by Rod Dreher
De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America. As the inventor of JavaScript, Brendan Eich was one of the most important early figures of the internet. But in 2014, he was forced out of leadership of Mozilla, the company he founded, after employees objected to a small donation he made to the 2008 campaign to stop gay marriage in California.
A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.
That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender-dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.
Intellectuals Are the Revolutionary Class
In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.23 Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”24
This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”25
Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudoreligion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.
The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.
Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism can identify.
Like the early Bolsheviks, SJWs are radically alienated from society. They too believe that justice depends on group identity, and that achieving justice means taking power away from the exploiters and handing it to the exploited.
Social justice cultists, like the first Bolsheviks, are intellectuals whose gospel is spread by intellectual agitation. It is a gospel that depends on awakening and inspiring hatred in the hearts of those it wishes to induce into revolutionary consciousness. This is why it matters immensely that they have established their base within universities, where they can indoctrinate in spiteful ideology those who will be going out to work in society’s institutions.
As Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries did, our own SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific. For example, transgender activists insist that their radical beliefs are scientifically sound; scientists and physicians who disagree are driven out of their institutions or intimidated into silence.
Social justice cultists are utopians who believe that the ideal of Progress requires smashing all the old forms for the sake of liberating humanity. Unlike their Bolshevik predecessors, they don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production. They believe that after humanity is freed from the chains that bind us—whiteness, patriarchy, marriage, the gender binary, and so on—we will experience a radically new and improved form of life.
Finally, unlike the Bolsheviks, who wanted to destroy and replace the institutions of Russian society, our social justice warriors adopt a later Marxist strategy for bringing about social change: marching through the institutions of bourgeois society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT cause was adopted by corporate America as part of its branding strategy, its ultimate victory was assured.
Futuristic Fatalism
To be sure, neither loneliness, nor social atomization, nor the rise of social justice radicalism among power-holding elites—none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian state.
Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country’s stability. To recap:
Faith in most major institutions has declined sharply. Politics are so divided by rigid ideologies that it is difficult for the US federal government to get anything done. Participation in civic life is cratering. As the state drowns in oceans of debt, wealth inequality is at nearly a one-hundred-year high, with the middle class shrinking.
Younger generations are abandoning religion, which binds and gives purpose to societies. Church leaders don’t know how to deal with this chronic crisis; as with the out-of-touch Orthodox hierarchy and clergy of the late imperial period, many don’t seem to realize what’s happening, much less how to address the decay.
Pornography is ubiquitous, but marriage and family formation are petering out. Ours is also an intensely sensual age, one that emphasizes sensate experiences over spiritual and rational ideals. That sexual desire is taken to be the central fact of contemporary identity is not seriously contested (it is telling that in the irreconcilable conflict between religious liberty and gay rights, the latter is winning in a blitzkrieg). The swift acceptance of gender ideology is a clear sign that Prometheanism and sensualism have been joined and have overturned the old order. The internet has acculturated at least one generation to pornography, far exceeding anything that those who overturned Russia’s censorship law in 1905 could have envisioned.
The Prometheanism that drove prerevolutionary Russians predominates in twenty-first-century America. As inhabitants of the quintessential modern nation, Americans have always celebrated science, technology, and the self-made man. Today Silicon Valley is our dream factory, generating spectacular wealth and manufacturing belief in utopian change through advanced technologies.
A collapse, followed by revolutionary reconstruction, could happen much faster than we think. As Dr. Silvester Krčméry, one of Father Kolaković’s disciples, put it:
We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination
and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.26
It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic system into question. As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.27
Social justice warriors and the theorists of their cause are not “normal people” who live by common sense. Fanatical belief in Progress is a driving force behind their febrile utopianism. The ideology of progress, which has been with us in various forms since the Enlightenment, explains their confident zealotry. It also explains why so many ordinary people who aren’t especially engaged by politics find it hard to say no to SJW demands. We cannot understand the hypnotic allure of left-wing totalitarianism or figure out how best to resist its advocates unless we grasp its most dedicated advocates as cultists devoted to the Myth of Progress.
CHAPTER THREE
Progressivism as Religion
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.
MILAN KUNDERA, THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING1
In 1905, Moscow high society gave a banquet in honor of the Russian arts impresario Sergei Diaghilev at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Diaghilev had recently curated an epic Saint Petersburg exhibition of portraits he had selected on an exhaustive tour of private homes of the wealthy. The dinner was to celebrate his success. Diaghilev knew that Russia was on the precipice of something big. He rose and delivered this toast:
We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.2
What Russia’s young artists, intellectuals, and cultural elite hoped for and expected was the end of autocracy, class division, and religion, and the advent of a world of liberalism, equality, and secularism. What they got instead was dictatorship, gulags, and the extermination of free speech and expression. Communists had sold their ideology to gullible optimists as the fullest version of the thing every modern person wanted: Progress.
