The following is neither a synoptic history of progressivism nor a detailed analysis of it. It is rather one person's perspective on one aspect of its origins and logical goal.
To me progressivism is a stage in a turning away from authoritarianism that began with the Renaissance when Italians began to take the Roman artifacts that lay all about them as well as the Roman and Greek writers as the source for an alternative way of understanding humanity. Up until that time authority, in the form of the Catholic Church, had declared what man was and even what his world was.
The door the Renaissance opened eventually ushered in the Age of Reason in which reason was asserted to be a more reliable guide to understanding man and his world. This eventuated in replacing the religious basis for morality with a basis in human experience and behavior. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that lying was not wrong because religion said it was. It was wrong because a society could not exist if everybody lied. Thus a test for a moral injunction became," What if everybody did that?" This was a moral rebellion against authority. As to matters of fact, in which the Church claimed explanatory rights using the Bible, first Copernicus presented his view of the earth and the sun as mere speculation to avoid the punishment of the Church. More explicitly, Galileo pointed out that the Church and by implication the Bible were, as a matter of fact, wrong. The Church's view was an egregious example of authoritarian overreach in which human values are ascribed a de facto reality.
Another major step in this transition was the declaration in 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon, the first formulator of the scientific method, that knowledge is power. Up until this point value of knowledge had been generally regarded as intrinsic. The fact that knowledge could generate power over nature as well as understand it was, in effect, the birth of technology as we know it. At this point Western man had freed itself from much of the authoritarianism of the Dark and Middle ages and had established an alternative to religious authoritarianism.
As this rebellion against authority expanded into other levels of society it generated the political movement toward democracy. Some argue that the Protestant Reformation was an essential ingredient in this process. I submit that the all Protestantism did was establish other authoritarian regimes, e.g. Calvin's Geneva, the Pilgrim's banishment of Roger Williams, and Luther's attack on the Anabaptists. Among the most pronounced political expressions of the attack on authoritarianism was the philosophical work of Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Mill, Hume, Bent ham and the Frenchman Rousseau. In this process they defined the state as a contract between the citizens and their government. As such the state could no longer act arbitrarily without the consent of the governed. The American Revolution saw the first thorough implementation of this body of thought. At this point the rebellion against political authoritarianism had succeeded. The state became a function of its citizens.
As the Industrial Revolution, a product of the freed human mind, set in people were increasingly agglomerated into the cities, driven either by confiscation of their land by enclosure laws or primogeniture laws of inheritance. Here they were crowded together in an unsanitary environment of cheap housing, fractured communities, and poverty. This is the world described by Dickens and illustrated by Hogarth. These people provided a cheap source of labor and were victimized both by their long hours of work, poor food and the worst of tenement housing. However, the factory, by gathering many people in one place also provided an environment for organizing that was not available in rural areas. I suggest that it was at this point and under these conditions that the intellectually-birthed rebellion against authority that had led to democracy, now led to the birth of progressivism as we know it. People had democratized their political world; now they would seek to democratize their work and social worlds.
It is, in my judgment, no accident that the rise of political democracy and the industrial revolution are almost exactly coextensive. The human mind, freed from authority, began to reappraise all its institutions in terms of human values. When it turned to the social and work conditions generated by the Industrial Revolution it applied those very human values of fairness and justice. The Industrial Revolution, while accentuating the gap between the rich and the poor also divorced political power from the land. This created an environment in which those struggling for a more just society at least were not burdened as much with class distinctions and the notion that people ought to "stay in their place."
Although in the founding of the American republic wealth and hence property, much of it commercial, played a prominent role in creating our founding documents, (see Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy), progressivism did not begin to flourish until after the Civil War. The immense jump in industrialization, especially in the North, occasioned the conditions of concentrated poverty that had earlier been unleashed in England. Additionally the massive immigration to the United States of the period brought many of the socialist ideas from Europe. In the United States the Industrial Revolution took hold later than in Europe. Because of our country's large size and the continued presence of the frontier we did not experience the urban poverty-based revolutions in 1848 that Europe did. The frontier became an idee fixe in the American mind and has been politically employed since, notably by Ronald Reagan and his "can do", "walk tall" mantras. It has kept us culturally infantile when it comes to social justice and the common good. As corporations, e.g. railroads, oil, steel grew into conglomerates they began to undertake control of our government. A country of citizens gulled by the Horatio Alger myth thought they were free even as their freedom, based on citizen efficacy, was stolen - not least by the illegal and unchallenged assertion that corporations were persons. The citizen's right of free speech became their newspaper's and eventually their media empire's as they exercised their free speech. As the corporations prospered by weakening the citizens' control over their government and their own lives those citizens were forced into greater and greater poverty. Cheap labor was imported for the mills and sweatshops of industry. Instead of being forced to pay a livable wage, the wealthy kept the difference and became even wealthier. This is in notable contrast to the overseas exportation of industry to take advantage of cheap labor in our time. However progressivism did not stop at dealing with the inequalities of the economy. It spread to all facets of American life. There was a progressive movement in education led by the philosopher John Dewey. Progressivism found expression in law notably in the influence of Justice Brandeis. In literature it found expression in the writings of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis as well as muckrakers like Ida Tarbell.
