Progress And The "Progressives"

     The abstract notion of progress, which is the implied goal of the “progressive,” is seldom considered analytically. What is it, after all, that we mean by progress? Is it something we can seek in a confident way, at least in specific contexts? How do we know if we’re achieving it? Would an analysis of its opposite, regress, provide any clues to the puzzle? Is there some more fundamental concept to which we must recur before we can grasp either one?

     All those questions are answerable. However, there are persons who would move heaven and earth to prevent you from doing so. And yes, they style themselves “progressives.”

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     When I was leafing through my archives a little earlier, I stumbled over this excellent piece by Thales at The Declination. A couple of snippets:

     This is the Progressive vision for the future, where fat and unhygienic is beautiful. This is a world in which John Scalzi is the pinnacle of writing talent, where Michael Moore is your script writer and Ben Kuchera is your journalist. Your State Department official is a moron who claims the unemployment numbers in Syria are largely responsible for global terrorism. Your own President cannot name who the terrorists are.

     Utopia for Progressives is Hell on Earth, possibly worse than any the Bright One who Fell could think up. Your live entertainment will be based on vaginas. Your art is a Crucifix in a jar of piss, or period blood on canvas. Paul Krugman will be your personal banker, with every Western government worth mentioning so far in debt that the entire population could work for well over a year doing nothing but paying it, without coming close to discharging it....

     I want to make this as abundantly clear as I possibly can with words, I’ve had enough of the destruction of Western Culture. Progressives have ruined all that is good and Holy on this planet. Wherever there is ugliness, you can be sure to find one of their ilk behind it. Not only do they loathe standards of conduct, beauty and comparison, they actively promote anti-standards. They deconstruct so far, they’ve tunneled straight through civilization and into barbarism, they are the men digging in the ground all the way to China.

     They elevate diarrhea to fine wine, while pouring the good vintage down the drain. A beautiful woman in a bikini is an ugly demonstration of sexism, to them, instead of a wonderful example of femininity. A strong man is a patriarchal, heteronormative oppressor. The intellectual is a “mansplainer.”

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Thales has bull’s-eyed the critical fundamental concept that makes it possible to talk sensibly about progress: the acceptance of a standard. That it should be necessary to drag this notion front and center and demand that it be examined closely says a great deal about the deterioration of Western culture...none of it good.

     Without a standard, we cannot determine whether progress is occurring. But the “progressive” agenda demands the elimination of the standards on which Western culture is based. Do the “progressives” have alternate standards to propose? They do not. Rather, they posit that there shall be no evaluations whatsoever – that their decreed outcomes must be accepted without question. Whether we would like those outcomes is immaterial to them.

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     Kevin Cullinane of the Freedom School once proposed a definition of progress that I find highly appealing:

     Progress is the improved satisfaction of human desires, morally, with less input.

     Concise! The relevant standards, human desires and human morality, are clearly stated. The criteria for evaluation are equally clear: improved satisfaction and less input. However, as with any human concept, one must take care to remain within its domain of applicability. Some desires don’t quite make the cut.

     Consider one of the puzzlers Thales called out: the “progressives’” attempt to redefine beauty so that grotesquely fat women would qualify. That a woman would want to be thought beautiful despite being dangerously overweight should come as no surprise. All women want to be thought of (and treated) as beautiful. But that desire cross-cuts the existing standard for beauty. Therefore, say the “progressives,” the standard must go! But what would take its place? By what criteria would any woman determine whether she is progressing toward beauty or regressing from it?

     And answer comes there none. “Progressives” don’t propose standards; they demand specific outcomes. Indeed, “progressives” are actively hostile to standards of any sort. A standard implies that their agendas might be evaluated and found wanting. That is unacceptable. So all standards must go – and be damned to those whose desires or interests would be harmed by losing them.

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     Several commentators have remarked upon the absurdity of Leftist attitudes in the U.S. at this time. To one with traditional standards for prosperity, justice, and beauty, the absurdity is plain. But the “progressives” are straining to destroy those standards. For prosperity they would substitute “equality;” for justice, “social justice;” for beauty, “diversity and inclusion.” Discussion of the actual meanings of their shibboleths is forbidden by “political correctness,” as is discussion of the departure from their proposed norms by their standard-bearers and mouthpieces.

     The maintenance of our standards requires that we treat them as property: i.e., we must defend them when they’re attacked. That, too, is a target of the “progressives.” Property is inherently exclusionary, and they can’t abide that. But it’s the only workable attitude toward what they’ve been trying to do to us in the name of “progress.”

     The overwhelming majority of us are with Thales. We share venerable standards about prosperity, justice, and beauty. They allow us to know when we’re making progress. If we are to protect that condition – an absolute necessity to a project pursuer — we must never compromise, even slightly, with those who seek the destruction of our standards. “Progress” must not become an empty sound once uttered by benighted savages in a forgotten age.

