Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Progress in three parts
Don Quixote on Jan 21 2010 at 5:10 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
I grew up in the 50s & 60s, when “progress” was a popular and positive term. Indeed, progress was all around us — in our homes, our cars, our televisions, our hospitals, even our kitchen appliances. We were headed to the moon and beyond. Sometimes, progress was a little scary; we had harnessed the power of the atom and used it to build the ultimate bomb. But even then, we had created the United Nations, giving us hope that the whole world would progress to the point where we no longer needed the bomb, where perpetual peace would be interrupted only by the occasional “police action.” As a society we believed that, in the youngster’s phrase, ”every day, in every way, we’re getting better and better.”
Even the flower children were truly, if unrealistically, optimistic. They truly believed that a new age was dawning, one in which ”peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars.”
My how we have lost that optimism. We don’t hear much about “progress” any more. In fact, we seem mostly to be resigned to the fact that progress is about over and our best days are behind us, not ahead of us. I’ll talk tomorrow about one striking example of how this guides our politics, and more Saturday about how buying into the pessimism hurts the conservative cause. In the meantime, I’d be interested in your thought about where the concept of progress fits in today’s world.
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Problem is, “progress” has mutated into “progressivism” and they are not one and the same at all. It’s the same problem as “liberal” having been co-opted by hard-core freedom-hating leftists.
Perhaps the problem also is, everything we regard as progress is now found by some politically motivated think-tank to cause some new problem. Nuclear power = Three Mile Island or, better yet, Chernobyl. New medical discoveries = higher profits for evil drug companies or more expensive care.
In other words, it’s become socially unacceptable to rejoice in things that make life better. You can’t look on the sunny side because you have to focus on the shadow, and every silver lining has a cloud.
http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_with_Bill_Whittle/They_Stole_Our_Future%2C_But_They_Cannot_Break_Our_Will/2907/
Bill Whittle on pjtv did a piece on this subject recently- as did Bookworm with her Carousel of Progress. They may be “progressive” but they sure aren’t future thinking.
There does seem to be a miasma of “things are not really that good, and maybe worse than they were xx years ago” attitude in the land. And I agree such an attitude is damaging to all arenas of life. Call it a “miasma of mediocracy”.
I believe much of this attitude is the child of the slave collar of political correctness which has been forced on our collective necks, and the lock of moral relativity which has been soldered to the mind of society. Truly free thought is portrayed as an unpermited thing. By all the usual suspects. The MSM, the “Progressives”, those who would like to think they know better than and have the power to control the rest of us.
Anyone in the medical field knows things are getting very much better. Yes, there is the problem of who gets to decide what to do with Grandma, but that is in the political arena which we are starting to correct. We now are routinely vaccinating children against diseases that had to be treated in hospitals 30 years ago. Roughly 2000 children annually do not die now, thanks to those vaccines. The MSM hype about the Swine Flu appearance and response has hidden the fact that we have in place now a system to recognize, analyze, and create a protective vaccine. The data is not all in, and probably will not be for a year, but I will stipulate, without the new vaccine, things would have been much worse. Pediatric surgeons are now learning how to perform fetal procedures to prevent a baby from being born with a meningomyelocele. This is where the babe is born with his spinal cord hanging out a hole in his back. This results in paralysis, retardation, death within ten years.
The miasma of mediocracy is more than just the old perception of half empty vs half full. I am sure it does criple people and hence their lives. This discussion will be interesting.
Thanks, DQ
Al
The late-19th, early-20th century Austrian economist cum Harvard Prof. Joseph Schumpeter described the cycles of capitalism and innovation thus: capitalism gives rise to periods of tremendous creativity and wealth generation. This causes periods of perceived inequality, particularly among those classes of people that are not part of the creative process but must instead feed-off the wealth creation of others (i.e., government workers, laborers, academics, intellectual class), even though wealth creation raises all boats. Among the newly wealthy, this is exacerbated by people’s perceived guilt of having more than others (i.e., limousine liberals). Eventually capitalism’s successes leads to a back-lash against capitalism and its perceived excesses, and you get a movement by the non-productive forces in society to redistribute all the created wealth into their own pockets. When a new equilibrium has been established, the forces of innovation eventually kick in again and begin the new cycle.
