{"id":7251,"date":"2014-04-25T08:17:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T15:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7251"},"modified":"2014-04-25T08:17:25","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T15:17:25","slug":"the-progressive-paradigms-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-paradigms-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"The Progressive Paradigms Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative that gives people an identity and a morality. With these paradigms we can sort out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned, the political goals we should pursue, the ones we should avoid\u2013\u2013and who gets the power to decide.<\/p>\n

Every human community from the most primitive tribe to the most advanced civilization functions in terms of some sort of\u00a0worldview. For nearly 2000 years Christianity provided the dominant paradigms of Western civilization. Modernity, however, developed a new and dangerous twist on this eternal human behavior. With the rise of the natural sciences, people began to dream of a new paradigm based on science, not the irrational myths and superstitions of religion. Whole new disciplines arose to teach and institutionalize these new \u201cscientific\u201d truths about human identity and behavior. Soon anthropology, psychology, sociology, and political science displaced the old philosophical, traditional, and theological\u00a0understanding of human life.<\/p>\n

Isaiah Berlin describes this historical process and its consequences: \u201cThe success of physics seemed to give reason for optimism: once appropriate social laws were discovered, rational organization would take the place of blind improvisation, and men\u2019s wishes, within the limits of the uniformities of nature, could in principle all be made to come true . . . The rational reorganization of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.\u201d The progressive worldview is easily recognizable in this description. Just let technocrats armed with science and backed by the coercive power of the state take over the organization of society from the myths of religion and the superstitions of tradition, and we will achieve the utopia of prefect freedom, justice, and equality.<\/p>\n

This whole notion, of course, is itself a myth, one whose bloody consequences stain every page of modern history with genocides and gulags. Humans are not material things in the world that can be understood by the laws of nature so reliably that people can be organized and controlled like the cogs and wheels in a watch. People are too complex and intricate, too mysterious in their motives, too spontaneous in their actions, and too unpredictable because of their radical freedom to chose. Yet from Freud and Marx down to today\u2019s evolutionary psychologists, this myth of the \u201chuman sciences\u201d is marketed as real science, beyond discussion or qualification as much as the laws of gravity or the heliocentric solar system.<\/p>\n

Whenever progressives address an issue, one is subjected to these mythic paradigms dressed up in spurious science, and delivered with the arrogance of the \u201cenlightened\u201d who patronize or demonize their opponents as ignorant or evil or both. Of course, these attitudes bespeak the mythic origins of the paradigm, its source in faith rather than reason, its tenacity resulting from the careful selection of evidence that confirms it, and the equally careful discarding of evidence that challenges it. In this respect many progressives resemble the members of a cult, with the same demand for orthodox dogma never to be challenged, the same uncritical deference to scientific authority, and the same intolerance of heretics or infidels who dare to question that orthodoxy and refuse to conform to its revealed truths.<\/p>\n

The random perusal of any daily newspaper or cable news show will provide numerous examples. The great feminist myth holds that sex identity is a socio-political construct.\u00a0The traditional behaviors and preferences of men and women, once understood to reflect their different natures, have been imposed on women by men whose power depends on the \u201cpatriarchy\u201d that subordinates women in order to serve male power and privilege. Hence any disparities between men and women must reflect not nature, but the lingering effects of this unjustly constructed sex identity. Given that modern \u201cscience\u201d has unmasked this regime of oppressive power, the state must be enlisted to rectify the inequalities \u201cpatriarchy\u201d\u00a0inflicts on women. \u00a0The government must create laws and use its coercive power to punish those who break them. Any challenges that contradict this paradigm must be silenced, shunned, or demonized, for they concern not just disparities between men and women, but violate an important metaphysical belief of the left\u2013\u2013radical equality, the notion that equality of result is more important than equality of opportunity available to all, which\u00a0traditionally was\u00a0defined as the freedom for people to rise as far as their particular talents and virtues can take them.<\/p>\n

Hence Obama\u2019s recent speeches on the lingering differences in income between men and women, in which he peddled the long-exploded canard that women make only 77% of what men make. The truth is, when one controls for type of job, length of service, hours worked, how dangerous the job is, and whether women have children or not, most of that disparity disappears. Indeed, educated women under 30 earn more than their male peers in most cities in the U.S. But those qualifying details\u00a0don\u2019t serve the paradigm that holds all people are equal and only fail to achieve equal results because of injustices in social, cultural, political, and economic structures. The authority for asserting this ideological, not scientific, position comes from the spurious \u201c77%,\u201d which implies a rigor and precision beyond discussion or challenge except by the evil or ignorant.<\/p>\n

Another theme of Obama\u2019s recent speeches has been income inequality, which he asserts is growing worse and unfairly limits the opportunities for advancement of the less privileged. This \u201ccrisis\u201d is also about the dogma of radical equality. It reflects a pre-modern, zero-sum vision of wealth as fixed and limited, so that the abundance of one necessarily demands the penury of another. It also seemingly does not get the dynamism of capitalism, its \u201ccreative destruction\u201d that\u00a0generates and distributes new wealth, and that over time continually reshuffles people and families in and out of income levels as the talents of individuals find opportunities to better their lot and transcend their origins.<\/p>\n

