Regression trumps Progress
The signs of regression are all around us nowadays. In North Africa and Western Asia, recent attempts at imitating liberal democracy, not to mention the nationalist and communist movements of previous decades, are all moribund. In their place is the current epidemic of hyper-reactionary Islamic fascism, rapidly overtaking all those countries not provident enough to have organized a return to a somewhat less disgusting military dictatorship. To be sure, this medieval Islamic atavism is not confined to the Middle East, nor even to the Muslim world in general, but has also followed migrant populations into the more accommodating sections of Europe, North America and several other regions. The ultra-Islamic contagion is helping to turn back the clock several centuries not only for moderate Muslims but also for all the other inhabitants of the infected regions. Promoted for decades by Western empires and their ultra-conservative Middle Eastern allies, as a useful weapon against nationalism and communism, primal Islam has now become those empires well-deserved nemesis.
Unfortunately, this particular disease is only the most virulent strain of world-wide religious regression, that has also broken out inside the Hindu-nationalist movement, in India and in the Hindu diaspora, to say nothing of militant Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist revivals affecting various parts of Eastern Asia and other emigrant communities elsewhere. Not to be outdone, the world’s most popular religion has also exported its own antediluvian versions of Christian fundamentalism and Bible-thumping literalism, infecting dozens of other countries. Based especially in the USA, this particular form of regression also spawned the increasingly popular Christian-Zionist movement, in alliance with the militant leaders of today’s Israel, in which liberal democracy and social-democracy have been recently replaced with a Talmudic fixation on the ultra-orthodox colonization movement.
As has become common with all these religious resurrections, microbial elements of neolithic belief in tribalism, sorcery and magic have also been mixed into the overall pandemic, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in the imperfectly modernized Western world. Nomadic mythologies, both Aryan and non-Aryan, are being combined once again with neofascist miscegenations of the Christian narrative, just like they were back in the 1920s and the 1930s. Native peoples in Canada, the USA, Australia and several other countries have also had to cope with a similar outbreak of borderline identity disorder, also focused on pre-urban traditionalism.
Another major source of modern regression is the enormous income gap between the social classes, that has been increasing at an alarming rate ever since the libertarian infection also broke out some thirty-five years ago. As a result, the top one percent of one percent, about one ten-thousandth of the world’s total population, has been taking an exponentially larger share of world income than it held during the somewhat healthier thirty-four years that followed the Second World War.
In spite of relatively modest gains in income that accompanied the recent industrialization of several previously peasant economies, the overall social bill of health of today’s world has been severely infected by an unprecedented dichotomy between billions of underpaid industrial and service workers (more numerous than they ever were before) and a handful of ultra-rich financiers. The middle class that is supposed to preserve social well-being by separating the two extremes is gradually being killed off altogether, as every country in the world competes against every other country to reduce taxes further than ever before on parasitical nodules of potential investors. But only a very few of those hyper-concentrated pools of capital are still interested in any kind of job-creating productive investment, in which the rate of return is so very much smaller than in the pestiferous, exclusively financial transactions that dominate the current world economy.
The world’s richest people, not only those hailing from private-sector financial conglomerates but also those other billionaires who have taken over direct control of nationalized economies, are also trying to eliminate whatever remains of the much maligned twentieth-century welfare state. All over the world, every social program originally designed to help underprivileged people stay afloat at least minimally is being re-engineered so as to transfer less and less real income to such unworthy “useless eaters”. Today’s libertarian survivalists are trying once again to spin survival of the fittest into the epitome of a primitively democratic way of life, each individual guaranteeing each other individual’s personal freedom to compete in a fight to the finish for each and every place in the sun.
Still another affection undermining physical and mental health in today’s world is the incredibly short-sighted but quite popular tendency among decision makers to completely ignore ecological disorders. In spite of overwhelming evidence and daily reminders in all the media, both private and public investors all over the world are constantly pressing ahead with full-scale development of every kind of material pollution. They do this all the time in the most deliberately profitable ways possible, constantly inventing new excuses for doing nothing real to prevent environmental degradation. On the contrary, they consciously pretend that their ways of doing things are in fact ecologically preferable to any of the alternative methods available.