During the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration progressivism took root as a nation-wide effort to improve the lot of the American people. This effort resulted in the most egalitarian period in American history. It demonstrated the broad viability of the progressive, people-first approach to governance. It went so far in F.D.R.'s Four Freedoms, proposed as an addendum to the Bill of Rights, as to include freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Notably, all Ronald Reagan had to do was oppose it with the American Horatio Alger myth of self reliance, which he used to destroy government as a citizen-focused institution and that rapidly segued into a "me first" social ethos, in order to bring it down. This simple fact suggest that one of progressivism's central tasks is to redefine American values in terms of the common good focused on helping the individual to optimize her/his potential. This will require a good deal of thought.
As the world becomes more and more independent progressives will have to be ahead of the curve if violence and the destruction of human freedom are to be mitigated as the obvious forces of over-population, declining resources, global warming and environmental degradation converge. One already sees the World Social Forum opposed to the World Economic Forum. It is, in my judgment, an open question as to whether the goals of progressivism and those of capitalism are compatible. Progressivism seeks to free all humans, capitalism only the wealthy.
While some have made distinctions between progressives and populists *, I have sought herein to try to show its roots in the rejection of intellectual, then political and eventually social authoritarianism and its replacement by democracy. Progressivism is the product of a fundamental idea, namely, freedom from tyranny initially of the mind, eventually of the complete human being.
Bob Newhard
* ("Progressivism found support among small businessmen, professionals, and middle-class urban reformers",) populists (" the disgruntled farmers who fueled the Populist movement.") For these quotes see The Dawn of Liberalism: Progressivism http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture11.html
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
On (Adults) Growing Up in the World They Created
Human beings have an inherent problem of scale. When things get too big, whether buildings or systems, we start to distance ourselves from them. If they get so big that they overwhelm us in their complexity and seriousness we, childlike, close our eyes. Why, we must ask, are we paralyzed in the presence of this enormity of global overpopulation and what can we do to overcome it? To understand the dangers implicit in this behavior and find ways to counter it is one of mankind's greatest tasks if it is to survive the convergence of the massive forces descending upon us. All responsible experts, by which I mean those capable of taking evidence as the basis for judgment, now agree that the big word is "if." One of the problems with even this observation is that the word if is enough to generate childlike irresponsibility. That is, if we even suspect we can't do it, why try.
These thoughts occurred to me while reading an excellent essay by Professor Ken Small. The essay titled Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable can be found at file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Robert/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ozc2s59x.default/ScrapBook/data/20090205223848/index.html
One approach is sometimes called the salami method, that is slicing up the problem into smaller more "manageable" parts. This approach, while certainly more accommodating of our human limitations, has several risks built into it that must be recognized and addressed. First it requires that the problem be well enough understood so that it is broken into its constituent pieces at relevant, addressable, sections. This in itself is complicated by all the factors that must be considered in this reduction process. Population growth includes the problem of contravening ingrained human values, e.g. the "need" to have children. It has an ethnic value, e.g. if we don't maintain our numbers our culture will perish. It has the problem of redistributing the world's resources and the very idea of ownership.
The next problem is how to orchestrate this salami technique so that the most necessary of these various "slices" are addressed at a time and in a sequence that will get the results we need. As you will note from Small's essay he is looking at the generation, approximately 20 years, as the basic "slice" to orchestrate the needed changes. He anticipates about 200 years of generational change to bring the earth's human population down to a sustainable level. This process allows us to begin asking, "What should my generation do to further this population reduction. This in tern presents us, if all the conditions of thought and understanding I mentioned above are met, to begin productively thinking, planning and acting so that the next generation will have a basis to build on.
So the issue for this generation is to articulate the problem as best we can and find the cut points for "slicing." Identify this generation's slice; that is what we need to accomplish in the next 20 years? Then, plan and promote the process and actions tjat must be undertaken. There will, of course, be a lot of learning from experience as we progress. We will have to use our intelligence to outsmart our human nature. In the future I will try to present some thoughts on how we might proceed in such an endeavourer.
For purposes of illustration let us postulate a global population of 10 billion by 2050. This is actually within the margin of possibility. Taking the upper limit for a sustainable population of 2 billion, which is upper midrange in the estimated earth carrying capacity, we would need to reduce population by 8 billion in 200 years or 10 generations. This would, in crude terms, require a reduction rate of about 800 million per generation. One could expect, however, that as mankind acculturated itself to the necessity of this reduction that it would take place at a faster rate the further along the process went.
But let us target on this generation's 800 million. Understanding the goal is to sufficiently reduce global population with as little violence as possible. What priorities should be set to achieve the necessary reduction?