But, like the magical 77%, simplistic statistics are paraded as scientific evidence supporting an ideological preference. So we are told that the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans grew $59 (adjusted for inflation) from 1966 to 2011, but the incomes for the top 10% rose by $116,071.\u00a0But for most of those 45 years the people in each cohort weren\u2019t always the same. As Stephen Moore and James Pierson\u00a0point out<\/a>, \u201cThe myth is that the super-rich stay at the top of the income ladder year after year, and few new entrants are allowed to break into the elite club. Wrong. The IRS found that only four of the 400 (1 percent) made the cut every year. There were 3,672 different taxpayers who made the top 400 list at least once over the seventeen-year period studied. Over half of them made the list only once or twice. Three quarters of the individuals who rose to the heights of this top 400 list were there for six years or less. There is no permanent upper class in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the lower income cohorts, a Treasury Department\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0of income mobility between 1996 and 2005 showed that over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile, about half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005, and only a quarter of the \u201csuper rich,\u201d the richest 1\/100 of 1% in 1996, were still that rich in 2005. What has slowed this movement is the historically sluggish economic growth that has followed the Great Recession, a consequence in large part of Obama and the Democrats\u2019 statist and redistributionist economic policies. Implementing policies that spur economic growth obviously would help to restore the income mobility seen in times of high growth like the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Yet all Obama can propose is raising the minimum wage, a symbolic gesture at best, and one repeatedly demonstrated to kill jobs for those most in need of work. We see again the progressive paradigm of radical equality dressed up as a rational response to statistical facts. As Thomas Sowell\u00a0writes<\/a>, \u201cOnly by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a \u2018problem\u2019 for which a \u2018solution\u2019 is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of \u2018classes\u2019 with \u2018disparities\u2019 and \u2018inequities\u2019 in income, caused by \u2018barriers\u2019 created by \u2018society.\u2019 But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the \u2018barriers\u2019 assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.\u201d\u00a0In short, serving the paradigm trumps growing the economy.<\/p>\n

Radical equality is one of the key paradigms of the progressive worldview, a leftover leftist dogma based not on reason or the possible, but on a Manichaean worldview in which greedy capitalists\u00a0unjustly appropriate more than their fair share of wealth, a problem to be solved by a technocratic government using its coercive power to redistribute wealth and punish the \u201cmalefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people,\u201d\u00a0as the 1936 Democratic party platform put it. Those who challenge this dogma and the policies it engenders are vilified as selfish and evil, while those who champion it are anointed as the generous and good. The paradigm is in\u00a0its D.C. heaven, and all\u2019s right with the world of the progressives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The progressive mind functions in terms of fossilized paradigms into which every crisis and problem are fitted, no matter how many qualifying or contradictory facts are left behind. These paradigms are part of a worldview, a picture of human existence that gives it coherence and meaning, and a narrative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,11,187],"tags":[165,916,570,1044,693,1073,688,1018],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1SX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2534,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-philosophy-stupid\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":0},"title":"It’s the Philosophy, Stupid","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The Democrats\u2019 position in the negotiations to raise the debt limit and deal with runaway government debt can be summarized in one mantric phrase: the rich must \u201cpay their fair share\u201d in taxes. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, for example, said\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6886,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-inequality-smokescreen\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":1},"title":"The Inequality Smokescreen","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 7, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Desperate for a diversion from the disasters of Obamacare, the president has conjured up the old leftist \u201cincome inequality\u201d clich\u00e9. His court-pundits complain that \u201cthe richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic,\u201d according toThe New Republic, while Berkeley Professor Robert\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1358,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-dangers-of-democracy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":2},"title":"The Dangers of Democracy","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 1, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The parliamentary elections that have begun in Egypt will impress only the most starry-eyed of democracy champions. These are the people who, like Senator Joe Lieberman, think that the \u201cArab Spring\u201d is all about people \u201cdemanding lives of democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Muslim Brotherhood"","block_context":{"text":"Muslim Brotherhood","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/muslim-brotherhood\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":700,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-presidency-and-the-pathologies-of-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s Presidency and the Pathologies of Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Obama\u2019s presidency has failed miserably, but it has accomplished one thing: it has revealed for all to see the lethal pathologies of progressive ideology. This doesn\u2019t mean progressivism will go away. We thought the New Democrat Bill Clinton had put progressive ideas to rest\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7978,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/election-day-whats-at-stake\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":4},"title":"Election Day: What\u2019s at Stake","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 5, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe\u2019s\u2013\u2013an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260-500x320.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1209,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/zombie-ideology\/","url_meta":{"origin":7251,"position":5},"title":"Zombie Ideology","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 13, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Ideas, old and dead, are still walking around. by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com Explaining the continued death-grip of progressive ideology on significant numbers of people despite its manifest intellectual exhaustion, incoherence, and senility compels one to rely on analogies. The notion of political religions, a time-honored way of explaining political\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7253,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7251\/revisions\/7253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}