To Strive, To Seek, To Find, And Not To Yield

     Did you recognize the title line? Are you familiar with the mighty poem it concludes? It can be found here. If you’re unfamiliar with it, please take a few minutes to read and savor it before continuing on here.

     Ulysses – Odysseus in the Greek versions of the two relevant myths – was the king of Ithaca, one of the great men of Greece who set off, along with many other Greek heroes and soldiers, to reclaim Helen, queen of Sparta and wife of King Menelaus, from Paris of Troy. Unlike many others who participated in that conflict, narrated in Homer’s Iliad, Ulysses survived to return to his home, his queen, and his throne. However, his return voyage was not without adventures, about which we read in the Odyssey.

     Tennyson’s poem Ulysses speaks of the mythical hero later in life, when his great deeds are supposedly past and done. But great men don’t take kindly to the suggestion that their days of greatness are behind them. Indeed, one of the tests of greatness is endurance: to go further than before; to try new paths and chart new seas; never to accept stasis, or irrelevance.

     A truly great man’s life is an unbroken series of self-betterments: to go further than before, to do better than before, and always “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

     “Not to yield to what?” I hear you cry. That, Gentle Reader, is the meat of this essay.

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     Along with these essays I write fiction, as you’re surely aware. It takes me about a year to produce a novel. The length of that interval displeases some of my fiction readers. They want more and faster. In an ideal world I’d oblige them – nothing so cheers a writer as an expressed hunger for more of what he writes – but this is not that world. It takes me a great deal of time and effort to produce novels that meet my standards, and I’d bet a dollar to a doughnut that were I to hurry the process, the very readers who clamor for more of my crap would turn to asking “Did you really write this, Fran? It doesn’t seem up to your usual standard.”

     Contemplate, I entreat you, the last three words above. “Your usual standard” – meaning my usual standard – was set by me. No one else has the authority to do so. To satisfy me, what I write must meet that standard. I’m sufficiently a perfectionist not to release anything that strikes me as sub-par, not meeting the standard my earlier works have set and met.

     My standards are a component of my personality: what I regard as appropriate to my abilities and my record of achievement. I cannot water them down...and believe me, at times the temptation has been strong.

     Are there costs attached to a high standard? Of course. The higher and more exacting a standard one sets for oneself, the longer and harder one must labor to meet it. The consumption of a great amount of time to produce a single item also involves an opportunity cost: the other things one might have produced in that time do not exist. This is practically a tautology.

     High or low, we all set standards for our undertakings. Those standards determine when our works are finished. Nothing else does – or can.

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     I have a particular sensitivity to the misuse of words. When I detect it, I feel compelled to respond, sometimes with an acerbity that might better have been restrained.

     Consider the word perfect. What does it mean? What, therefore, does it mean to be a perfectionist?

     According to my Webster’s Unabridged, to perfect a thing is to complete it:

     perfect: v, to bring to completion; to finish.

     That does not sound – to me, at least – like an objectionable thing. We want our efforts to be finished, to go to completion, and therefore to be perfect, and are unhappy when their path to that is truncated. But what does it mean to say that a thing is finished, complete? Doesn’t that mean that it meets the standard set for it a priori? So the relevant question about perfection is: For specified item or undertaking X, what is the applicable standard? Who set it, did he have the authority to do so, and is there a way to determine when the standard has been met?

     Once we have determined that the standard for item X was set by one who had the authority to do so, and that it was relevant to the sort of thing X is intended to be, all that matters is conforming to its dictates. If X conforms in all particulars to the standard for it, then it is perfect. Moreover, its maker has achieved perfection in the only sense that pertains to enterprises under the veil of Time.

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     This piece was triggered by Sarah Hoyt’s diatribe against “perfectionism:”

     Perfectionism should be classified as a disability.

     It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than miss-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has....

     If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

     There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.

     Forgive me, Sarah, but you’ve hared off after a phantasm, which might serve to explain your own state of “being permanently trapped in insecurity.” You have failed to understand the meaning of perfection and therefore the variety of perfectionism appropriate to an artist or craftsman – which means just about everyone who ever undertakes to do anything.

     A perfect thing meets the standard set for it. The perfectionist, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, vows “not to yield.” He is determined to meet his self-defined standards. He seeks and finds imperfections, and corrects them, but always with reference to that aforementioned standard. Does he accept that he’s fallible – that he might miss something? Of course. That has nothing to do with his commitment to perfection, which is an ideal to be striven toward.

     My entire life I have striven for perfection: in mathematics, in software, and in fiction. Perhaps I’ve achieved it on occasion; perhaps not. The ideal has not paralyzed me, as Sarah has suggested:

     There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.

