For want of a... word? Or of an understanding that should be named?
For Want of a Nail (1629)
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
“Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The old poem "For want of a nail...", shows how a seemingly small issue, can lead to catastrophic consequences. One such seemingly small issue that continually arises today, is our inability to name what most threatens our interests, and so,
it's argued, for want of a word, we have to make do with a confusing flurry of words like Woke, Leftist, Extremist, Hard Right, RINO, Commie, Progressive, Woke Left and Woke Right/Woke Reich/Weak Reich, and so on, and on, and on, which further confuses the issue (at best). For want of this missing word, or words, so the argument goes, we cannot agree on what we should or shouldn't do to put matters right, and so for want of that, we in The West risk losing our world to endless waves of ideological assaults.
The question I have is, is the problem really a matter of our want of a word, or is it our habit of naming every seemingly new issue that arises without first identifying what the real problem actually
is, which leads us to having an issue that's less one of our being in want of a word, than one of having an abundance of names for problems (many? One?) that we haven't yet either appropriately identified or named? Perhaps a bit of both? Maybe, but I suspect that if we handled the latter, it'd go a long way towards resolving the former.
The underlying problem with using these terms (Left/Right, Woke, etc.,) is that the attempt to make ideological diagnoses of such problems, across whichever fields of philosophy, theology, art, science, politics, etc., is the very process of naming and inflaming that ideologies engage people in to heat their tempers up, and to draw them into
their ideological solutions, while successfully evading any substantial identification of the actual problems which they all have in common (
don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg!).
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| "First learn to use this..." |
It's not enough to call our pet peeves - or each other - names, when we haven't identified what it is that we're calling them names for, and why. Worse, failing to attend to first things first, enables
all sides to claim to be trying to make progress, and ensures that the answers given to the question of "
What is Progress?", will be
"Progress is what we're doing!", and that regress is
"what they're doing!", as each side accuses the 'other side' of being reactionary, hidebound, stupid, commie, capitalist, etc..
First off, IMHO, we need to understand what it is that we're trying to name,
before we can tell how and why this or that word does or doesn't apply, and what to do about them. Do that first, and I'm willing to bet that we'll soon make progress towards identifying any other word or words that we're in want of.
Progress begins...
Where to start? Well, IMHO, our first step should be to identify what can be recognized by us today, as having been not just a mark of Progress since the beginning of recorded history, but one that preceded progress in every other field of philosophy, theology, art, science, and politics, etc. Significantly, as we're often told that religion is man's first systematic set of beliefs about the world and our place within it, I think it's safe to say that when religion stopped demanding human sacrifice in the lands that would become The West, and started praising what was true and ethically just,
that must surely rank as a, if not
the, first example of meaningful progress, in the history of mankind.
Should we ask
why that was a measure of progress? Without getting into trite praises for '
Reason!' (which this turn doesn't necessarily prove or justify), it may be more worthwhile to point out what that change of direction marked a turning away from. Leaving aside the obvious issues which ceasing to practice human sacrifice meant that people no longer had to contend with, the unvarnished purpose of such sacrifice is to influence, gain, or claim to be able to, control the source of ultimate power over us, which means that
Power itself is what was being sought and worshipped by means of human sacrifice. That worship of power, which is not limited to human sacrifice, entails violence, terror, uncertainty, unpredictability, and the pervasive feeling that that which you've made most central to your life, is a direct threat to it. Whether or not we've fully turned away from that manner of thinking, ceasing to practice human sacrifice, was at least a recognition that we
should turn away from that as an acceptable pursuit, and that was not only a mark of real progress, but a standard which all additional progress can be measured by, even (especially?) today.
OTOH, when the object of worship is that which
commands you to engage in ethical behavior towards the world, towards your family & fellows, even towards your livestock, and holds that the creator of them all doesn't just value Truth & Justice, but is thought by them to be the essence & embodiment of what is real and true and good and just, then those who live with
that belief at the center of their lives, are going to be infinitely more open to engaging in trust, friendship, family, and community, and consequently, that community is going to be far more conducive to pursuing (and towards understanding what it is that makes) lives that are worth living.
