A Progressive Fairy Tale - Eden, Utopia, Rosy-Fingered Dawn And Other Fabulist Fictions

Genghis Khan thundered out of the steppes with his Mongol-Turkic armies and laid waste the lands from East to West, creating one of history's most extensive empires. 

He was known for his savagery, barbarity, and indomitable will.  The heads of the conquered were impaled on spikes leading to and from the villages he vanquished and the eviscerated, disemboweled bodies of women and children left to rot in the fields. 

'This shall never happen again', said modern day optimists convinced that there is such a thing as progress, that conservative convictions about the permanence of an aggressive, self-interested, territorial, and defensive human nature are exaggerated, and that with hard work, commitment, desire, and good faith the world would indeed become a peaceful, verdant, compassionate place. 

The Twentieth Century was one of the most bloody in history and featured an event that beggared the imagination - the Holocaust.  Never before in all the wars, civil unrest, and genocidal, exterminating hysteria, had there been such a cold, calculating, attempt to eradicate a whole race of people.  The Nazis rounded up six million Jews, interned them in concentration camps, gassed them, and incinerated them. 

That, too, will never happen again say these same optimists who insist on seeing a child's garden book of verse. Yet the Twentieth Century was home not only to Hitler but Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, together responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people - all murdered in the name of some higher idea, but murdered nonetheless.  Never since the One Hundred Year War, the War of the Roses, or the great civil wars of Russia and Poland had humanity seen such violence. 

 

In The Three Sisters by Chekhov, the two Russian lieutenants, Vershinin and Tutzenbakh debate Russia's future.  One, a progressive, is convinced that humanity will progress, that society will become more equal and considerate, and a new, loving, harmonious world awaits.  The other, a conservative, argues the opposite.  When in human history has this ever been so?  History is nothing but a repetitive tale of wars, brutality, competition, and mayhem. 

So the argument today between progressives and conservatives is surprising only that one side insists on ignoring the lessons of history.  If human beings since the first settlements have been nothing but aggressive, territorial, and self-interested and have resorted to the most extreme forms of violence to express it, why should the future be any different? Singing Kumbaya is not enough. 

The National Mall is continuously overrun with protests organized against climate change and for abortion, the black man, the gay, the disabled, and the farm worker.  The No Kings rally to protest Donald Trump's authoritarianism and violation of democracy was only the latest; but like all protests, it was simply a jamboree whose participants had no idea about authoritarianism, dictatorship, or single-party governance.  

These gatherings are Easter egg rolls, kindergarten play time, sweet verbena, pansies and Spring breezes, happy, carefree times of camaraderie and joyful solidarity, nothing more. 

Never before has there been such a sweeping tide of promise, idealism, and deliberate historical distortion.  Muslims are by and large good people, progressives say, a few bad apples no different from any other religion. Yes, the ISIS beheadings, the bloody assaults of Sahelian Islamic anarchists, the slaughter of Christians by Nigerian Muslims are regrettable but not representative of Islam.  

So where do these impossibly hopeless dreams come from?  How is it that anyone can look at children, families, generations, regions, and nations, all of which scramble for purchase, territorial expansion, wealth, and dominance and conclude that human nature is good, compassionate, considerate, and fine?

There are some who, not content with belief, commitment, and support, have devoted their entire lives to social change. They amass at the barricades, demonstrate in front of the White House, festoon their lawns with Hate Has No Place Here and Democracy Matters signs, become COVID vigilantes and Black Lives Matter advocates.  

 

Yet the cards have been dealt, hands played, bets one and lost.  The literary critic Jan Kott observed that if all of Shakespeare's Histories were laid down in chronological order, they would be no different, one from another. The venality, greed, ambition, jealousies, and petty grievances would all be the same, only the names would be changed.  Richard III and Henry V were different kings, one a villain, the other a hero, but both were compelled by ambition. 

Dostoevsky's Devil describes himself as a vaudevillian, a tummler, a jokester without whom life would be a bloody bore, endless days of masses and psalms.  All goodness would be intolerable; and so it was did he describe the life that appeared at Creation - perfect for a short, millennial moment in the Garden of Eden, and then destined for all eternity to demand, fight, and die for...for what?  for more, for better, for what one does not have. 

The idea of earthly progress is a new phenomenon, alien to most religions.  Paradise, enlightenment, sitting before the throne of God are celestial, spiritual, attainable only through prescription.  Utopia is a chimera, a fantasy. 

Hindus have called the world Maya, or Illusion, a perceptual trap preventing the individual from finding  his way to sannyasi, spiritual purity. 

 

Progressivism was an irreverent answer to determinism - or rather the random world in which accidents cause effects, none of which have any particular meaning but which can be rectified, set to rights, improved.  It was frustration at the intolerability of inequality which provoked progressive thought - in other words a reaction, a response, some kind of need to be on the side of goodness.  There was no philosophical or religious grounding for such ideas of secular, earthly paradise, but progressives simply couldn't let go of the ideal. 

Goodness as much as evil is at the heart of tyranny - liberals, imbued with a sense of righteousness and an absolute belief in their convictions cannot help but proselytize and evangelize; and if such entreaties fall on deaf ears, threat and intimidation in the name of goodness is justified.   The Soviet Union, convinced by Marx, Lenin, and Engels that communism was humanity's ultimate good, perpetrated a decades long period of death, starvation, and humiliation. The Left has not changed. 

We are in a time of resurgent conservatism, and a profound one - one not just content with changing political priorities but with changing the political landscape, the political philosophy, the zeitgeist, the ethos of the times.  Progressivism is approaching its end date, its final act, and its swan song has been something out of the most melodramatic, impossibly romantic operas.  So be it.  We cannot begrudge them a last hurrah.