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"Progress whence and to what? We talk of progress because by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements we have established a state of society which mistakes comfort for civilisation."
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ProgressivismThe hatred that often passed for progressivism in activist circles was — Progressivism
"The hatred that often passed for progressivism in activist circles was truly astounding, and I fell lock-stock-and-barrel for it. One was trained only to look for the negative in every nook and corner, and, if it didnt exist where one looked, to imagine and fervently believe that it did. Ones whole life became one great protest. Protesting against real or imaginary injustice was almost the only respectable thing to do. It was as if there was nothing at all good in the world to celebrate, and even as if celebration and joy were themselves an unnecessary diversion or a unaffordable luxury that truly committed activists had to carefully shun. That explained why many progressives and radicals were horrifically negative as human beings, many of them being irritatingly obnoxious, judgemental, cantankerous, dour and sullen. Their penchant for protest made them only more so. Believing themselves to be somehow morally superior to others because they had, so they thought, devoted themselves to the oppressed made many of them painfully sanctimonious and proud. ... Negativism, then, was a defining feature of being progressive, and thats what I began to revel in. But such negativism was almost entirely one-sided in activist circles, for to be counted as a real social activist it was simply unthinkable that the oppressed could be faulted for almost anything at all. For a social activist to even mention, leave alone condemn, the foibles of the oppressed communities—gender injustice or caste rivalries among Dalits or the obscurantism and misogyny preached in many Muslim madrasas or the terror attacks and killings of innocents by Naxalites and radical Islamists—was tantamount to nothing less than treason."
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Progressivism
Progressivism
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Progressivism is a political philosophy and reform movement that seeks to progress the human condition through reforms. Adherents endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere throughout the globe. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new empirical knowledge.
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"Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle."
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"Privilege is simply the target the progressive left paints on the back of those whose power they want."
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"Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."
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"The progressives of Theodore Roosevelts day were a varied lot, and some of their disagreements would reverberate, often loudly, right through the New Deal. But they shared a commitment, as Walter Lippmann had said, to substitute mastery for drift, or, as Hoover might have put it, social planning for laissez-faire: a commitment, in short, to use government as an agency of human welfare. Progressives of all persuasions believed that government must somehow superintend the phenomenal economic and social power that modern industrialism was concentrating into fewer and fewer hands. No longer could the public interest simply be assumed to flow naturally from the competition of myriad private interests. Active governmental guidance was required."
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"Viewed from Mount Vernon Street, the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection."
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