The 1950s and 60s ( when I too grew up) were marked by boundless optimism in part because of the tremendous explosion of growth that followed the Depression and WWII. However, the period from about 1930 – 1945 were a period of backlash against the roaring-20s. I propose that we are in the midst of another backlash period that may take some time to work out before the next cycle of growth, innovation and optimism kicks in. I hope that I will be around to enjoy it.
We’ve seen this before – and, oddly enough (or maybe it’s not in the least odd) it seems to accompany “progressive” presences in the White House.
Jimmy Carter, though not remotely the “progressive” (in the sense of out-and-out left-wing tear it all down) the current deep thinker with whom we’re stuck for the next three years turned out to be, shared many of the same traits. He was a self-regarding intellectual, a true believer in his own mental superiority, even more of a believer in his own moral superiority – and a resounding failure. The lack of optimism under Carter was palpable. It was quite obvious that he was overwhelmed by the office, and the best he could do was put on a cardigan, turn the thermostat down, and talk about diminishing expectations and how maybe America’s best days were behind us.
Now we have a new genius – or at least we have someone sold as a genius. (I don’t know what anyone bases that assessment on. I have yet to see a single test result, a single transcript, a single grade from a single encounter with a classroom, a class ranking in law school or anywhere else – how do these people all seem to know this guy is smart – indeed, brilliant? I cynically think to myself: y’know, if he ever stood first in his class – any class, anywhere – we’d have known about that. Instantly. It would have been rammed down our throats as evidence of superiority. That everything is hidden away just makes me wonder… Call me Mr. Suspicious.)
And, as another self-regarding-to-the-point-of-out-and-out-narcissism progressive flash of brilliance sits in the Oval Office, here we go again. This one hasn’t turned the thermostat down and put on a sweater, but he has told us we’ve been arrogant, uninterested in what the world thinks, and too inclined to bully everybody else. Furthermore, the people running the greatest economic engine in the history of the planet apparently haven’t known what they were doing this last decade or so, and he – based on the afore-mentioned no evidence whatsoever – can do it better.
But he hasn’t been doing it better, he’s been doing it worse, and using our money to pay off the endless line of crooks, from ACORN to the SEIU , with which he’s surrounded himself. So here we are, and what used to be referred to as “Carter malaise” can now be updated and re-termed “Obama malaise.” He, being a great deal more involved in himself than Carter was is having somewhat more of a swell time than Carter did – so far. It’s still early.
But the rest of us? We’re right back to 1978, and where has the optimism and faith in the future gone?
Over the holidays, I re-read Steinbeck’s “The Leader of the People,” which is basically about the closing of the American frontier… ***
Jody hardly knew when Grandfather started to talk. “I shouldn’t stay here, feeling the way I do.” He examined his strong old hands. “I feel as though the crossing wasn’t worth doing.” His eyes moved up the side-hill and stopped on a motionless hawk perched on a dead limb. “I tell those old stories, but they’re not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them.
“It wasn’t Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn’t been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head.
“Under the little bushes the shadows were black at white noonday. When we saw the mountains at last, we cried—all of us. But it wasn’t getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering.
“We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed. “Then we came down to the sea, and it was done.” He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. “That’s what I should be telling instead of stories.”
When Jody spoke, Grandfather started and looked down at him. “Maybe I could lead the people some day,” Jody said.
The old man smiled. “There’s no place to go. There’s the ocean to stop you. There’s a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.”
“In boats I might, sir.”
“No place to go, Jody. Every place is taken. But that’s not the worst—no, not the worst. Westering has died out of the people. Westering isn’t a hunger any more. It’s all done. Your father is right. It is finished.” He laced his fingers on his knee and looked at them. *** Grandfather was (in a sense) wrong, of course: the physical frontier might have closed, but many other frontiers opened…in business, in technology, in many areas. But I worry that there now *is* a closing of the frontier in a psychological sense. One of the symbols of this is that the word “cowboy” is now used as a term of opprobrium, whereas as recently as the 1950s & 1960s even the Left tried to latch on to what was then a very positive cowboy archtype.