Whatever opinion that people might have of religion today, the step of turning away from the former form of it, and towards the latter form, was a monumentally significant example of meaningful progress, and what Moses and the Jews wrote down for us in The Bible, is what most obviously put The West on the path out of circular prehistory, and onto the path of true progress.
Progress continues...
On the other side of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian hyphenation, the Greek's are responsible for taking two giant steps towards progress as well. Firstly, by advancing beyond the habitual submission to the rule of brutal and arbitrary tyranny, by entrusting their society to the reasonable possibility that they and their fellows were capable of engaging in the effort of self-governance together, which began moving control over the levers of power towards those decisions that could be made through reasoned argument, and away from the arbitrary whims of a powerful tyrant. Secondly, the Greek's development of theatrical Drama, which put tangible ideas before the consideration of the people, was another step of real progress that was a value in and of itself, and which set the stage for the development of philosophy.
Each of these steps moved early western society away from the sense of its people having
no understanding of, or control over, lives that were lived in a fearful state of unpredictability, and moved them towards having lives that
could be founded upon understanding and trust. That movement away from merely surviving under fearful & undefined notions imposed upon them by those in power, and towards conscious consideration of being able to understand what is meaningful, and why that is,
is the essence of progress.
Those two steps also served to move the Greeks away from the word games and mystifications of the sophists and their claims that Might makes 'Right', and towards the attempt to identify what's real and true, and towards moving the mind away from fog and darkness, and towards clarity and light. Both of these had a significant impact on both the lives of those in their community, and of those other communities that became aware of their ideas, and sought to emulate them.
NOTE: Greek Democracy did
not mean peace and safety for their society - see
Thucydides' Melian Dialog - but
it did introduce the expectation that reasoned argument
should be involved in both the exercise
and restraint of power, and
that was progress.
The Greek's development of Philosophy - the love of Wisdom (a hat-tip to Proverbs is in order) - rested upon Aristotle's first rule of thought, that:
- a thing cannot both be and not be in the same time and context (Law of non-contradiction)
, and what he identified as being the fundamental rules for logic, requiring:
- that all terms must be clear and unambiguous,
- that premises must be true,
- that conclusions must follow from those premises;
, and these led to an orderly interest in, and respect for what is real and true, and brought clarity to the worthwhile thoughts and actions of those living within their society.
Progress isn't all Greek to the West...
The Romans advanced upon the Greeks understanding of politics and law, with the more orderly and effective form of republican government based upon the Rule of Law - with Law understood to be "
...The law is reason unaffected by desire..." (
from Aristotle), as well as the understanding that Laws must be reasonable "
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions" or else they are no law at all (from
Cicero). That too stands as another indicator of real, tangible, progress, as they brought more clarity, predictability, and accountability, to the lives of those living within their communities.
Christianity then introduced the world of the Greeks & Romans to the recognition & belief that each individual person, regardless of birth or status, as not only of equal standing & value before God, but was understood to be made in the very image of God. Prior to that revelation, it was a universal presumption that most people
should be valued by their birth and status, and that they
should be treated as being little more than bi-pedal tools, whose bodies were routinely used as fodder for the ambitions of those in power. Despite all the real progress that the Greeks and Romans made in philosophy, the arts, and law, they not only never recognized or entertained that thought, they
routinely treated individual lives as being expendable, even extinguishable, for reasons of convenience or pique (the Roman father that found a baby to be flawed or inconvenient, had the power to toss it upon a rubbish heap to die of exposure, and an annoying child or wife could be put to death by his hand as well).
To say that Christianity's view of the value of each individual - each an Imago Dei - led to revolutionary progress for all mankind, is a monumental understatement.
The joining of the Greco/Roman to the Judeo/Christian marked a measure of progress that has become the defining feature of Western Civilization, and the completeness of it owes a great deal to the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was Aquinas that made the most substantial progress in harmonizing the best of ancient Greek & Roman thought, from Aristotle to Cicero, with that of the Judeo-Christian, and his efforts unquestioningly improved the clarity of Western thought and behavior in every aspect of life, from philosophy, to law, the humanities, civil life, science, and even to religion itself.