Canada’s Conservative government, controlled by people from the extractive industries, has become a world leader in pollution denial since it came to power back in 2006. They pay the inevitable lip-service to environmental protection, while carefully avoiding any decision that might in fact negatively affect investors sacrosanct bottom lines. Even the explosion of non-regulated petroleum tank cars, that killed dozens of people in Quebec last year, has not done anything to temper their enthusiasm for immediate profit. They have deliberately refused to take any blame whatsoever for what happened, just like they did during the poisoned food scandal in Ontario in 2008. All libertarians all over the world, in both the private and the public sectors, always blame every “isolated incident” of criminal negligence on the workers who carried out their orders and never on the bosses who made those decisions.
Every one of those seemingly separate outbreaks of reactionary behavior is in fact interacting with each other kind of atavism to create a world-wide pandemic of regression. Religious fanaticism, tribalism, social Darwinism and ecological blindness are like four separate strains of infectious disease combining together to bring down progress, rather like the famines in the early part of the fourteenth century that made it possible for the Eurasian plagues to kill millions more people than such epidemics managed to do prior to that time. As a result, all the material and intellectual progress of the succeeding six centuries risks being turned into its exact opposite in the foreseeable future.
During the European renaissance of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a small group of intellectuals started believing in progress, the idea that human beings and their societies were not trapped in any kind of apocalyptic or cyclical prison, but could in fact gradually improve themselves, both individually and collectively. This belief in human progress, originally rooted in the religious concept of the divine spark, led to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which Christian anthropomorphism was abandoned by leading thinkers in favor of natural explanations of the universe. Human intellectual development as a concept took on a decidedly secular connotation during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, when many thinkers came up with considerably more radical interpretations of what progress should entail. French philosopher Denis Diderot, for example, famously avowed that the world could only progress once the world’s last king was strangled in the entrails of the world’s last priest.
The industrial revolution in the West, between 1780 and 1880, considerably strengthened this idea of progress by giving it a much more solid grounding in productive economic growth, greatly increasing the potentiality for a much richer kind of commonwealth. The scientific progress preceding and accompanying that economic and social revolution then continued to expand and deepen its effect during what have sometimes been called the second (1880-1930) and third (1940-1980) industrial revolutions, which were in reality conceptual and technological extensions of the first one.
The idea of progress both caused, and benefited greatly from, all the amazing discoveries and innovations that constituted the truly positive aspects of rapid economic growth. Political and social reformists and revolutionaries all over the world then started to tackle the more negative aspects of industrial development by trying to extend the benefits of massively increased material wealth to all the different human populations that were initially ignored or horribly exploited by the pioneering entrepreneurs who managed to turn scientific and technological progress to their own exclusive advantage.
Although the train of human thought has never followed a strictly linear path, it nevertheless soon became obvious to people possessing a progressive frame of mind that leaving behind a belief in magic or in equally mythical religious constructions eventually led to several other logical conclusions. The first such conclusion had to do with the extension of the word “revolution” from its initial appearance in the science of astronomy to its eventual use as a political construct. To put it as simply as possible, using the most well-known example, the revolution of the planets around the sun was found to follow an elliptic curve rather than a pure circle, an idea (among many others) that was rejected by the scholastic leaders of the Catholic Church. For them, individual human behavior on earth could certainly be imperfect but not the actions of their universal God, who would necessarily have made heavenly objects follow a perfect pattern (a circle).
This led the followers of science and secular reality to the conclusion that since inanimate, celestial bodies could behave in such an “imperfect” way, there was no reason at all to continue believing in any of the human social constructs that had been invented over the centuries to justify enormous differences in power and income. In the absence of extra-terrestrial control, if the physical universe was not at all perfect, eternal or unchanging, then human societies did not have to follow any preconceived notions like the totalitarian domination of universal religions, the divine right of kings, or any other such malarkey. Subsequent observers have extended the same train of thought into the rejection of dozens of more recent ideological constructs, such as the free market.
As a result, the concept of progress soon came to include the extension of civil rights to everyone, not just the white male owners of property who originally invented free assembly, freedom of speech and the right to vote as weapons in their fight against the absolute monarchy. This meant liberating women, the other half of humanity, from 6000 years of religious and civic oppression within all the world’s urban-based empires. It also meant freeing hundreds of oppressed peoples in the colonies and economic satrapies of those empires, not to mention minority populations living inside the imperialist “mother countries”.
Recently, however, progress as a concept has been deliberately maligned and manipulated by sycophantic reductionists to mean the opposite of what it was originally supposed to mean. Radical ecologists, for example, have been denouncing “progress” as a synonym for environmental destruction. Multiculturalists have been just as busy rewriting the definition of the right to practice some particular religion as an excuse for doing away with such inconvenient, competing rights as women’s liberation, or taking away children’s rights to a decent education by allowing religious maniacs to confine education to purely religious fantasies.