     The way it blights lives is…interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing.

     That’s not perfectionism; that’s the behavior of the loser, he who cannot believe in himself and his powers, and surrenders to despair.

     Perfection is achievable when the standard set for the undertaking in question is clear and unambiguous. He who sets his own standards has no excuse for falling short of them, no matter how high he set the bar. I say that even though I know several of my most cherished works contain flaws, for when they’re drawn to my attention, guess what? I fix them. For the striving for perfection is not a thing that ends. In some cases it continues right up to death.

     It is vital, perhaps even civilizationally critical, that we understand perfection as it should be understood, and that we make it our pole star. There was a sign hung over the office in which I worked that asked two questions:

• Are you doing the right thing?
• Are you doing the thing right?

     Those are vital questions regardless of one’s specific enterprise. They compel you to be clear of mind about what you intend to produce, and to understand as completely as possible what’s required of it. And unlike most generalizations, they do apply validly to many things.

     Ask the wrong question and you’ll get a useless answer every time. “Is this perfect?” according to an irrelevant or an under-defined standard is always a wrong question, the sort that drains the meaning from the quite useful word perfect. Quoth Sarah once more:

You don’t know what is perfect either.

     Wrong, dear. It’s you who don’t know. I do know. Regardless of past failures, and of the certainty of future failures, I strive, I seek, and I find...and win, lose, or draw, I do not yield.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Quickies: An Observation About Morals And Standards

     “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right!” – “Salvor Hardin,” Mayor of Terminus, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation

     I puzzled over that statement when I first encountered it. I puzzled even further when Asimov wrote that it had become one of Salvor Hardin’s most celebrated sayings. But in recent years its significance has become clear – and important.

     We in the Right tend to pride ourselves on our morals and standards. That’s to be expected; what else, after all, distinguishes us from the Left, or from assorted vulgarians of no particular affiliation? But it’s well to remember that morals (in which I include ethics for the sake of concision) are not standards and should not be conflated with them.

     Morals are barely different from principles. With the exception of purely religious moral constraints, which need not apply to persons not of one’s own faith, both are precepts of right action with roots in our common human nature. They speak, albeit indirectly, of nasty consequences for their violation, whether in this world or the next. Thus, there are both moral and practical reasons for hewing to them.

     Standards are not rules of that kind. They pertain to “what simply isn’t done,” especially by “the better sort.” The consequences of violating a standard might range from being chided by one’s “set” to being expelled from it and treated thereafter as an outcast. But “what simply isn’t done” is more often founded on questions of style and dignity than on anything else. Moreover, context matters. You may not punch out the bounder who insulted you in private; it’s one of those things that isn’t done. However, were he to insult you – or worse, your wife – in public, thrashing him without soiling the drapes or breaking any of the crystal would be deemed acceptable. Allowing someone to demean you or your beloved in public without consequence is another of those things that simply isn’t done, and in these benighted days in which the option of pistols at dawn has been taken from us, other courses are seldom attractive or available.

     Much of the Right’s quandary over how best to respond to the Left’s torrent of denigrations, calumnies, and occasional outright violence is because we’ve tended to view our standards as equally as binding as our morals. It falls to me to inform you all that this is not the case – and furthermore, to advise you that our failure to fight fire with fire is in large measure how we arrived at a state in which only the emergence of Donald Trump had the slightest chance of saving the Republic from an irreversible descent into socialism.

     Thus Salvor Hardin’s epigram becomes comprehensible – and imperative. Verbum sat sapienti.

O Standards, Where Art Thou?

     In the days before I discovered girls, I received many exhortations from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, friends, friends’ parents, and miscellaneous other persons whom I regarded with a modicum of respect to try my hand at this or that undertaking. Their urgings encompassed everything from painting to pole vaulting. “I don’t think so,” I would normally demur, usually because I was engaged in something else and determined to finish it properly. “But you might be good at it,” they would reply, “and you won’t know unless you try it.”

     After I’d acquired some verbal facility, I came to call this the Asparagus Antiphon. (No, I didn’t care for asparagus then. I feel the same today. But I digress.) The parallel isn’t exact, of course. A child isn’t “good at” a vegetable; he either likes it or dislikes it. But the emotions pertinent to it are a match.

     Most kids don’t learn the fine art of changing the subject nearly as young as I did. It proved an excellent counter to the Asparagus Antiphon, even before I’d named it that. I got exceedingly good at it – so good that those who’d decided to hector me about attempting gymnastics, prestidigitation, the tuba, or what have you were mystified by how fluidly the conversation had left the track they’d embarked upon. It won me the peace I needed to persist at whatever challenge I’d already accepted until I “got it right.”

