The Religion of Progress Breaking Down, By Brian Simpson

I have noted a couple of articles, in my travels, arguing that the religion of progress is breaking down, one by German academic blogger Eugyppius, being an example below. He makes the point that the ideology of "expectant progressivism," the idea that things are always getting better, "more just, more abundant, more enlightened, more advanced and more human-rightsey," lies behind many social movements from mass immigration (all migrants will increase our diversity, and hence wealth and social capital), to technological utopian adventures in AI and transhumanism. Things will get better because progress is inevitable, and more knowledge will produce more wise living.

But this is hardly so, and is most likely been falsified by the Covid plandemic, which saw the most dramatic failure of health policy, and as well, the failure of the technology of the mRNA vax. The main counter to expectant progressive is that in the longer term, the disutilities and diminishing marginal utility of technologies will become manifested, and the negative consequences will be seen more clearly. Thus, while many love IT and AI, if developments lead in the longer term to the extinction of the human race, it is hardly a benefit: https://josephsansone.substack.com/p/transhumanism-nightmare-continues

Of course, if the entire civilisation collapses, which I think is a more probable bet than a technological utopia, progressivism in all its main forms, falls as well: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328722001768.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-pervasive-belief-in-the-eternall

"The most powerful force in Western politics today is a cultural virus that is always chewing away at our instincts for self-preservation. It is why millions of people support infinity wind turbines and infinity solar panels, even if these make their electricity more expensive and less reliable. It is related to out-group identification and the cultural fetish for victim minorities, and thus explains the popular impulses that permit mass migration. At the broadest level, this force accounts for an important phenomenon in modern politics, whereby millions of people support policies that make their lives objectively worse, while parties responsible for these policies appear utterly immune to their own failures, if they are not actively rewarded for them.

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You might call this force "expectant progressivism." It is the quiet, unstudied belief that things are always getting better, more just, more abundant, more enlightened, more advanced and more human-rightsey. Expectant progressives view the past teleologically, as one massive Whig-historical fable, and they regard their political preferences as investments in moral futures. They aim to put their names on the next brave innovations in social and economic justice while these are still culturally cheap – that is to say, controversial and disputed. Once these innovations become new cornerstones in the liberal consensus, the expectant progressives will be able to cash in on their far-sighted, humanitarian convictions. They will enjoy the privilege of proclaiming that they were, once again, on the right side of history.

Expectant progressivism is as stupid as it is powerful. It is an entire parareligious cultural movement in which millions of ordinary people vote for crazy politicians and shout dumb slogans at stupid protests, imagining themselves to be the modern incarnation of the suffragettes or the abolitionists. It is why Letzte Generation activists are literally taking Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi biographies with them to read in their jail cells. It explains the unending lectures about "the current year" and the constant pressing forward into new spheres of gender nonconformist vegan entomophagic absurdity. The expectant progressive is always acting out a historical morality fable for the benefit of an imaginary approving audience in the future.

Like a financial bubble, expectant progressivism has self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling properties. It aligns the interests of professional activists, who must always begin crusading on behalf of some new cause as soon as they have won the present battle, with millions of ordinary people and their money. Expectant progressivism is why Green policies are robust to bad outcomes: People don't support the Greens because they believe the Greens will improve their lives right now, but because they believe that supporting the Greens will turn out to have been the right thing to do in the future. It's great business if you can get it – campaigning on the strength of distant prophecies about how the world will be one day, while your political opponents get hammered for all the problems of the present.

Where expectant progressivism comes from is one of the most urgent questions in politics. We must know whether we are doomed to live with this cancer forever. In the past I've provided very pessimistic explanations in this area, proposing that expectant progressivism is a long-term consequence of industrialisation and technological advance. Westerners look back upon generations of improvements in their wealth, material comforts and daily conveniences, and draw very naive moral lessons from this apparently unending progress. This theory suggests that expectant progressivism is so deeply rooted in our collective psychology that it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Since the pandemic, however, I begin to wonder whether I have overestimated the robustness of this cultural system, and whether it is an altogether more fragile machine. With every passing month, more evidence accumulates that the general belief in the eternal progress of mankind is starting to break down."