Toward a Less Lazy, Fluffy, and Resentful...
Progressivism
Am I a “progressive”? It depends, I guess, on what we mean by the word. So let’s start with definitions. I would like to take my cue here from the word itself: progress is the necessity and inevitability (and moral neutrality) of an existence that propels forward (at least in some ways). There were will be errors and sins—it ought to be admitted—in the future, just as there have been in the past. To improve or change anything is to experiment, and an honest person knows that sometimes a well-intentioned experiment creates a bigger and unexpected program than it solves. This invites of us not apathy but rather a humility in our attempts to change and fix and heal.
To be a progressive in the best sense of the word, then, is to be an advocate of tomorrow, of the future, while also holding to an awareness that we have some say, but hardly all the say, about what’s coming. Within awareness of limits is also the ability to grieve our judgements and programs when they surely go array in ways that may continue to hurt people and the natural world that we are a part of. Awareness of the problems and challenges of the past is good if we learn something from them, less good if we simply use those griefs to prop up our supposed righteousness while smugly and cheaply judging ancestors who do not speak up for themselves in conversation and contemporaries whose stories we do not know well.
Many clashes and conflicts come from competing values, or at least from our propensity toward dichotomy. If you listen to the contemporary liberal, you will be sure that inclusivity is a moral good and exclusivity an evil. Though if you watch people’s behavior you will be less sure. Marriage beds are still usually confined to two people. University admissions departments still turn people down. Hiring processes whittle many down to one. Charter schools that aim to provide better education for low-income people make decisions about who gets to enroll by lottery systems. The animals themselves sometimes travel in herds, a safety measure to protect against those outside the herd who may intrude.
I am not saying that none of these examples cannot be improved—well, the animals aren’t likely to consult us about the morality of their practices very soon anyway—but many of them (a hiring process, for example) are an attempt to deal with the scarcity of resources that plague many human affairs, and others still (think a marriage) are ways for people to say no in order to say a deeper yes. To move forward into the future is to reckon honestly with exclusion as not the ultimate good but as a tool that will continue to be employed by human beings. And if I am simply using the “wrong” examples to play with these abstractions, well then the rhetoric itself ought to be more specific, and the problem that would result from specificities would be nuance and moral ambiguity.
Many years ago I was having a conversation with a good friend in a coffee shop when another mutual acquaintance dropped by. I invited the third party to sit down and join us, which he did—subsequently killing the conversation the first friend and I had been having. I think our guest recognized this almost immediately, and so he wasn’t there long. After he dismissed himself, my first friend—who is several years older than me—observed that “there’s a time to guard the intimacy.” His comment sounded initially like a foreign language, as I’d come from a family where—despite my mother’s constant protests, as she was the one who often had to deal with the consequences of this insane norm—everyone was invited. Multiple guests were invited on sports road trips, family vacations, holiday meals, church services, days off from school, and about any other scenario we might be able to conjure up. Now genuine hospitality, especially when practiced with care, is a virtue—or it can be a piling on, an avoidance, a sacrificing of quality for quantity.
If the way of the future is to pretend that quality doesn’t matter in order to let everyone in the room then I am happy to not be a progressive. There are times when guarding the intimacy is appropriate. There’s a time to fight for access, too, especially for our worst public and private systems, but in my recent experience we use these words more to gauge our friends and enemies than to improve processes on the ground. Where people are interested in the latter, I will partake in the effort, but if our initiatives fail, or don’t progress as quickly as we’d like, we will have to, again, reckon with complexity.
If exclusion isn’t the enemy, then neither is wealth creation. For starters, let’s agree that poverty—our need—is the human condition, not merely the result of greed and exploitation. Christians might alter this slightly and say that poverty is a result of “The Fall,” whereby human beings disobeyed God and were then banished from the plenty of the initial Garden that housed us. Okay, I won’t argue for the story empirically, but I think it still works as a starting point. As long as we see that taking away all the wealth in the world doesn’t produce a world of kumbaya and abundance. It just spreads poverty. If you don’t believe me, try sometime, as I have, to track down how much money U.S. billionaires hold and then compare that number to the annual U.S. Federal budget. You will see, as I have, that the latter number is larger than the first one, and even if you seized it all (and therefore had nothing else to seize from billionaires until further wealth was created), you would barely put a dent into the U.S. debt.
