Guest post: Progress has a plan
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Becoming aware.
There seems to be this assumption that “the kids” are like prophets. Whatever they do is a sign of where History is headed. It is, in short, glorious and by-definition-good “Progress”. Why they do anything doesn’t matter, only that they do it. Progress has a plan, and Progress moves in mysterious ways.
If it’s got a rainbow or pastel flag, any change in its direction is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Why a change occurs is almost irrelevant from the perspective of those devoted to Progress, because action that brings the utopia nearer is good by definition. Such action is itself Progress, and Progress must be supported. If something happens as a result of Progress, then that, too, is Progress, and Progress must be supported. Is Genderism illogical and irrational? Does it demand the unethical? Leap past your concerns and doubts. Leave them behind, for Progress doesn’t require justification. Everything else must wait, because Progress demands your support, and Progress must be supported.
Kierkegaard wrote of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in Fear and Trembling to describe Abraham’s submission to God’s demand for the sacrifice of Isaac. God’s design, the telos that He impressed upon all of Creation, supersedes everything else. All ethical reasoning is suspended in submission to the divine will. Suspending ethical reasoning in this way is illogical and irrational, however, because the suspension itself can be analyzed in ethical terms. Getting past this metaphorical gap requires a mental leap away from logic and rationality. (One could even argue that such a gap is itself evidence of the divine.)
Now, I happen to think Kierkegaard was actually a literary troll doing performance art to mock the obscurantist mysticism of Continental philosophy, but this explicitly nonsensical idea of a teleological suspension of the ethical does seem like a decent account of how otherwise moral people can support monstrosity. They willingly suspend their normal ethical processing, and everything represented by the divine, or the ideology, or the party, or whatever becomes a self-justified good. Taken as a description of how people do behave rather than of how they should, it’s somewhat compelling. And horrifying.
Any god worthy of being worshipped would have failed Abraham, because the correct response to a god demending that you sacrifice your child on his/her/its/their sayso is “Fuck you.” Simlarly, any such god worthy of worship would not have subjected Abraham to such a brutal, sadistic test in the first place. If the god of the bible was so all-knowing, why would he have to test Abraham in this way at all? Wouldn’t he know already? Why then the needless cruelty of toying with Abraham. And what aout Isaac; talk about your intergenerational trauma. “It’s okay son, I’m just following orders. Yahweh’s really an okay bloke if you keep on his good side. It’s nothing personal; you see that, right?”
How many kids will be sacrificed to the cruel, brutal, sadistic Trans god because it rationalizes, justifies, and absolves their parents’ homophobia? Why change your mind when you can just change your kids? And while we’re at it, do let’s add on a side-order of Munchausen by proxy. Never mind that they can’t actually turn their sons into daughters, or their daughters into sons. (Never mind that there’s no way that kids would have this idea unless it was fed to them; never mind they wouldn’t believe this was even possible if adults who should know better didn’t lie to them that it was. Thanks “progressive” school boards and teachers! Thanks “progressive” parents! Thanks compliant, captured media! Thanks social contagion via social media!)
Even forcing everyone else around them to act as if they’ve succeeded in doing the impossible doesn’t result in the impossible being accomplished. Browbeating and intimidation might win ouward agreement, but it can’t change reality. In any case, these parents are not paying the price for pretending they can make that swap of daughters for “sons,” and sons for “daughters”: their children are. Unless they desist before they are irrevocably mutilated, they will pay for the rest of their lives, showing their “faith” by hopelessly trying to wrest what fleeting comfort and solace they can out of the narcotic combination of the placebo effect and the sunk cost fallacy. (Even if they destransition, they might still live with permanent sterility and sexual dysfunction.) The parents will bask in the warm glow of their own progressive righteousness, patting themselves on the back for their own courage and compassion for raising “trans kids,” failing to notice (or care), that the best way to “protect trans kids” is to not turn them into “trans kids.”
I think it was Lord Acton who pointed out how Karl Marx’s conflation of the (determined) progress of history with being in the right right ethically led directly to such events as the Holomodor, The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc. But the same idea of ‘the march of history’ and ‘progress’ towards some predetermined and happy end also lay behind the horrors inflicted upon colonised peoples, and lies behind the fundamentally magical right-wing think-tank ideology that if the market is only left, unregulated, to its own devices — and never mind the suffering inflicted on others along the way — eventually everything will come out all right, and we shall live happily ever after.
That one word “eventually” has a lot to answer for. Jam tomorrow.
All true observations. It’s a kind of naturalistic fallacy. That which comes after is better than that which precedes it. The arc of History bends toward justice (or the Good) and so the end of History must itself be good. Whatever it is that will be is that which should be. If we don’t understand it now, eventually we will. If it doesn’t make sense now, eventually it will. Our donuts and questions may not be answered now, because eventually they will. To demand understanding and sense and answers now is to deny the basic presupposition of future perfection. It would be a rejection of the faith.
I think you can see something of the same logic in the idea that we don’t need vaccines because, well, there aren’t really any serious diseases anymore. (Apparently the human immune system just got that good.) I’m afraid that the default human thought setting is ‘superficial’.
Well likewise you can never really go back; things might get worse but it will be a different worse because it’s not just one environmental variable that changes. Reactionaries consistently fail to understand this.
I think we eventually (sorry for using that word again) have to blame God & His Spiffing Providential Plan (sorry for all the capital letters): ruin Adam & Eve’s lives, and those of all their progeny, so that all the inveterate nasties and the not sufficiently enthusiastic may be weeded out and transported to burn in Hell, and all the goodies, who have spent their days, like the MAGA crowd, grovelling before their Hero, will end up in the Good Place, where they can go on grovelling for eternity and singing Songs of Praise to Dear Leader. What a Wonderful Ending! Salva me!
Yeah it’s the “right side of history”. The right side of history replacing God at the judgement seat for the righteous and the transgressors.
It was always satisfying to imagine a supreme being beaming at you and proclaiming, with accompanying trumpets, you were in the right and here’s the reward, and then looking angrily at your adversary and saying, to dark drumbeats, and YOU were in the wrong.
We don’t have that kind of imagination any more. Instead it is some group of distinguished historians pointing out how bigoted and short-sighted and ignorant your opponents were, while you and your side were the Chartists/Suffragists/Abolitionists of your time.
Perhaps better history teaching covering the real ugly complexity of the moral struggles of the past should be part of the solution. A good example to start with would the the checkered relationship between the anti-slavery Republican Party of Lincoln and the nativist penumbra adjacent to it which gave rise to a vociferously anti immigrant state government in Massachussets with a sterling record of socially reformist measures. Instead popular culture gives us Gangs of New York.
Around the beginning of the current century the aphorism that Marxism filled a God-shaped hole was succeeded by the wisecrack that European integration filled a Marx-shaped hole. I think that Francis Spufford captured the idea more elegantly at the conclusion of Red Plenty in the rhetorical question “Can it be otherwise?”. It’s because we are human that it can’t be otherwise and equally because we are human that we can’t accept that it can’t be otherwise.
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