But ecology is in reality an integral part of progress, since it means making sure that economic expansion really does provide increased prosperity for everyone. Unsustainable development can never guarantee progress for the rather obvious reason that short-sighted, linear expansion will simply collapse as soon as massive dollops of pollution eliminate the human populations totally dependent on breathing, eating and drinking non-poisonous elements in order to survive. Anyone who accuses progress of being anti-environment has obviously not thought much about what the word “progress” is supposed to mean. Ecological fascists should go back and read their dictionaries one more time.
Human rights are also an integral part of progress, as long as exclusively religious rights are not allowed to drown out all the other rights. The right to practice a religion, after all, is a personal choice, not a social one. Modern societies mixing together hundreds of different peoples, believing in thousands of different combinations and permutations of magic and sorcery, competing religious constructs, and primitive forms of ethnic identity, all jumbled up together, cannot possibly be expected to survive if every little group of believers is allowed to reduce everyone else’s rights to fit their own mythical projections. In a world of over seven billion globalized people, universal rights have to take precedence over letting each individual ego make up its own little package of personal behavioral quirks that everyone else has to accommodate because they are supposed to be so much more “authentic” than any other people’s beliefs.
There is also nothing racist about rejecting any of these reconstructed religious fantasies. In the first place, none of these modern egotistical projections of ancient religious practices are historically or theologically accurate reconstitutions: they all combine certain poorly understood ideas that their founders initially had, while rejecting others just as important, and adding all sorts of newer ideas in which none of the founders ever believed. In the second place, these reconstructions are not confined to any particular religious or cultural tradition.
Most importantly of all, it is completely ridiculous for politically correct sycophants to try to compel everyone to accommodate each and every one of these modern religious reconfigurations out of a misconceived fear of committing racism. Racism, after all, does not just mean negative discrimination against some particular cultural entity, it also includes positive discrimination for any particular group. Any form of discrimination on racial, cultural or ethnic grounds is racism; ordinary racism also includes reverse racism.
Evil things that people from dominated, minority groups do are just as evil as equivalent things that people from dominant, majority groups do. Evil people are not better if they come from Palestine rather than from Israel, or from China rather than from the USA, or from native people rather from non-native people. Equal doses of evil are equal, no matter from which human population they stem.
And finally, ego projection, otherwise known as hubris or overweening pride, is the root element of each one of those different forms of reactionary regression. People who believe in magic or similar religious myths are, after all, only projecting their own egotistical refusal to acknowledge that human beings are just another part of the natural universe. Humans in fact do not have any special right to be protected from the consequences of their own childish behavior by any genie, metaphysical father figure or harmonic principle possessing absolute control over everything that exists. Without an adult sense of responsibility for their actions, humans cannot expect “something else” to step in to save them from their own misdeeds. Unfortunately for more modern minds, the indifference of the rest of the universe to human problems and inadequacies is not something that over-inflated religious egos have the courage to accept.
Hubris is also the psychological principle underlying the individualist or antisocial form of egotistical behavior. Those who favor massive increases in the income gap between the social classes are into that sort of thing not so much for material benefit as such, since there are only so many particular items that any one individual can possibly use in a single lifetime. What they really seek is the kind of power over others that accumulating massive gobs of capital and outdoing everyone else on the planet appears to give them over every one of the supposedly inferior peons who surround them.
This is the same master and servant feeling of pure domination that also motivated, and still motivates, all the world’s totalitarian dictators, regardless of the imperialist, fascist, communist, populist or neoconservative ideology that they are nominally supposed to be representing. It is also not at all anomalous to note that many of the world’s most reactionary religious movements have made a very convenient pact with the devil by also upholding material accumulation, according to their favorite dictum, “God helps those who help themselves”.
This selfsame ego projection also explains deliberately ignorant attitudes toward environmental destruction. People who are constantly denying that any real ecological problems currently exist, or who profess to being able to find some kind of readily available technological fix for pollution and climate change, are simply letting their colossal egos get in the way of any real solution. While it is true that human beings are theoretically capable of solving those problems by simply discovering new kinds of natural resources that do not possess the same negative physical characteristics as those now being used, as in the controlled development of nuclear fusion, this can only happen if human societies possess the time, the audacity and the organizational will-power to effect such massive changes.
