.

This idea of endless progress is false: in the past agriculture produced fruit and vegetables healthier, the environment was less polluted, water was abundant, families were able to better educate their children, community structures protected their members, aesthetic standards were correct, etc .; and it is also a failed idea because it does not allow us to see the real setbacks e the disasters of development, confused with progress. Thus, in the end, in the 21st century, the rampant economic powers, from neoliberalism to Big tech, from globalism to Big Pharma, from international finance to mass culture politically correct, from the media to advertising, they had an easy game to transform Marxism for their own ends, that is to say that thought-practice-realization that seemed to best embody the instances of progress towards a perfect world and society. Well exposes that trajectory Marcello Veneziani in Unforgivable. One hundred portraits of unseemly masters (Marsilio, Venice 2017, pp. 69-70).

Here is what the Apulian intellectual writes: «Global capitalist society has achieved the main promises of Marxism, while distorting them: in globalization it has achieved internationalism against homelands; in uniformity and homologation it has brought about equality and universal leveling; in the global domination of the market he recognized the world primacy of economics set by Marx; in practical atheism and irreligion he realized Marxian practical atheism and its critique of religion; in the primacy of practical and utilitarian material relations with respect to spiritual, moral and traditional values, he espoused Marxian materialism; in the liberation from every organic and natural bond he realized Marx’s Prometheanism in the individual sphere; in the libertine and permissive society it has brought about the Marxian liberation from family and marriage ties; and, as Marx wanted, he achieved the primacy of praxis over thought. It is Western society that decrees the primacy of becoming over being, of the mutation of nature, of trespassing on the limit ».

In practice, the evolution of the left from socialism to progressivism to weak liberal thinking radical chic has meant its enslavement to economic powers, which use weapons of mass distraction such as, among others, immigrationism, lgbtqia + ideology, feminism, the lawfulness of drug use, to hide under a red carpet L’horror of glAnduniversal balization. Examples that are easy to see, because under our eyes on an ongoing basis, they are fashion and advertising. Both have always existed, but the first was confined to the aesthetic field, the second had the sole task of selling products (more or less improving the quality of life of the consumer). Both today want to impose a custom, an ethics, an anthropological transformation. The same goes for cinema, songs, sports. All in the name of alleged progress. And, then, how to defend oneself from bad progressivism? Recovering the culture, the “high” art, the tradition, the living and strong roots. It is no coincidence that school, education, culture, family, people and national sovereignty are the main targets of supranational financial and capitalist powers. Easy? Not at all! But it is the only possible answer to the prevailing tide of hatred and ignorance and, as bad as it goes, it constitutes at least the individual, if not collective, lifeline.