     Though young, I’d grasped something that many persons never do: that an enterprise of any sort, to be worth your time and effort, must have standards: criteria by which to determine whether you’d “got it right.” I was determined to know what standards apply to whatever I was about to attempt, and to meet them squarely. That’s much easier if you’re allowed to concentrate than if your attention is scattered over a large number of subjects.

     Today, to insist that there are standards for performance in certain endeavors is tantamount to blasphemy.

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     This morning’s sweep of news sites, opinion mongers, and beloved blogging colleagues brought me, as it eventually will, to the lair of the esteemed Charles Hill. He quotes an amusing piece about a not-so-amusing subject: poetry:

     There’s zero barrier to entry with poetry — the rules for writing sonnets are right there, and not even the American educational system has so far managed to destroy literacy completely. If you want to go mano-a-mano with Shakespeare, your word processing program even comes with a dictionary and a thesaurus. There are 350+ million people in America today; Elizabethan England had maybe 3 million. Just as a matter of simple probability, there should be some world-class sonnet-writers around right now…
     …but, of course, there aren’t, because sometime in the later 19th century our universities started awarding degrees in English Literature.

     The insight in the final lines above is enormous: Many of the persons who pursued those degrees had no poetic ability and no taste. But they were determined to get degrees, and it’s a lot easier to sell pretense and flummery in “English Literature” than it is in mathematics or physics.

     Charles comments thus:

     I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that I have Facebook friends who will point me to contemporary verse without even the slightest hint of irony.

     (Note the subtly ironic term “Facebook friends.” In my experience – limited, to be sure – prefixing “Facebook” to a relationship term nullifies it completely. Compare this to the practice of prefixing an abstract noun with “social” and thus inverting its meaning. But I digress.)

     Time was, poetry had certain rules: criteria whose satisfaction was demanded of anything that was represented as a “poem.” If you wanted to be deemed a poet, you had to know the rules for the forms you proposed to practice, and you had to abide by them. Of course to be regarded as a good poet, rule conformance, though necessary, was not sufficient. You had to display something more: originality, elegance in phrasing, and some sort of substance. The point of your verse could be humorous, as in the odes of Ogden Nash, or it could be formal and grave, as in the works of Emily Dickinson, but it had to be there, or your verse would be dismissed as “doggerel.”

     The demise of the formal rules of poetry happened long ago. People who wanted to be poets...at least, to be thought of as poets...found all those niggling little requirements “too much trouble to bother about,” so they simply vented onto paper. After all, it’s the substance that matters, right? The profound insights; the great emotions; the expression of immutable and eternal truths! Or maybe not. Surely we should be inclusive of poetry that flows spontaneously from the lips as well. Why leave the hallucinators and the schizophrenics out of the fun?

     Free verse...blank verse...free and blank verse...stream-of-consciousness verse...verse composed of neologisms...verse rendered in shrieks and howls...the damnedest unversed verse the Universe can contain has rained down upon the noble field of poetry like a cascade of vitriol. With the dismissal of all the standards that once applied to poetry, poetry has been robbed of all point.

     And now there are no more poets, and no more poetry.

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     The current, multifarious campaigns against standards of all kinds are destroying the very concept of achievement. If there are no standards for acceptability and quality, there is no way, apart from the most arbitrary and subjective of judgments, to grant laurels to any human product, whether of the hands or of the mind. When everyone is a poet, no one is, for poetry as a category of items distinct from all others has been rendered meaningless.

     The true horror is in this: There are persons whose conscious intent, whether overt or covert, is to destroy the concept achievement and all recognition thereof. They’ve had more success in some fields than in others. For example, what’s happened to poetry, painting, and sculpture hasn’t yet happened to archery, basketball, or real estate development. That chafes them greatly, for any field in which the participants can be differentiated from one another is an obstacle to the Harrison Bergeron future at which they aim. (In that vision, each of them imagines himself to be the Handicapper General. Yet another instance of Commissar Complex. But I digress.)

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     I do only a very few things. I’m determined to do whatever I do as well as it can be done...or failing that, as well as I can do it, given my personal capacities and gifts. That requires that each of my undertakings pertain to a set of standards: rules for inclusion in the field, and criteria by which to judge achievement. Thus I have no interest in fields that have abandoned all standards. They’re the natural habitat of poseurs and pretenders: “artists” uninterested in hard work or critical judgment, and “critics” determined to place themselves on the same plane as the “artists.”

     Standards are what make possible justifiable human pride: yet another of the barriers to their hegemony the would-be commissars are determined to destroy. It stands in the way of their preferred substitute: the “self-esteem” they promote relentlessly in our “schools” that forbids all notions of right and wrong, or better and worse. (And as I sense that this is about to mutate into a tirade of a completely different sort, I believe I’ll close here. I wouldn’t want to digress.)