Very true, David.
I see it as “It isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”. You may need the goal to put your heart and soul into playing the game – whatever the particular game is – but then when all is said, it’s really all about the heart and soul you put into it, not about what you accomplish. What you’re saying, though, is something a bit difference – it’s about a need “to go where no man has gone before”. Remember that old campfire song about “The bear went over the mountain”? Something like that…
My grandson asked me over the holidays who I thought the two greatest men in history were. Tough question, no? My answer wasn’t what he expected (we had, after all, been doing a lot of political discussing) – the two greatest men? the unknown hero who made the first wheel, and Thomas Crapper. Civilization owes everything to the two of them.
When I consider where we are, and where we may progress to, I keep finding myself coming back to the Tower of Babel. Is there something there we need to learn? I think there is, but I’m not sure what the lesson is.
What do you mean by progress?
I remember having a debate with a friend in high school on this very subject.
He argued there was no progress, only innovation. I think he was right.
>>What do you mean by progress?>>
Heh. Good question.
>>He argued there was no progress, only innovation.>>
That’s worth some thought…!
That is a great question! My off-the-top-of-my-head answer is that progress is advancement in the knowledge of mankind and the use of that knowledge by mankind.
C S Lewis argued that most “progress” really just represents a transfer of power from one group of people to another…radio, for example, shifts power from the “masses” who become listeners to those who control the programming; birth control shifts power from the next generation to the current one.
I agree with Lewis about a lot of stuff, but not this. Like everything he wrote, though, it’s worth thinking about.
How about if we define progress as a positive move toward the perfection of mankind.
We can split the atom and put it back together, harness anti-gravity, heck, even discover how to make the perfect cup of coffee, but none of that is going to change the nature of man.
I think we can agree we’re not smarter than we were 5,000 years ago. Yes, we’ve built on the knowledge of the previous generation and made cool things with that knowledge, but are we any closer to understanding who God is?
What if quantum mechanics is merely an attempt to describe God? Will we be any closer to perfecting ourselves?
What we are seeing is innovation, merely innovation.
As I mentioned, I see “progress” as the acquisition of knowledge and the use of that knowledge, for good or evil. In the 50s and 60s in America at any rate, progress thus defined had a mostly positive spin. Most people believed that advances in knowledge would result in the betterment of humanity. To take one example, advances in medicine would save lives and improve the quality of life of millions of people. This doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding who God is (assuming God exists at all) or to perfecting ourselves, but it is far more than mere innovation. It has real world consequences for the betterment of humanity.
I suppose it is because I grew up in the 50s and 60s that I tend to share this bias and to think of the acquisition of knowledge as a good thing, in and of itself, while acknowledging that it is possible that knowedge is a dangerous or bad thing (we could blow ourselves up or we could eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil).
But the idea that changing the nature of man, perfection or knowledge of God are the only goals worth progressing toward, and that everything else is mere innovation, is far too limiting.
As I mentioned, I see “progress” as the acquisition of knowledge and the use of that knowledge, for good or evil.
I guess I wouldn’t credit any knowledge used for evil as progress.
What’s the purpose of life? Until we answer that, we can’t measure whether anything we’re doing is progress or not, assuming that you’ll agree that progress is a measure of where we are on the path to that goal.
Besides what’s wrong with innovation. I have great fondness for innovation and all the gadgets that innovation has produced.
But as to progress. In spite of the advances in medicine, don’t most people die from things they could prevent without medicine? And can’t some of the exponential growth of cancer be laid at the feet of our progress?
If we say that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is the goal, and certainly the political philosophy founded to achieve this goal has done as much as humanly possible for more persons than any other humanly devised system in the history of the world, how’s the progress?
Humans are clever beings and from clever beings come clever ideas. We’re naturally inquisitive (for the most part) and there is nothing wrong with wanting to know something for the sole purpose of knowing it.
