Progress and Its False Prophets

Moving Backwards

Most people assume that history is moving forward.  The present is better than the past.  The human race is heading to a higher, greater future.   In our secular humanist culture this assumption is undergirded by Darwinian evolutionism.  This has always seemed to us to be a most amusing idea: Darwinian evolutionism claims that development is achieved by the survival of the fittest.  That implies that there must be plenty of casualties along the way. 

Modern Western man never assumes that he (or Western culture) will be one of those casualties.  It's always someone else, some other culture that is less than fit and will be destroyed.  Yet within the Darwinian philosophy, Islam might prove to be the better, more powerful culture that sweeps the West into the sea.  Darwinianism cannot predict such things; it only identifies the more fit ex post facto.  Herein lies one of its idiocies.
 

There is another stream of thought which has been married to Darwinianism.  Hegel proclaimed that human history was moving to an inevitable triumph.  The mechanism which moved it forward was the dialectic.  Each stage of human development had the seeds of its own destruction.  Those seeds would eventually coalesce into an antithesis, which would tear down the present, leading to a new synthesis, and another antithesis, and so on.  But eventually  the perfect would emerge, in which there would be no incipient antithesis any longer.  Thus, Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man when liberal democracy triumphed over communism.  Fukuyama was asserting that western liberal democracy was the highest stage of human evolution: it represented the last (great) man, beyond which there would no development. A silly idea in hindsight, much mocked.  But consistent with current ideology, nonetheless.

The political ideology known as progressivism believes these inanities with a vengeance.  History is always making progress.  Given the previous rise and fall of prodigious numbers of civilizations this is a stupid position to hold, but idiocy is no respecter of persons.  Jonah Goldberg summarizes the progressive folly:

The Whiggish assumption in contemporary politics that today must be better than yesterday, this year more advanced than last year, this century wiser than the one that preceded it, is held most dogmatically by so-called progressives.  For them history is a vehicle with no reverse gear, and the engine that powers it is nothing more or less than the State.  This is the hardened, metaphysical, dogmatic cliche that makes it possible for journalists to glibly describe any expansion of the government into our lives as a "step forward" or an "advancement" and any retrenchment of government as a step "backward."  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.12.]

All of which is nonsense, of course.  But it explains why the dominant religion of secular humanism and its Commentariat mouthpieces despise the Christian faith--for it speaks of judgment to come.   Christianity is thus rejected as blasphemous from the outset.  When Christians testify to the secular humanist world that if a certain course is pursued it will result in great harm and damage, even destruction, the prevailing religious secular orthodoxy cannot accept it.  It is deaf.  It simply does not compute.  Worse, it gives license to attack Christians as either mad or negative, evil, judgemental, and destructive.  Why?  Because they are questioning the religion of secular progress.

In the time of the apostles, sometimes rulers would choose the deluded, mad option.  When Paul was defending himself before Agrippa and Festus, we read that Festus said, "Paul you are out of your mind!  Your great learning is driving you mad."  (Acts 26: 24)  Today, given the stranglehold of progressive ideology over our culture, it is much more common to see Christians rejected as being antithetical to society's interests: negative, and destructive and even subversive is the Christian Gospel which rejects the implicit utopianism of our generation.

 The bottom line is this: without Christ the future of any culture is never bright.  We Christians love our cities, our nations.  But we do not love their destruction.  Therefore, we strive mightily to tear down the idolatry of secular humanism and its corollary of inevitable State engineering progress.  In Christ alone our hope is found.