The effect of that unity of understanding has shown itself in everything from the early republics of the Italian City States, to Britain's Magna Carta, the formulation of a constitutional monarchy, the English Bill of Rights, and Lord Coke's ordering of Law in respect to "
A man's home is his Castle". Those, and other significant milestones, not least of which was the lighting of the light of science by Christian monks, beginning with Roger Bacon devising the first scientific experiments, in an effort to methodically investigate the wonders of God's creation, all contributed significant steps forward in the real civilizational progress of The West.
We can recognize these as self-evidently being
real progress, because they brought ever more clarity to our ability to identify and communicate about what was and is real and true, which
is of real value to human life, and to our understanding of it, and all of which served to place reasonable constraints upon the exercise of power over others, and contributed to improving people's ability to live lives worth living.
That increased clarity of understanding, improved Westerner's ability to engage reasonably within a more civil society, and respect what is justly due to others, is what is, and should be, meant by Progress, and how it is recognized and measured.
Conversely, that which obscures our understanding, dims our recognition of what is real and true, and increases the infringements of arbitrary powers being exerted on and over our lives, is the
opposite of Progress... and
that is something that we most definitely should have a name for.
Realizing Progress....
This cumulative progress in the Western understanding which developed from Moses to Jesus, from Aristotle to Aquinas, and on down to Elizabethan England, accrued some philosophical & political 'mis-steps' as well (see especially Machiavelli, Sir Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hume), which opened the door to reintroducing sophistry and mystification into popular thought. At a critical point in that history, however, those regressions were recognized, identified, and, although only temporarily, halted its spread, through the rise of Scottish Common Sense Realism. SCSR, which was exemplified by
Thomas Reid, identified the nature of those modern missteps, and restored Common Sense to the western mind in general, and
to the American Colonies in particular.
By 'Common Sense', they did not mean that sense of '
Oh, how very practical and clever of you!', they meant it in the sense of what had commonly been known as the
Three Acts of the Mind: to apprehend, judge, reason; as being the sense which all humans share in common, and which forms the basis of our
Common Sense understanding that reality is what exists, and that we can know it, and that we can communicate to each other about it (see Robert Curry's excellent "
Common Sense Nation"). That Common Sense is what enables us to correct errors and omissions in our own understanding of the world and of each other, and it is what makes it possible for any reasonable person to be brought to recognize and understand what came to be understood to be self-evident truths, which is what enabled the greatest feat of political progress in 2,000 years, the
Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution of the United States of America.
At each step in the journey of the Greco/Roman - Judeo/Christian West, some aspect of our understanding of the real nature of ourselves, and of the world we inhabit - such as Aristotle's first rule of thought (
Law of non-contradiction), Art's ability to communicate
truth and worthy ideals, and our understanding that our individual rights are not the result of negotiations and agreements, but
are derived from the nature of being human - Imago Dei; '
All men are created equal' - it became increasingly self-evident that
Might does not make Right, and that only a clearer understanding of what is real and true can enable us to recognize what is right, and that
truly practical might, can only follow from adhering to that, and so realize that every reasonable person has an equal claim to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Each of those steps can be identified as steps of true progress,
because they clarified and identified our understanding of what
is real and true, in everything from the purposes of the state, and the boundaries that must be placed upon its powers, to maintain those fruits of true progress. The accelerating refinement of learning, science, civil discourse, and manners, and whatever particular form of thought - philosophy, theology, art, science, politics - abides by and builds upon those fundamentals, and any claim to be seeking real progress, must harmonize with them.
And so it is my contention that every single step forward, across all forms of thinking, from philosophy, theology, art, science, politics, qualified as real progress,
because they brought greater clarity of understanding of what is real and true, and so led society to become more moral, virtuous, and able to live lives worth living, within reasonable systems of justice.
Which Way Western Man: Progress or Regress?
In contrast to that, whatever form of thinking - philosophy, theology, art, science, politics - seeks to confuse, dim, abridge, confound, subvert, outright deny, and/or seek to get away with faking the fundamentals of sound thought, is declaring their desire to regress our thinking to a point that it is no longer bound by what is real and true, so as to gain some level of power over you
through your misunderstanding of reality.