But is the advancement of knowledge– of knowing facts that eluded previous generations progress? Or is progress, as you define it, predicated on how the knowledge is used?
Unless I’m misunderstanding your premise, doesn’t all of this just lead to more stuff, or did we just get distracted by all the stuff?
Leaving this little exercise in semantics aside, you’re premise that we’ve lost the sense of optimism that was the core of being American is real.
The Vietnam war raised doubts and the left capitalized on that doubt and have never let up from their stranglehold on American optimism.
IMO, it pervades the American psyche as the result of 40 years methodical indoctrination of America’s failings. Nothing America has done is sufficient as preached by the left. We’ve done more good for more people than any other country in history and we’re reminded that someone somewhere suffered in spite of our efforts.
The world is falling apart. We’re killing the planet and we’re to blame. Someone somewhere doesn’t have enough of something and it’s our fault.
This self-hatred can be resisted for only so long. It produced the malaise that Carter railed against. America jumped at the chance to elect an optomistic president and for a while we laid aside all our failures and enjoyed our success. As Obama has reveled in the same swamp of self-loathing as Carter, America will respond to the next president that can shake off the lethargy and remind us of all that we have done, and can still do that makes us unique in the world history.
Merely having or developing technology isn’t progressing towards a better humanity. Becoming deserving of such things is still a prerequisite above all else.
Until human factions learn to use technology and power wisely, there’s no point taking the next step because it would be inherently self-destructive. Then you’d be progressing towards entropy, rather than the other end.
>>How about if we define progress as a positive move toward the perfection of mankind.>>
Heh. If that’s the definition, then we haven’t progressed at all!! Read the gospels, read the old testament and you can hardly reach any conclusion other than mankind is still the same mankind that existed in those times! Indeed, we may have more technical accomplishments, but we’re still the same human beings we were 10,000 years ago or so…
Knowledge does not equal morality.
Morality is necessary to come closer to God.
Knowledge is a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to coming closer to God. It can, but it doesn’t always – in fact, it can draw one away from God…
In fact…I can’t help thinking that might be the lesson of the Adam and Eve – the aquisition of knowledge leading to the elevation of self to deity status?
So…what is progress. More thought required!
Longer and healthier lives are more than just “stuff.”
I do appreciate the question of whether progress has a moral component. Personally, I don’t believe that the existance of God cannot ever be “known” emperically, but, hypothetically, if there were no God, and knowledge could and did grow to a point where God was proven not to exist to the point that God’s non-existence would be believed by as many people as believe that we can’t fly by flapping our arms or any other impossibility, would gaining the knowledge of God’s non-existence be “progress”?
Now look at it the other way. Assume there is a God and that our knowledge could and did grow to the point that we could prove that God exists such that as high a percentage of people would believe the proof as believe that the Sun (or gravity or Obama or anything else physical) exists. Would that be “progress”? Suek is right, “More thought required.”
>>Would that be “progress”?>>
Maybe. But the entire muslim world believes in Allah. No question in their minds.
I guess you heard about the 13 yr old schoolgirl who will be subjected to 90 lashes of the whip for bringing a cellphone to school…
I don’t think knowledge is enough.
I should have said:
“…the entire world _knows_ that Allah exists…”
It is not belief – it is knowledge. They’ll tell you so.
You’re under the mistaken impression, DQ, that God’s existence exists for somebody to prove. In point of fact, it’s the other way around. A person has to prove that they are worthy of knowing the existence of God.
It’s a reversal of cause and effect.
“A person has to prove that they are worthy of knowing the existence of God.” I respect this as a statement of religious belief, but what is your authority? Why should I believe you when you say this? I was brought up in a Presbyterian/Luthern household in which I was taught that we can never prove we are worthy of knowing God; it is only by His grace that we unworthy souls might know Him.
Brian E #15 said it better than I ever could:
> This self-hatred can be resisted for only so long. It produced the malaise that Carter railed against. America jumped at the chance to elect an optomistic president and for a while we laid aside all our failures and enjoyed our success. As Obama has reveled in the same swamp of self-loathing as Carter, America will respond to the next president that can shake off the lethargy and remind us of all that we have done, and can still do that makes us unique in the world history.