The modern age is built on the Myth of Progress. By “myth,” I mean that the concept of historical progress is foundational to the modern era and built into the story we tell ourselves to understand our time and our place in it. Believers in the Myth of Progress hold that the present is better than the past, and that the future will inevitably be better than the present.
This myth is a powerful tool in the hands of would-be totalitarians. It provides a transcendent source of legitimacy for their actions, and frames opposition as backward and ignorant. Understanding how communists manipulated the Myth of Progress is important to grasping how today’s progressives roll over the opposition.
The Grand March
Those steeped in the teachings of Marx believed that communism was inevitable because History—a force with godlike powers of determination—required it. Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a “Grand March” toward Progress: “The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”3
If progress is inevitable, and the Communist Party is the leader of society’s Grand March to the progressive future, then, the theory goes, to resist the Party is to stand against the future—indeed, against reality itself. Those who oppose the Party oppose progress and freedom and align themselves with greed, backwardness, bigotry, and all manner of injustice. How necessary—indeed, how noble—it is of the Party to bulldoze these stumbling blocks on the Grand March and make straight and smooth the road to tomorrow.
“There was constant propaganda about how communism was changing the village for the better,” recalls Tamás Sályi, a Budapest teacher of English, of his Hungarian youth. “There were always films of the farmer learning to improve his life with new technology. Those who rejected it were [depicted as] endangering their families. There are so many examples about how everything old and traditional prevented life from being good and happy.”
Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition. Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.
Modernity Is Progress
Alas, devotion to the ideal of Progress did not begin with Marx and is not limited to Marxists. The most ardent suburban Republican is as much a believer in the Myth of Progress as the most ideologically rigid faculty Trotskyist. As historian Yuri Slezkine writes, “[F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity.”4
What separates classical liberals (of both the Left and the Right) from socialists and communists is the ultimate goal toward which we are progressing, and the degree to which they believe the state should involve itself in guiding that progress. Classical liberals are more concerned with individual freedom, while leftists embrace equality of outcome. And classical liberals favor a more or less limited role for the government, while leftists believe that achieving their vision of justice and virtue requires a heavier state hand.
President Barack Obama nodded to the Myth of Progress when he cited a line popularized by Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush expressed his faith in it when he declared that the United States is a vanguard of global liberal democracy.
“There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment,” he said, “and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.”5
Bush’s war to liberate Iraq for liberal democracy failed, but drinking deeply of that intoxicating rhetoric makes it easy for Americans to forget these things. It’s not necessarily because we are foolish; the Myth of Progress is written into our cultural DNA. Perhaps no country on earth has been more future-oriented than the United States of America. We are suckers for the Myth of Progress —but to be fair, we have reason to be.
Over the relatively short period of our nation’s history, and after hard struggles, liberal democracy and capitalism have created one of the world’s highest standards of living, and have guaranteed civil rights and expanded personal freedom to all. Within living memory, black Americans were forbidden in some parts of the country from voting or eating at the same restaurants as whites. That ended, in large part because the US federal government finally acted to make the Constitution’s promises good for black Americans too. Sometimes, progress is real and tangible.
We also believe in progress because of its Judeo-Christian roots. Most ancie
nt cultures have a cyclical view of history, but Hebrew religion—and its offshoots, Christianity and Islam—describe history as moving in a linear direction, from creation to an ultimate redemption. In Christianity, that redemption will come after the Apocalypse and Last Judgment, in which God’s justice will triumph.
Again, progress can be real, and for Christians at least, history is moving toward a glorious end (after a violent apocalypse), but this does not mean that all changes improve upon the past inevitably. It also doesn’t mean that “progress” divorced from God is progress at all. In fact, progress can become very dark in a secular context, without a biblical understanding of human fallibility and without the God of the Bible as the author of history and the judge of the earth.
Today’s progressivism dates back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when its more radical Continental exponents secularized Christian hope by replacing faith in God with faith in man—particularly science and technology. Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was a French thinker who became one of the founders of socialism. Saint-Simon and his comrade Auguste Comte (1798–1857) were exponents of positivism, a philosophy built on the idea that science was the source of all authoritative knowledge.
Positivists believed that history was primarily the story of the advance of science and technology. They believed that science would eventually end all material suffering. And as science advanced, so too would morality, because it would be based on scientific knowledge, not religion and custom.
In England, philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) incorporated positivism into the classical liberal political tradition. In Germany, Karl Marx put it to use in building a radical politics. Marx and his disciples replaced the Christian hope in a reward in heaven with the belief that perfection could—and inevitably would—be established on this earth, after a savage apocalypse, and through the application of science and science-based politics.