Immediately it becomes obvious that the least violent method of reducing population is to reduce the birth rate. Thus we need a massive investment in birth control. This immediately runs into an intreched religious resistance found in our culture. We will have to make the consequences of not reducing human population so clear, as Al Gore did with global warming, that this can be overcome. It probably will require limiting family size. China's one child per couple policy, which with a variety of exemptions applies to 36% of the population, has prevented over 250 million births between the program's inception in 1979 and 2000. This is an average of about 166 million per generation. This begins to provide a scale to measure what needs to be done if we are to achieve a global 800 million reduction for the world as a whole in this first generation. It is important to understand why only 36% of the Chinese population was required to participate in the program. For instance one of the major exemptions was for rural families because they needed children for a labor force. Parents who were themselves only children were allowed to have more than one child for family lineage purposes. Thus the Chinese took into account both economic and cultural concerns. China has about 16.5% of the world's population of 6 billion. A global population reduction done on the same scale for the same 20 years would have been 960 million, well over our 800 million 20-year target. This suggests that the Chinese approach could be used as a model to be modified by cultural and other demands, just as China modified their plan for cultural and economic purposes. This further suggests that if one society of 1 billion can achieve these results without major conflict that it may be possible for the world at large to do so. I am well aware of the downside of the Chinese effort, eg. killing female babies by exposure to ensure a male child to carry on the family name. These are cultural factors that need to be improved. However, the consequences of not making these reductions will be far more disastrous for humanity than maintaining the current methods of family inheritance or lineage.
Bob Newhard
These thoughts occurred to me while reading an excellent essay by Professor Ken Small. The essay titled Global population reduction: confronting the inevitable can be found at file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Robert/Application%20Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ozc2s59x.default/ScrapBook/data/20090205223848/index.html
One approach is sometimes called the salami method, that is slicing up the problem into smaller more "manageable" parts. This approach, while certainly more accommodating of our human limitations, has several risks built into it that must be recognized and addressed. First it requires that the problem be well enough understood so that it is broken into its constituent pieces at relevant, addressable, sections. This in itself is complicated by all the factors that must be considered in this reduction process. Population growth includes the problem of contravening ingrained human values, e.g. the "need" to have children. It has an ethnic value, e.g. if we don't maintain our numbers our culture will perish. It has the problem of redistributing the world's resources and the very idea of ownership.
The next problem is how to orchestrate this salami technique so that the most necessary of these various "slices" are addressed at a time and in a sequence that will get the results we need. As you will note from Small's essay he is looking at the generation, approximately 20 years, as the basic "slice" to orchestrate the needed changes. He anticipates about 200 years of generational change to bring the earth's human population down to a sustainable level. This process allows us to begin asking, "What should my generation do to further this population reduction. This in tern presents us, if all the conditions of thought and understanding I mentioned above are met, to begin productively thinking, planning and acting so that the next generation will have a basis to build on.
So the issue for this generation is to articulate the problem as best we can and find the cut points for "slicing." Identify this generation's slice; that is what we need to accomplish in the next 20 years? Then, plan and promote the process and actions tjat must be undertaken. There will, of course, be a lot of learning from experience as we progress. We will have to use our intelligence to outsmart our human nature. In the future I will try to present some thoughts on how we might proceed in such an endeavourer.
For purposes of illustration let us postulate a global population of 10 billion by 2050. This is actually within the margin of possibility. Taking the upper limit for a sustainable population of 2 billion, which is upper midrange in the estimated earth carrying capacity, we would need to reduce population by 8 billion in 200 years or 10 generations. This would, in crude terms, require a reduction rate of about 800 million per generation. One could expect, however, that as mankind acculturated itself to the necessity of this reduction that it would take place at a faster rate the further along the process went.
But let us target on this generation's 800 million. Understanding the goal is to sufficiently reduce global population with as little violence as possible. What priorities should be set to achieve the necessary reduction?
Immediately it becomes obvious that the least violent method of reducing population is to reduce the birth rate. Thus we need a massive investment in birth control. This immediately runs into an intreched religious resistance found in our culture. We will have to make the consequences of not reducing human population so clear, as Al Gore did with global warming, that this can be overcome. It probably will require limiting family size. China's one child per couple policy, which with a variety of exemptions applies to 36% of the population, has prevented over 250 million births between the program's inception in 1979 and 2000. This is an average of about 166 million per generation. This begins to provide a scale to measure what needs to be done if we are to achieve a global 800 million reduction for the world as a whole in this first generation. It is important to understand why only 36% of the Chinese population was required to participate in the program. For instance one of the major exemptions was for rural families because they needed children for a labor force. Parents who were themselves only children were allowed to have more than one child for family lineage purposes. Thus the Chinese took into account both economic and cultural concerns. China has about 16.5% of the world's population of 6 billion. A global population reduction done on the same scale for the same 20 years would have been 960 million, well over our 800 million 20-year target. This suggests that the Chinese approach could be used as a model to be modified by cultural and other demands, just as China modified their plan for cultural and economic purposes. This further suggests that if one society of 1 billion can achieve these results without major conflict that it may be possible for the world at large to do so. I am well aware of the downside of the Chinese effort, eg. killing female babies by exposure to ensure a male child to carry on the family name. These are cultural factors that need to be improved. However, the consequences of not making these reductions will be far more disastrous for humanity than maintaining the current methods of family inheritance or lineage.
Bob Newhard
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