I think if any of you are suffering from an excess of pessimism, try turning off that 24-7 blather that is issueing from your TV. Turn off the TV! Far too much of it is excess hype of every sort, designed to keep you tuned in. It’s debilitating. I’ve watched only football and golf over the last 1 1/2 years; then on Tuesday I turned the TV on to catch the national zeitgeist over the election. As of yesterday, my TV went back off. I’d had enough. I’ll continue to get my news, at my speed, from the Web. And there’s little left of football, and without ‘The Good Tiger’, not much interest for me in golf either. My TV’s going to be very, very quiet over the next six months.
<B>I respect this as a statement of religious belief, but what is your authority?</b>
What’s the authority of a parent telling their children what is or is not curfew or grounds for punishment? What’s the authority of society for setting rules of behavior. What’s the authority that allows a state or a nation to declare a legitimate drinking age for everybody, regardless of individual maturity or extenuating circumstances? The fundamental argument for not telling younger people about a subject is that they aren’t ready to hear that subject. There are a lot of tangential arguments that can be made relating to this subject concerning politics, morality, or common sense, but that’s not something they all share in common. They all share in common the simple fact that people aren’t ready because they wouldn’t need to ask somebody else for permission/power if they could do it themselves. If people could live without laws or a nation, they wouldn’t need laws and thus wouldn’t have to obey drinking laws. If children were ready for knowledge beyond their years, they would already have it and be able to make use of it wisely. The fact that they don’t have the knowledge and can’t or won’t use it wisely, is proof by itself that they are not ready.
Trying to prove the existence of God is a futile measure, because it’s like traveling to the other side of the universe. You can theorize and create logic traps, but the whole point is not about God, it is about yourself. You want to prove something to yourself, and whatever you find at the end is either 1. meaningless or 2. impossible. When you have figured out a way to travel to the other side of the universe, when you have already traveled to the other side of the universe, then you’re ready for the knowledge of ‘what’s there’ or awareness of being there. Until then, it can be easily spelled out that a person is not ready since he hasn’t been to the other side of the universe.
<B>it is only by His grace that we unworthy souls might know Him.</b>
That’s predestination or inshallah. Christianity has many different theological implications. Predestination is only one of them and it isn’t even a major one. Predestination says that no matter how much you try, your worth or lack of worth has already been judged. This is then shown in terms of human subjective qualities as wealth or benefits. It is thus, subjective, and as a theological doctrine on the nature of god, often in conflict with free will and human potential.
<B>Why should I believe you when you say this?</b>
That’s like asking why should you believe water is ready to change states. Obviously, when it happens. The empirical question of God’s existence is meaningless. True empiricism is about what has happened in the present, not what can happen. Verification of hypothesis must come from this reality. Without verification, you cannot verify the hypothesis. The good news is that humanity doesn’t need verified hypothesis in order to believe. We often find the best outcome and believe we can reach it, regardless of what facts tell us. That’s called human determination and it is at the root of human innovation as well. The belief that, always, one can do something a little bit better than what the status quo says is feasible. Then there is human invention, which says that what people believe is impossible is simply because people lack the imagination to create that reality from what is available: human flight.
Whether you believe in it or not is not what actually matters. When a person makes his dream into reality, then something important has happened.
“Knowledge is a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to coming closer to God. It can, but it doesn’t always – in fact, it can draw one away from God…”.This comment in itself invites contemplation.
Knowledge gives us tools but I am not sure that thousands of years of knowledge have made us any wiser or morally better than our forebears (one reason why the Book of Proverbs is my favorite part of the Old Testament: it demonstrates so pungently that people “back then” were no different than we are today).
So, we have much better technology in medicine and war and our ability to use them for good and bad has expanded exponentially. However, I don’t believe that our ability and will to distinguish between right and wrong has changed other than in a religious context.
Ymar – I don’t know from what religious tradition if any you draw, but to DQ’s point: an underlying tenet of the Christian faith is God’s unconditional love for us. It is up to us to accept it or reject it. This is one of the central points that makes Christianity absolutely incompatible with Islam.
