Modern Words

Downward Progress

We were intrigued the other day to read what was intended to be a damning criticism of a US politician.

The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.

 "More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said.  “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."

Imagine we attended Harvard Law School as a tyro, but with a deep conviction that the world was over 70 percent ocean.  Now, years later, replete with a Harvard Law degree, years of life experience, and presumably wiser, we still hold the same view: that the earth's surface is predominately water.  Critics could doubtless allege that we were closed minded, of "calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world." 

Whilst the slur would be expectorated full of sound and fury, it would signify precisely nothing.  Well, actually, it would signify something about the person doing the slurring.  Let's deconstruct.
  Has the makeup of the earth's crust changed?  Have the facts changed, such that what was once believed to be the case has now been demonstrated not to be so.  Have the fundamental realities of global geography changed?  Not at all.  So, to hold to what one believed thirty or forty years ago reveals not a man who is "dangerously impervious to the facts" but, on the contrary, someone rational and sane. 

Or, maybe the detractors believe that nothing in this life is certain and that the facts keep changing constantly. Who knows.  But if that were to be the case, then it is the animadverters who end up empty minded, for whatever they think and opine today we can be certain that tomorrow "it ain't so". 

Artfully suppressed behind all this, however, lies a deeper ideological and philosophical commitment--a belief in evolution, progress, pragmatism, and dialectical advance.  Mankind is moving forward and upward.  Darwin said it were so.  Progress is the one secular force of history that cannot be thwarted.  In this ideological framework one can understand why it is a damning indictment to be accused of still thinking the same things you thought as a teenage tyro.  It would indicate arrested development, a less-than-human state.  It would make you more like a tree than a human being, non? 

No-one contradicts the ideal of growing in wisdom and maturity as the years pass.  The Apostle Paul talked of doing childish things when he was a child, but when he grew to adulthood, he put away childish things.  One expects that an adult will think differently about many things than they did as a child.  One expects a person in the crowning glory of older-age wisdom to be much more advanced in their opinions and wisdom than a twenty year old something infatuated with celebritism, for instance. 

But where you draw the lines is critical.  Some "development" is devolvement.  When the Commentariat accuses a person of having a "calcified" mind, one suspects they are alleging the target is guilty of today's ultimate ideological sin--to be a denier of modern verities such as evolutionism, or secularism, or dialecticism.  In which case the "wisdom" of age they are referring to--of which they seem themselves as avatars--is actually the devolved idiocy of dotage.  They are the ones showing themselves prematurely senile.
 Take, for example, some of the hot ideological lightning rods of our day.  Firstly, abortion.  If a person was once an agnostic on the matter of killing the unborn, but now holds the view that its the just and righteous thing to do, he has devolved.  He has become more animalistic, less human, less like God.  His mind has become calcified into a state of ignorance. On the contrary, if a person, as a young man, rejected abortion as a vile act of murder, and forty years later not only holds to the same view, but holds it more strongly with an entire lifestyle bent against it, then he is more enlightened than he was as a teenager. 

Or again, if a person as a young man held the view that theft was sinful and usually a criminal act, but now holds the view in later life that the state extracting from some to bestow upon others is likewise theft and sinfully criminal, his thinking has become developed, refined, purified and more advanced.  He has made progress, not just intellectually but spiritually.  But if a man as a teenager held to the view that theft was an evil act, but now as an adult advocates for government expropriating from some to distribute to others, his thinking has degenerated; he has ethically devolved.  Far from making progress, he has descended further into the abyss.  He is farther from the exit to the labyrinth in mature years than he was as a young man. 

Much of what the world calls progress is actually devolution and moral regression.  In the hands and minds of the morally degenerating, "progress" has instead become an idol of destruction, a deadly thing of worship.  Thus, President Woodrow Wilson:

Progress!  Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one?  No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself . . . . Progress, development,--those are modern words.  The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new."  [Cited in Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.162.]

How prescient those words were.  How damning they have become.  The people have turned away from the Living God to something "new".  Except, all they have done is turned back to the Baals, to the stupid, dumb gods of a former benighted era.  And they and their age have become like them, as stupid, as dumb, as benighted.  Progressive.  Enlightened. New.  These have become modern words to serve ancient dank, dark, and depraved deities.  No progress there.  Just calcified minds.