The Progressive’s Utopia is Dante’s Inferno

At 80 years old, I find myself living through a relentless campaign to kill the past in the name of the future.

I have a religious and conservative mind so I suffer from every trendy phobia possible. In short I’m a bigot; my character suspect and my convictions irrelevant. I can’t possibly be permitted a voice in the public square. It’s not that the content of what I say is ever precisely examined. It’s just that I might offend someone who will cry, “unsafe”.

In the space of a couple of decades the language of public debate has been transformed. A range of terms in common use don’t actually describe anything to live by, rather they are unjustified abstractions that promise Utopia. Their power is in what they appear to promise rather than in their meaning. “Social justice“ would have to be one of the most obvious shibboleths, closely followed by “equality” and a contemporary spin on “tolerance” which really means affirmation. “Diversity and inclusion” more accurately reflect uniformity and exclusion because they prohibit dissent.

All of those terms deconstruct and condemn. They exhibit one view of the world. Human beings are victims of some entrenched privileged power rather than sinners; creatures who have fallen short of even their own once upon a time standards. The struggle intrinsic to the human condition is not about learning to be faithful, humble, patient, gracious, hopeful, forgiving, generous, and loving; about the development of a man’s or woman’s character.

Life’s purpose is about breaking free from those who have power over us. The moral struggle is political. The victim is hero providing his or her victimhood is approved by the progressive utopians. Lusting after freedom the hero leaves it behind. Providing everything is done in the name of equality and the responsibilities of civil society destroyed, Utopia will be the nicest possible place. Embrace us.

Civil society and its institutions are the very skeleton of freedom our heroic victim would grind to dust because s/he is wantonly ignorant of her/his heritage. S/he simply does not understand the civilising power of the intergenerational family and the institutions which surround it. Family, marriage, tradition, mediating institutions between the individual and the state, legitimate hierarchical order, religion, especially Christianity and law other than human rights law, must be abolished. If one may paraphrase Shakespeare, the baby of human rights beats the nurse of common-law. And, just in case, something from the past should slip in unnoticed and arouse doubt in our hero’s mind any suggestion of transcendent religion must be swept from the public square.

Having faith in the new religion of utopian equality and the “Goddess of Choice” any consideration of an either/or world is forbidden and must be kept silent by the invective of swelling hate speech law.

Consequently justice, must always be “social justice”; about equal outcomes as much as it is about equal opportunity. Justice, naked and alone, is too intimately connected to the sovereign God who demands that we love Him without reservation. The threatening truth of God’s sovereignty is denied, but it’s still there, behind the equality facade, disorientating the fragile human psyche in its denial. That’s why we can’t have God in the public square or Parliament.

There never has been a time in the whole of human history when so much conflicting data has been available on the nature of what it means to be human. Consequently, that freedom, which is promised to sinners by God should they repent and turn to him is nearly always misunderstood. Freedom we are constantly told is about being able to “live the dream”; to do what we want. The irony should be salutary.

The modern pagan in his or her hubris has forgotten Sophocles. “Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” When one is his or her own God, madness always follows, or to be a little more contemporary, mental health decays. It’s not surprising that the default position of the progressive mind is to hold two conflicting ideas in the mind at once and believe both of them. Most recently the advocates of transgenderism have achieved this end with a zealousness so uninformed the rest of us nearly believe them.

In spite of almost two centuries of the authority of “science” claimed by the dogma of natural selections, we now find ourselves strangely disconnected from the authority of science and profoundly confused about our origin and destiny. The apparent victory of the decaying religion of natural selection over the biblical story of creation in our schools is not a consequence of gathering knowledge; rather an ignorance of both.

We have been made dizzy by a new spin on old-fashioned dualism. On the one hand we are autonomous creatures, but on the other victims of government or some other demeaning power; the patriarchy perhaps. Personal identity rooted only in the subjective, must be sustained by a growing number of human rights. The joy of discovered rather than invented identity, and the consequent freedom enjoyed in community, created and sustained by the transcendent God, is a foreign country that can’t possibly be explored.

Alas the progressive is not Prometheus. Rather a very small man or woman with delusions of grandeur. The horizon is found only within the self. It has to be, because there is no transcendent spiritual truth outside the enclosed circumference of the narcissist vision. In the end the progressive is nothing more than a narcissist without the sympathy of the gods to make the fairy-tale palatable.

Logan