The Cancel Culture's Religion: Progressivism

Coopting words for political gain is an art. "Progressives" have done this so well with their label. Positive emotions are elicited by the word, "progressive", and negative feelings go to anyone opposed to anything "progressive". Science shows us that most human decisions are initially influenced by emotions before the logic centers in the brain have a chance to examine a problem, so we may not be able to do much in our efforts to turn people around.

Two years ago in John Gray's post at Unherd, "Liberalism: the other God that failed: Will the post-liberal West suffer the same fate as communism?", I think we can see the root causes of what we today call the "Cancel Culture" and its progressive trajectory,  

"In this alt-liberal ideology, the central values of classical liberalism — personal autonomy and the rejection of tradition in favour of critical reason — are radicalised and turned against the liberal way of life. A heretical cult, alt-liberalism is what liberalism becomes when it tears up its roots in Jewish and Christian religion. Today it is the ruling ideology in much of the academy and media..."

When you try to create your own god, things typically do not go well.

"...alt-liberals appear wholly sincere when they denounce the society that privileges and rewards them. Unlike the Marranos, whose public professions concealed another view of the world, alt-liberals conceal nothing. There is nothing in them to conceal. They are expressing the prevailing western orthodoxy, which identifies western civilization as being uniquely malignant."

It is amazing how, in our country where we are well fed (obesity is endemic) and the poor are richer than most of the world's peoples, the alt-liberals still claim that large numbers of people are starving and poverty stricken.

"Of course, civilizational self-hatred is a singularly western conceit. Non-western countries — China, India and Russia, for example— are increasingly asserting themselves as civilization-states. It is only western countries that denounce the civilization they once represented. But not everything is as it seems. Even as they condemn it, alt-liberals are affirming the superiority of the West over other civilizations. Not only is the West uniquely destructive. It is only the West — or its most advanced section, the alt-liberal elite — that has the critical capacity to transcend itself. But to become what, exactly? Lying behind these intellectual contortions is an insoluble problem."

In other words, our founding fathers were a bunch of white, slave owning, Christian men who created an evil nation to propagate their racist ideology, and only our enlightened modern eyes can see this and only our superior minds can erase that history. But what will replace our representative republic once we have rejected God and country? 

"In his essay in 'The God that Failed' Gide wrote: “My faith in communism is like my faith in religion. It is a promise of salvation for mankind.” Here Gide acknowledged that communism was an atheist version of monotheism. But so is liberalism, and when Gide and others gave up faith in communism to become liberals, they were not renouncing the concepts and values that both ideologies had inherited from western religion. They continued to believe that history was a directional process in which humankind was advancing towards universal freedom."

Now the religion of Cancel Culture will advance humankind and replace our history and our Republic in order to build up a new and better world. "Cancelling" is sounds eerily like the theory of Permanent Revolution of communist Leon Trotsky. How can cancelling ever end once it has become a faith?

How is far has humankind advanced?

We are more efficient at killing one another.

We are more efficient in communicating hatred and sowing division.

Falsehoods spread like wildfire.

We can generate a mob in no time.

The list goes on and on... 

Not all progress is good.

Not all progress moves forward. 

The society that moves away from God progresses to its own doom.