<B>an underlying tenet of the Christian faith is God’s unconditional love for us.</b>
I would say that is a tangent. And the reason is simple. The question of whether God exists and what kind of existence God would be, are two different issues. Because Christianity has already discarded the former, they concentrate on the latter. In point of fact, this method may be a useful reverse engineering exercise. By finding out what God’s existence would be like, in terms of emotions or goals, one may also find out whether such a god exists or not.
Christianity has some theological arguments on why God exists. But for the most part, it’s not such a big deal or priority.
<B> Ymar – I don’t know from what religious tradition if any you draw</b>
I don’t draw from any specific tradition. I was not raised in any particular mold or ideology. I can and have been influenced, much as I have been influenced philosophically by such as Ayn Rand, but I do not ascribe to that which I won’t accept as true. And it’s not because I was raised this way, but because I chose this way.
Given Christianity’s focus on the value of free will, that’s not such a handicap in the end.
The path to God is many, because if God was a physical manifestation then such a phenomenon would be one or two dimensional, rather than multi-dimensional in scope. The point made that God works in mysterious ways or is mysterious, is valid. Thus I do not accept the metaphysical argument that God has love, while I do accept the impact of people who have benefited from God’s love. The contradiction is very simple to explain. I don’t need to believe in death to feel it or to see it or to recognize when it has happened. The two things are different metaphysical beliefs, an ultimate truth and simply an observational truth. Or to put it another way, my epistemology says that knowing ultimate truth is not feasible with our current limitations while knowing the lives of single humans is very well within our capabilities.
P.S. But again, I must mention that the question of whether God exists and the question of what kind of existence God has, are two different issues. It’s not like cause and effect, where you need one to get the other one. If you have an answer to one of the issues, you get an implicit answer for the other one.
I’ll clarify the death example. Regardless of who you talk to or what they believe in concerning the afterlife, all can recognize Death when it happens. That’s because the recognition of death as a state happening to an individual or a thing is within our capabilities. Perceiving the afterlife is not at this time.
Even though it seems like we’re talking about the same subject, in metaphysical constraints we are not. The ultimate truth of whether God loves or has love, and the limited human truth that a single person can have God’s love, are not exactly the same thing.
Danny Lemieux #26:
> DQ’s point: an underlying tenet of the Christian faith is God’s unconditional love for us. It is up to us to accept it or reject it. This is one of the central points that makes Christianity absolutely incompatible with Islam.
I’ve never read the Koran or any of the hadiths (?) supporting it. Danny’s point would be that Allas does not have unconditional love for us. I am in the unenviable position, then, of having to accept by faith Danny’s statement (pun intended!) – or investigate and try to prove it correct one way or another.
What would you all say are the reasons that Allah should be considered to not have unconditional love for each of us in mankind?
I read the two main Wikipedia articles on Islam and Allah. If one accepts what is written there as “truth” – hardly recommended – then it would be *reasonable* to follow a form of belief in Allah that allows you to believe Allah does have unconditional love for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah
(section 2.2, first paragraph only)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam
(top paragraphs 1,3, particularly where the words merciful and compassionate are used)
Some Christians, sincere in their beliefs, have used Old Testament quotes to justify a variety of things we now consider evil. Clearly our current Islamic jihadists are engaged in a vast evil. And I’m not making a morally relativistic argument here, because I believe Islam has been used through, I’d estimate, 95% of its history to engage in widespread acts of evil – the occasionally benign or even benevolent ruler-mullah accounting for the rare 5% – while the percentage for Christianity being employed as the justification for evil has historically been far, far, FAR lower. (If I’m wrong, I always welcome the counter-example and argument! That’s the far easier path to wisdom than self-correction ;-)
MikeD…under Islam, God loves you as long as you “submit” (Islam means submission). Otherwise you are to be destroyed. Of all the religious texts with which I am familiar, Islam is the only one that openly advocates doing violence against non-believers.