With that being common to all such aims, it seems to me that the proper name & description of those who seek to attain their desires by getting away with thinking in this latter way, should be:
Pro-Regressive.
Full disclosure, I've been trying to '
make fetch happen' for 'Pro-Regressive' for over a decade, not as an ideological label for the latest variety of troublesome tactics, but as a word that both identifies and describes what their subversive attacks are engaged in across our fundamental understanding of what is (
Metaphysics), upon how we know it (
Causality &
Logic), and upon what we should or should not do because of our understanding of that (
Ethics).
Those fundamentals are necessary for making clarity of thought possible, but the telos of pro-regressiveism has no interest in anyone successfully pursuing or achieving real progress, because it is by regressing
your life and
our society, that the
Pro-Regressive makes progress in
their pursuit of power.
Whatever may have been the particular disagreements and errors of past philosophers (lovers of wisdom) from Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Thomas Reid and our Founding Fathers, they were seeking to abide by what is fundamentally real & true, and they strove to bring clarity to our understanding of how to live a life worth living. That is what identifies them as the ones who have contributed to the making of actual progress.
The misosophists (haters of wisdom) who've tried to get away with faking those steps, from the relative innocence of Scotus and Ockham, to the increasingly deliberate efforts of Sir Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Evola, etc., each has sought to get away with faking or denying some or all of those fundamentals, and that is what identifies them, across philosophy, theology, politics, economics, as being:
Pro-Regressive.
How you determine that something
is pro-regressive, is not by whether they favor this or that ideological position of the Left or of the Right, but by whether or not they are persistently evading those fundamentals through positions that insinuate misleading presumptions into your understanding (ask yourself what their positions are rooted in? What effect will they have upon your thoughts? What are they aiming towards and why?) in order to get a response from you, that's useful to them.
Because appearances - especially ideological appearances - can be deceiving, the common nature of the pro-regressive isn't always obvious - especially if you take them at face value and ignore their telos - but if you'll pause and look 'under the hood', you can see that they're more alike than not, in the underlying assaults on understanding, which they all share in common:
- Rousseau's idea of liberty: "... whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free;..."
- Heritage President Kevin Roberts wrote on the need to "...require many on the right to reconsider some of their unquestioned maxims", which he offers support for by quoting from the character of the psychopathic assassin Chigurh: "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"
- Replying to the charge that he's importing Gramscian thinking into 'The Right', Christopher F. Rufo replies: "We can find utility in Gramsci's analysis of intellectuals, elites, institutions, culture, folklore, hegemony, etc., while rejecting his Marxism. Your argument seems to boil down to a form of word association, in which anyone you label "woke" is somehow beyond consideration..."
, do those convey their concern for clarity of meaning, or for evading that to induce conformity? Does either quoting a movie villain to dismiss American 'maxims of' constitutionalism, or presuming that you can easily scrape some utility from the deeply subversive & evil ideas of Marx & Gramsci, without absorbing any of the ill effects which their 'analysis' and tactics for employing them were formulated to cause - do those indicate an understanding and respect for the power of ideas and a concern for what they confront you with, or a shortsighted & shallow effort to manipulate language so as to produce effects
in you, that are of use to
them?
What you see that they're rooted in as you look beneath the rhetoric, is a vaguery that shapes popular opinion to their ideological passions, and those are roots that will not bear good fruit. Here are a few more likeminded examples:
- Ibrahim Kendi writes: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
- Sargon of Akhad: "The problem is that reality as we experience it might indeed be radically subjective, and until you can demonstrate that it isn't, then we are in a bind, aren't we?", and that "The critical theorists have been philosophically demolishing us for more than half a century. We have to get ahead of them."
- Christian Nationalist Doug Wilson, claiming to support American constitutionalism with a theocratic Christian Nationalism where "... a Protestant nation I think is capable of having carveout spaces for Roman Catholics and even for Jews...", although "...Catholic church bells would be okay, but a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down Main Street. No."
, do they sound like they have an issue with discrimination, or with
who has the power to get away with
imposing discrimination?