This isn’t to say that greed and exploitation by the rich and powerful don’t ever happen, or that we shouldn’t notice and expose and fight against it when it does. But wealth creation usually occurs when someone—or many someones—invent, produce, and distribute a product or service that many of us then want. Think about the iPhone as one example, or the online store of Amazon, or the online access to movies that is Netflix. We did not know that we wanted these things until someone created them.
The poor as real people experiencing harsh realities (rather than as an abstraction to bring up without being in relationship to in political ads and debates) deserve advocacy, and any such advocacy that doesn’t aim to move actual said people out of their poverty will be an advocacy that I distrust. If you are going to try to do something like move a person or a group of people out of their poverty to something more like financial stability, you will have to be more creative than calling for every subsidy under the sun, which is more of a wish list than a serious attempt to get people out of poverty. To be clear, we ought to invest our budget honestly and vigorously toward the public goods and services that improve people’s lives in the present, but this would require regular and mathematical cost-benefit analysis for our programs, which means 1) controlling variables where possible, 2) putting program outcomes in conversation with each other transparently, and 3) therefore cutting out the denial of economics that too many of today’s liberals so often rely on in arguments (and it’s generous to call pouting and good-evil posturing and righteousness-patting-on-the-back arguments).
You can argue, for example, that the Covid stimulus payments were good and necessary (and I could be convinced of the right long-term UBI package if we could get the numbers to work, but that would require pitting this program against others and making difficult decisions appropriately), but that claim should never be made without an allowance (and I hope someone is doing this work) for a comparative calculation about how much money these same beneficiaries have been paying in follow-up inflation. That’s economics, but we tend to pretend during the front-end fights that the choice is between money in the bank for people or nothing (and then we call the people who have questions or concerns names).
Some of what actually made the Covid stimuluses successful, in my view, is the masterful way it was made so simple to get that money from government to people. Which brings me to convenience. I sat through a brief video this week on the evils of plastic bottles, which proceeded to argue that bottled water came to exist out of “manufactured demand,” i.e. Pepsi and Coke were worried that people were going to eventually stop drinking their straight-sugar products and through marketing thus convinced us how bad tap water was and bam, bottled water became a thing. Now as an early skeptic of most things, I remember thinking this way about bottled water initially. My god, how stupid that someone would try to sell me water. But I eventually drank many-a-bottled-water. Why? Was it because of marketing and manufactured demand? No, it was because bottled water actually solved the human problem of not being able to carry your kitchen sink with you wherever you go.
Sure, there are a few water fountains out there, and we also have metal bottles (which I tend to leave behind about one in three times I use them…also it would be interesting to do some energy comparisons between what it takes to create the plastic bottle versus the metal one) that can be filled up from the tap, but the reality is that bottled water continues to be a thing because they make it way easier to stay hydrated as we move about our days. This doesn’t in any way diminish the pollution problem that plastic creates, but it puts forward the real challenge ahead: to innovate in a way that is good to the earth while also continuing to honor the complexity and challenges of human lives that are always looking for an easier way to do things. Ways for the mind to “burn less calories,” as author of Blue Like Jazz and Storybrand author Don Miller likes to say in his discussions about marketing.
In the future, people are going to continue to situationally exclude, they’re going to continue wanting out of poverty while facing the trade-offs of economics, and they’re going to continue flocking to convenience when it’s an option. Which brings me to resentment. If your answer to any or all of these is to hate the human who drinks a bottle of water or who eats a hamburger or who drives a non-hybrid car or who buys a book from Amazon, first of all you have your own work cut out for you in aligning your own life choices to not betray your convictions, but it also isn’t really conservatives you’re fighting against, it’s the human condition. We didn’t choose to be here. And we possess some agency and possibility for innovation.
Meanwhile, people tend to notice when condescension is dripping off of commercials and human resource workshops, which is why people in these clubs often tend to try so hard in both subtle and unsubtle ways to arrange these rooms as such that only people who agree are let in in the first place or at least to discourage those who disagree from speaking up. The use of shame as a tactic may be indirect in most of my analysis here, but we’ve at least covered exclusion, haven’t we? Exclusion makes sense in this instance if the goal is “to win,” to get as many people as possible to submit to the value preferences of a few, but much less so if the goal is to elevate the material conditions of as many lives as possible, which is my progressive hope, if I may dare to be so blasphemous.