For a summary of the Sura and Hadith, here is a site that you might want to peruse.
http://www.letusreason.org/islam12.htm
Although I would consider all Koranic translations as suspect, I can vouch for a good number of these quotes, recognizing them based upon my reading of the Koran many years ago, using an English-language Koran given to me by a Kuwaiti friend. No need to elaborate further except to say that I was not impressed with the Koran.
I cannot for the moment recall which U.S. terrorism expert made this comment, but it was to the effect that one of the hard lessons of 9/11 that we have to accept is that the Jihadis are following the Koran to the letter and that the real issue is not Islamic extremism, but Islam’s very core and nature. The Jihadis are the “true” Muslims.
Also, one final point: the Christian New Testament and Torah are considered God-inspired and therefore open to interpretation. No such luck with the Koran: as often contradictory as it is, it is considered to be the direct written word of God through his scribe, Mohammad. It is not open to interpretation (although the Hadith commentary are).
I want to emphasize, though, that my disdain for Islam as a religion does not translate into disdain for Muslims. There are good and bad people in all religions and I try to value each individual on their own merits. I have met and been good friends with very kind, generous and open-minded Muslims. Like many professed Christians, there are many, many Muslims who are utterly unfamiliar with the precepts of their own religion, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the Koran is written and read in a very traditional form of Arabic that is incomprehensible to people in non-Arabic countries and, in fact, to many Arabic speakers. This last point is a bit akin to the fact that the Western Bible used to only be available in Latin, and for which interpretation was rigidly controlled through a Catholic political power structure until Martin Luther appeared on the scene and changed things.
Incidentally, according to former-Muslim friends (i.e., converted Christians), many Muslims familiar with Western values are appalled with Islam once they learn more about what the Koran says (which includes killing of all apostates). They tell me that there is a tremendous underground Christian movement in the Middle East, even as openly professed Christians are being oppressed and driven out of Muslim lands.
Going back to the “progress” issue.
After giving it some thought, I’ve decided that the word itself is meaningless unless it’s tied to a goal. So, we have to decipher what goal is being specified before we can determine what “progress” is. Going back to DQ’s original point, I think that the goal of Progressives is equality for all. When they talk about “progress” then, they’re talking about everybody having everything the same. At least, that’s what they would say, I believe. In fact it’s a lie – everybody should have the same things except for _them_ – that’s clear. It’s also a false equality – just because we have the same possessions physically doesn’t mean that what we have is “equal”…a 2000 lb horse needs more calories than a 1000 lb horse – if you give them the same feed, you’re starving one. I’m not sure what the equivalent would be in all sorts of various fields of human endeavor, but I’m certain the principle is valid overall.
We also have human nature to deal with. If we had a means of reaching perfection – which is their goal when they want to take over raising children from parents who are obviously not qualified because they don’t have adequate training or psychological degrees in child care – then we wouldn’t have problems like greed, jealousy and other evil (and which they also view as evil, even if from a slightly different perspective) human characteristics. I’ve got news for them…humans are humans. Perfection other than that which can be obtained by individual self discipline is simply not possible. In this respect, I think Progressivism has a common link to islam, in that they think they can impose a common morality by means of laws. Do you think they’d be willing to enforce morality by the same extreme methods? What would keep them from doing so?
They view humans as more like cattle to be enslaved than anybody their equal. A major fundamental disagreement there.
<B>What would keep them from doing so?</b>
Islam fears sexuality and the knowledge of sane relationships. The Left fears physical violence. While Islam feels empowered by violence, the Left feels more empowered by controlling sexual education (FistGate)
>>the Left feels more empowered by controlling sexual education (FistGate)>>
So it seems. However, the rationale for that is that because sex is such a powerful drive, it can be used to destroy the bonds of family, social customs and even laws. If they succeed in destroying the limits placed by social morality, then the only restrictions are those of the State – the law. Beyond that, the sexual appetites can be used to control behavior – by a system of denial and reward. Look at Russia today…look at their birth rates, their abortion rates. Fat lot of good their sexual “freedom” has done them!
In Russia, sexual freedom is translated as human slavery.