The myth of ‘progressive’ thinking

One of the guiding instincts on the political left is that society should be ‘progressive’. Social attitudes, politics and the economy should all advance together, making society fairer and more equal in the process. In this view, a tax can be progressive if it targets the income of the wealthy, just as a law is considered progressive if it protects the rights of a minority. This progressive worldview permeates almost all thinking on the modern left.

And yet the contemporary idea of the progressive society has undergone a logical collapse. It has been driven that way by activists, some of whom represent groups with valid causes, but whose messages have been concentrated and distorted out of all proportion by the lens of social media.

Perhaps the most glaring example of this can be seen in the argument over trans-gender rights, which has erupted between feminists and trans activists. The contention that ‘trans women are women’ has caused huge controversy among feminists who reject the idea that someone who is biologically male can ever become a woman in the full sense.

Trans rights activists regard feminists who make this argument as being regressive and guilty of trying to throw social progress into reverse. And so it is that two progressive movements find themselves diametrically opposed to one another, which according to the logic of progressive politics and activism should be impossible.

The reason for this paradoxical situation is that the ‘progression/regression’ view of human affairs is itself flawed. It is misleading for its implication that human progress is linear: that either we go one way, which is progressive, or we go the other, which is regressive.

History shows that this isn’t so. Human advancement is often closely entwined with its opposite, sometimes to the extent that it is impossible to pick them apart.