Economic Labels kill off meaningful Questions - Step out of the Wizard's Circle of 'Common Good'
- Labeling - applying answers to abort your questions
- The Questionable Label of 'Libertarian'
- The Wastefulness of *Economics* requires labels
- The wishful thinking of the 'Classical Liberal' label
- One Classical Liberal that took liberties with Life, Liberty, and Happiness - J.S. Mill
- Political Economy is not just an old label for 'Economics'
- The Common Good, Property, Liberty - united they stand, divided we fall
- Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all
- Dazzling us with what's partly seen while abandoning the full reality of what's left unseen
- Slow down bro - thinking about rights, government, justice, law, politics, can't start with rights, government, justice, law, politics
- IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is
- Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you dissappear from your life
- The reality is that a common good must be common to all.
- "Letgo of that Republic!' Gimme that...!"
- Summing up by returning to the Questions that should precede Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson'
- What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget
- The TURD's Pro-Regressive retreat from the West A.D. to the B.C. past through the Wizard's Circle
- The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'Value', 'Growth', and 'Law', reconceived as Semantic Deceptions
- Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law
- Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with
- Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true
- Understand Classic American Liberalism and decline to be mislabeled
And then there's the notion that we're unable to know what is objectively true, which is a sentiment that's been pushed by thinkers from Descartes, to Hume, to Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Gramsci, and on down through every post-modernist from
CRT's DiAngelo on 'The Left', to the
'post-liberals' like Sargon on 'The Right'. One obvious question to ask of that assertion is, if that's *true*, then how can
they know it? For if what they say is *true* and
no one can know
anything to be objectively true, why should anyone listen to what
they have to say about what
is or isn't *true*?!
But the better question to ask, given the popularity (and persistence) of 'their point' over time, is how and why do people give any attention to those who continue saying such things?
And the answer is that the ability of those who entertain their ideas, to think clearly and effectively about their lives and the world they live within, degrades -
regresses - due to their thinking those thoughts within their head, and doing so without the fundamentals in place to safeguard them (
hi Dewey!). Improving the clarity of your understanding is
not their point, undermining and subverting your understanding,
is.
With that in mind, take another look: does reading their statements bring you clarity of understanding, or the urge to exercise power over
others and/or to react against its being used against you? Their rhetorical roots are in preferences resentments, rather than in what is understood to be real and true, because what they aim towards, is power over 'others' (which they'd
never impose upon
you, of course,
nosireebob!).
Remember, it is not a single action that causes something to happen, and although modernity would prefer that be fully forgotten,
Causation has several layers - four of which were identified by Aristotle: the Material (“
that out of which it is formed”), the Formal (
what it is to be), the Efficient (
the active agent), the Final (
the goal), and the fifth identified by Aquinas as the Exemplary cause (“
what guides their intellect”) - and the Pro-Regressive, by their very nature, are intent upon corrupting one or more of those causes, so as to more easily undermine what a shallow reading of 'cause' would lead you to expect.
All Ideologies are united in their disregard for metaphysical realism, so as to practice utilizing language to blur key distinctions under your consideration, so as to confuse, dim, abridge, confound, subvert, and deny you clarity about what
is real and true. Whatever apparent differences the ideological snippets noted above seem to have, they are but surface appearances that distract from the demolition work which each of their ideas are doing to the structuring of thoughts within your own mind.
Ideologies assert that
their opinion of what reality
should be,
is what matters most, and under the pretext of urgency, they raise up their favored positions, over principles, to loosen their adherents' minds' grasp upon our shared reality, to overpower our judgement, and to invalidate our ability to know and communicate what is real and true. Those actions are how they increase
their power, through
your misunderstanding of the fundamentals of metaphysics, causality/logic, and ethical reasoning.
The test to be applied to what people say & do then, is not an ideological one of Left or Right politics, but a metaphysical one of whether their words and actions clarify understanding and reveal what is real and true and right to do, or do they seek to obfuscate, flatten and befuddle, so as to get away with acquiring the power to do unto you, as they will?
That shared telos
is what defines their being
Pro-Regressive, and we neglect identifying and naming that, at our peril.
So... what's it gonna be men of The West,
Progress, or
Pro-Regress?
It
is up to you.
