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umm…

i mean, there’s this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_war

or hadn’t you heard of that?

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The first thing is crediting progressivism with positive trends in human happiness over recent decades. As you yourself point out, attitudes in the mainstream have not moved far off the left in the USA in particular. While I do believe ideology can influence human happiness, the real fruit of progressivism is only being harvested in the current generation as these ideas are becoming mainstream which means it may be too early to measure its effects. What is far more likely to be the culprit is the massive boom in human creativity, productivity and problem solving created by the explosive growth of capitalism and attendant technological development over the last century. To give credit to progressivism for this is quite deceptive, particularly since the modern incarnation of a progressive will tend to oppose free market capitalism – ie the very force that emancipated so many people from limited resources and the time and convenience that recent inventions have permitted (feminists do this too when they credit feminism for the emancipation of women, when the vacuum cleaner, washing machine and pill were probably far more important).

If you were to take a relatively undeveloped country, say Papua New Guinea, and introduce all the benefits of capitalism, along with a strict program of progressive indoctrination, you’d no doubt see a spike in human happiness. To gauge the true effect of progressivism on actual progress, you need to measure its effect on populations that are not simultaneously experiencing paradigm shifts due to changes in technological advancement.

From what I can tell this observation invalidates much of the article, as so many of your points are painting progressive progress over a backdrop of technological advancement created by the very same free markets that many progressives would dearly love to eliminate.

The other point I’d like to bring up is your misrepresentation of the cathedral, which I find to be one of the most useful ideas presented by the Dark Enlightenment.

There’s quite a lot to mention here, but for a start claiming that the NYT was to the right while universities were too the left during the 1960s ignores the obvious fact that progressivism was first incubated in universities (cathedrals!) and then spread to organizations fed by the university system. That meant there was an inevitable lag. Universities had to consolidate on the left before they started producing their progressive stormtroopers who took up positions throughout mainstream tenured academia, the civil service and the media.

You’re also using the old ‘conspiracy’ slide to defame the idea that this was in any way conspiratorial. If you know about the activities of the Frankfurt School this is extremely disingenuous. There programme was an explicit conspiracy to achieve a Marxist society by hijacking Western Academia. Many of their most prominent people said this many times in their own words. But don’t believe me, here’s Willi Munzenberg ” [We must] organize the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilization stink. Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Sound like a conspiratorial tone to you? Sure does to me. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas – heard of these guys. I did majors in Sociology and Psychology, and these men’s ideas were FUNDAMENTAL to what we studied, we studied all of their theories in depth. They were not the only vector of progressive ideology, but to deny their importance is ridiculous. They tipped some of the first dominoes in the destruction of the existing order – their students (many of whom considered themselves disciples) flesh out liberal arts academia to this day. This movement now has its own momentum, yet it is still funded by special interests who benefit from a strong centralized state, which would suggest this ‘conspiracy’ is ongoing.

Another important thing to consider about the cathedral is that it indicates religious belief. I argue with progressives less eloquent and informed than yourself all the time. The vast, vast majority of them are unable to defend a single one of their ideas. They respond to any challenge to their ideology with immediate attack and ad-hominems. They cannot talk through the obvious contradictions and hypocrisy that they inevitably confront when they meet an ideological dissenter. It took me a long time to figure out why, but the answer is because progressivism is a religion to these people. They simply believe what they are told by people in authority. There is nothing beneath this belief, just an attraction to being ‘automatically right’ that they see their peers and media imply whenever a progressive idea is flouted, a deeply ingrained trust in authority created by our school system and the human tendency to follow fads, ideological as much as clothing.

The place from which these ideas are distributed is the university. The modern American university is very leery of any ideas that seriously challenge progressive dogma, and anyone who has encountered a progressive academic cannot possibly think otherwise. Try confront them and you’ll be met by first snark, then dismissal, and ultimately the threat of force. A new dogma has arisen, and new priests to defend and spread it. That it positions a political figurehead as a god makes it no less of a religion then one that channels its god through a political figurehead.

You also fail to take into account the effect that this religious allegiance has on people who function within academia. People tend to screen data through a filter of their own beliefs, and progressives are certainly not above manipulating data to achieve a goal that seems beneficial to the collective (after all the means are justified by the ends), which means it’s worth taking stats with a pinch of salt, as the reporting of these stats – especially from within the social sciences – are subject not just to the biases and religious convictions of those who report them, but also to censure from both the establishments that support their activities and those that fund them.

Sorry, this has been a bit rushed, but just needed to raise this issues. I hope someone can do a better job.

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He wasn’t stating random facts; he was stating facts to use them in an argument. The omitted details (that there is a demographic catastrophe of one group of Americans that is masked when you take figures for the whole population) directly had bearing on the argument in which he used the statistics.

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