I suspect those with a firmly progressive (not just liberal) bias like me share this basic suspicion of the self-serving logics of history and claims about the cleanliness of wealth-creation mechanisms.
Conversation
The basic ideological priority of progressivism is to unwind the overhang of history over society. Break or weaken links to past to make room for the future. Operate on the assumption that the past is guilty until proven innocent, while trads operate on the opposite assumption.
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This can lend progressivism a sort of naively destructive optics. Progressivism flaunts all its ills very openly because it cannot do otherwise. Other ideologies, to varying degrees, launder and rationalize the parts of the past that bolster their suspect historical advantages
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This critique btw, also applies to things labeled "progressive" that aren't really. For example, reason I find union politics suspect is simply that it is so damn old. As old as large-scale industrialization itself. You can't be about breaking from past if you rely on 150y of it.
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Many of the pathologies of wokism can also be traced to its already long history. Crenshaw's intersectionality paper is now 33 years old. That age alone, quite apart from merits/weaknesses of arguments is reason for suspicion. Enough time has passed for capture processes.
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Maybe my general politics here needs a distinct name, since everything starts aging (and by my model, acquiring anti-Lindy corruption and moral decay) the minute it is born. Something like "newism" or "birth innocenceism"
Only newborn things can be maximally innocent.
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And even that can never be 100% (hence Rawlsian veils etc). Everything new has a genetic heritage of some sort. It's a kind of original sin doctrine which should be cashed out as fundamental existential doubt about morality of everything. The older it is, the greater the doubt.
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Heh, this helps me clarify for myself why I think "progress studies" is ill-posed. It seems to frame progress as a kind of historical accumulation, whereas I think of progress as fundamentally a process of ongoing invalidation of history.
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Does progress studies actually have that much of an accumulation-centric frame? I see some accumulation focus, but also a lot of "we need to cut the red tape".
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Accumulation in the sense of a historicist teleology of the sort Popper critiqued, not necessarily compounding knowledge or material accumulation.
I don't think they've really thought about foundational things imo. Cowen+Collison are mostly reacting to a sense of stagnation
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I'm not against "history has a direction and a terminal logic" ideas, but the bar for useful instances is high. The only one I really like is Fukuyama's. Most people just want to see favored shallow trendlines within personal living memories perpetuated (whig, neoliberal, etc).
I don't think *history* has a teleology. I think *people* have a teleology, and we have agency and efficacy.
Progress is real and important, but it is not automatic or inevitable. That was the Whig mistake—to see it as providence. It depends on choice & effort, and can regress.


