If you want people to act, you need them to care, and if you want them to care, you need to get them riled up. If you want to start a social movement, or bring about social reforms, you need to make people feel a sense of urgency. Moral outrage, not bare facts, stirs people to action. I cannot think of a single significant social reform that was not born of a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Thus, progressives reject the story of progress not because they reject the facts it entails, but because they see it as a threat to future progress—because they think that the only reason we have come this far is because we have resisted concentrating on our achievements. They don’t hate progress: they just hate talking about it.
If this is correct, we are left with a paradox: in order to achieve progress, you have to downplay (or even deny) its existence. This would explain why so many progressives have trouble listening to claims about how good things are, or how much better they are than they used to be. While they might be empirically accurate, such claims sap the energy we need to keep moving forward.
Ideological commitments can lead us to deny what is obvious to any reasonable person. I find it hard to make sense of the claim that life is worse for the average person today than it was, say, one hundred years ago. That seems like gaslighting. But I suspect that very few progressives actually believe this.
The reason so many progressives love to hate Pinker and his fellow possibilists probably has more to do with human motivation and social change.
Progressives are always comparing the present to an ideal. Of course, some ideals are more attainable than others. It’s always useful to ask: What is our end game? What would it take for us to be satisfied? Some progressives have a clear sense of this. Others do not. In the latter case, dissatisfaction with the present is built into their modus operandi. For this group, to be a progressive is always to compare the present to an unrealized and often unrealizable standard, thereby providing a reason to keep on fighting the good fight.
https://areomagazine.com/2020/11/10/why-progressives-downplay-progress/
"Meanwhile, I can’t help feel the world has missed a golden opportunity. Both Brexit and Trump should have been a wake-up call and an invitation to self-examination- as well as an examination of indiscriminate immigration systems which fail to protect the jobs of those who are incapable of performing the types of highly skilled or cognitively challenging roles, which no advanced economy produces in sufficient numbers to fill their existing needs. Other than Australia, most Western countries have singularly failed to secure the interests of their most economically precarious citizens.
In this scenario, the Biden decision to raise minimum wages paired with pro-immigration reform, can surely be seen as tantamount to inviting more people to a game of musical chairs and removing at least a tenth of the chairs. Of course, Andrew Yang was half-right- in all likelihood perhaps half of the decimation of jobs for working age males was automation, but the other half was low-skilled migration with a sprinkling of bad trade deals.
The correct response to Trump and Brexit was to think more, to learn more, to examine our sacred cows, and if necessary, slaughter them. Above all, we should have tried our hardest to walk a mile in the other guys shoes and poke holes in the imaginary bogeymen and cardboard cutouts, with which we stereotype each other.
I could point out that the ADL estimates their are only 11,000 active white supremacists, with large portions forming within prisons. I could make the Steven Pinker claim that only 5% to 10% of Americans are still racist, adding the qualifier that two-thirds are over 65.
But instead lets look at progressives- and perhaps Steelman just a tad. Many are primarily focused on the issue along class lines and through the lens of economic fairness. Of those who do look at cultural issues from the perspective of CRT or intersectional oppression, most are simply well-intentioned followers who simply can’t bare to look deeper to the real root causes.
Some honestly believe that money is the only issue required to fix public education- not realising that structurally it’s no longer fit for purpose. Or might be willing to concede the need to reread Jude the Obscure, to realise that some progress can only be made from the secure base of strong communities, largely consisting of two-parent families, and achieved over more than one generation.
We need to start to examine just how susceptible various political systems are susceptible to bad actors, and just how much clickbait legacy media and technological changes, have made our once stable democracies just as prone to manipulation by the worst of us as the twin threats posed during the Twentieth century."
Comment from Geary_Johansen2020 on https://quillette.com/2021/01/20/big-tech-and-regulation-a-response-to-the-quillette-editors/
The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s—when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice—remains unfulfilled.
As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies—racism, sexism, militarism—liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern America from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America’s minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated aim: true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country’s least fortunate citizens. Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism.
Shermer and Steele discuss:
30th anniversary of his book The Content of Our Character, and what has changed in race relations in America in those 30 years?
Steele’s response to President Johnson’s famous quote:
“Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him; bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”why “The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.”,
literal truths vs. poetic truths and power:
“What actually happened was that liberalism turned to poetic truth when America’s past sins were no longer literally true enough to support liberal policies and the liberal claim on power. The poetic truth of black victimization seeks to compensate for America’s moral evolution. It tries to keep alive the justification for liberal power even as that justification has been greatly nullified by America’s moral development.”
political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth,black families & fatherless homes,white guilt,race fatigue,reparations,anti-racism,achievement gap,Princeton racism letter,race and IQ,SAT tests,BLM and the nuclear family,training and sensitivity programs.
Shermer and Steele also discuss his new film, produced with his son Eli Steele, titledWhat Killed Michael Brown?
Steele:
“We human beings never use race except as a means to power. Race is never an end. It is always a means, and it has no role in human affairs except as a corruption.”
“America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power. Whether for good or ill, race is a corruption. Always. And it always turns one group into the convenience of another group.”
“Liberalism’s great sin was to steal responsibility for black problems away from black people, leaving them vulnerable to destructive social forces, such as the drug epidemic of the 70s and 80s. It was the suffering of blacks that justified liberalism’s demand for power, but this only relegates blacks to permanent victimhood and alienates them from the power to uplift themselves.”
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Winner of the Bradley Prize and a National Humanities Medal and the author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winningThe Content of Our Character, Steele lives in the Central Coast of California.
https://www.skeptic.com/science-salon/shelby-steele-shame-how-americas-past-sins-have-polarized-our-country-and-what-killed-michael-brown/
Many on The Left hold one or more of the following views:
(1) there is no objective reality
(2) there is no scientific or historical truth
(3) science and technology are not vehicles of human progress but suspect instruments of established power
(4) reason and logic are not universally valid
(5) there is no such thing as human-nature/human-behavior. Gender and psychology are socially constructed
(6) language does not refer to a reality outside itself
(7) there is no certain knowledge; and
(8) no general theory of the natural or social world can be valid or true, all are illegitimate.
Given this strict set of beliefs it is impossible to have a constructive conversation with people on the left.
