It’s a brave new world, progressives
proclaim, and the old rules no longer apply. From the Russian Communists’ New
Man to the mantra of “That’s not who we are” from Obama, it’s always different
this time.
But is it? Has mankind, after millennia of contemplation, perhaps
discovered eternal verities about human nature? One historical test is
that when a culture denies the wisdom of the ancients, it eventually fails;
those remaining must pick up the pieces and start anew.
“Wisdom of the Ancients” and “eternal verities” are abstractions,
of course. But there is a short list going back to Socrates and St. Augustine
that is a handy pocket guide to human pitfalls and frailties. It is called “The
Seven Deadly Sins.”
Let’s go through the list one by one and see if we can recognize
any these in modern American progressivism, in its social, cultural, and
political forms. Note that all humans are prone to the Seven
Deadlies, progressives and conservatives alike. Normal people just don’t make a
movement out of them.
Gluttony
Contrary it what you may think, this is not the sin of getting fat
and obese. Rather, it is focusing on food for other reasons than substance. In
the case of progressives, food snobbery is a basic part of the class
distinctions that sets them apart and above the masses. Of course, one can be a
foodie and not be a progressive, but the correlation of Blue ZIP codes and
Whole Foods is no coincidence. You are what you eat, be you Woke or Deplorable.
Free range chicken or KFC? Indian Pale Ale or Bud? Eating “organic” can be
objectively shown to not affect the taste or nutrition or wholesomeness of
food, in most cases. It does affect the price and social cachet and is too
often a matter of pride to progressives (See more at “Pride” below.)
Lust
The recent news of the passing of Hugh Hefner is a timely reminder
that sex has its place and has to be balanced within an honorable person’s
life. While I’m not as critical of the Playboy philosophy as
other conservatives, seeing it as a somewhat reasonable response to
technological change and affluence, sex remains at its core about making
children and the next generation. A young playboy could be expected to settle
down, marry, and have children – even Hefner tried it, three times.
The current glorification of purely non-reproductive sexual
behavior like homosexuality and transgenderism is surely a huge mistake --
pure, unbalanced lust leads nowhere for the individual nor for society. Worst,
the disdain many progressives show for “breeders” leads to demographic
replacement as Mark Steyn has explained repeatedly.
Sloth
To a hardworking man coming home exhausted after a long day, sloth
might sound like an idea pretty close to heaven. But work builds true self-esteem.
One is contributing and in return one earns a paycheck.
Progressives facilitate sloth as a matter of policy in at least
two ways. Welfare is of course the most serious and destructive. With rules
that favor single mothers and absent fathers, the State rewards the destruction
of the family and the production of rudderless young men and women. “Idle hands
are the Devil’s workshop” is another eternal verity. Useless men are not free.
A new wrinkle is the legalization of recreational marijuana in
many U.S. states. One can reasonably argue that the medical consequences of
freely available pot are trivial compared to alcoholism, drunk driving, etc,
and so a free people should be able to put in their bodies what they chose.
What is seldom mentioned is that a major consequence of smoking a lot of pot
will be a big increase in sloth in the smoking population – been there, done
that!
Greed
This one is really simple. Working to build personal and family
wealth is not greed. Keeping it is not greed. Stealing that wealth earned and
accumulated by others is. Who is for high taxation to “redistribute the
wealth”? Who wants confiscatory inheritance taxes? Progressives, of course,
especially if that wealth passes through the hands of a government controlled
by progressives.
Envy
What progressive political movement hasn’t relied on a tactic of
playing to envy as a path to power? Lately, progressives invented the notion of
“white privilege” and harp on it incessantly to excite envy in “people of
color” and to isolate them from mainstream American culture. As a historical
example, Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned against the “malefactors of
great wealth” in his presidential run in 1932 during the Great Depression. Envy
of the success of conservative talk radio was the motivation for a call for a
return of the “Fairness Doctrine.”
Wrath
What a sinful pleasure it is to wallow in self-righteous wrath!
Even better is to physically hit, kick, smash, burn, and shoot. Rioting by
Black Lives Matter in some of our cities was justified as wrath over police
“brutality.” Rioting and mass assaults against conservatives by Antifa is
called protective wrath to suppress all sorts of imagined evils. James
Hodgkinson attempted a mass assassination of Republican congressmen in wrath
over the election of President Trump.
And what is contemporary feminism about but wrath against men?
Pride
St. Augustine considered pride to be the source of all other sins,
much as Aristotle considered courage to be the foundation of all virtues. A
modern progressive must reek of pride to declare himself wiser than either. To
claim to understand more about gender than Schopenhauer or about politics than
Machiavelli or about economics than Smith is neither humble nor plausible.
Even worse, based on that prideful claim of
greater understanding than the great thinkers of Western Civilization,
progressives claim the right and duty to impose their mission on others, using
government or street coercion as handy tools.
But What of Progressive Virtue?
Just as there is the Seven Deadly Sins, there’s the Seven Cardinal
Virtues. To be fair, I should task myself to analyze progressivism against
them. They have Hope and Faith that their cause will do good. But is “social
justice” true Justice? Is Charity served with other peoples’ money collected by
taxation? Prudence and Temperance? To experiment with the fate of Western
Civilization expecting human behavior to change simply because progressives
want it to is both risky and radical. They do have the Courage of their
beliefs, I must grant.
Conclusion
Vices and virtues arise in
the heart of the individual. But society reflects the character of its
people and in turn molds the individual. Progressivism is waging war on the
West by extolling and justifying the Seven Deadlies.
Normals, as Kurt
Schlichter so accurately calls us, are in no ways immune from and innocent
of the Seven Deadlies. We just recognize them as pitfalls on the way to the
life well lived that we should recognize and strive to resist. Progressives
seem to embrace them as tools for achieving the social, political, and economic
change they imagine is the next step to Utopia.