Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Advocating Progress
Don Quixote on Jan 23 2010 at 1:54 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
The comment section of the first part of this three-part entry took an unexpected, but welcome, turn when someone asked what the word “progress” meant. Having not really considered the matter, I took it as a given that “progress” meant advancement toward a goal and that “Progress” meant the acquisition and use of knowledge to advance toward what, without thinking, I thought pretty much everyone would want mankind to advance toward – things like health, peace, prosperity, freedom, technological innovation, happiness. But the conversation turned to metaphysics with, as usual, the Bookwormroom readers showing their great depth and insight.
Whatever Progress means to each of us, my suggestion, and the ultimate point of this “thought” is that conservatives have done themselves and their cause a disservice by abandoning the idea of Progress as we understood it in the 50s and 60s and letting the leftists define the terms of engagement.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the health care debate. As was discussed in the last comment, the American free-enterprise health care system has has done more to save lives and improve the quality of lives that any health care system ever. The leftists want to destroy this system and replace it with a government controlled system that will stifle the creativity needed to produce the innovations that save lives and improve the quality of life.
Of course, they don’t talk about destroying the goose that lays the golden eggs. They talk about unequal access to health care. They re-define health care as a right, something it has never been anywhere in the history of humanity. They harp on the unfairness of it all. Critically, we largely accept the leftist’s definition of terms and fight the battle on their battlefield. We talk about the fact, undoubtedly true, that, everywhere government health care has been tried, it has resulted in long waiting periods and, in effect, rationed health care. We talk about death counselling and about the fact that once government takes over, it will attempt to eliminate from the system those who place the most demands on it, in the name of providing better service to the community as a whole.
We talk a lot about how bad things will be under the new system. But we don’t talk very much about how amazing, how extraordinary, how revolutionarily successful, the old system has been! Yes, distribution of the new medical advances is uneven. Yes, the system is expensive (though compared to the value received it’s a bargain). But the majority who have unrestricted access to the system receive health care that could only have been dreamed of 50 years ago. Even those who are limited to emergency access and access to public hospitals receive far better service that anyone received 50 years ago. Rather than taking this remarkable system for granted, we should shout from the rooftops about the millions of lives it has saved, the millions of others it has improved the quality of. We should be asking the leftists whether they are willing to destroy this system in the name of equal access. We should demand that in modifying the health care system our politicians follow the health care provider’s creed of first doing no harm to this extraordinary system.
We can certainly accept more equal access to the benefits of the system as a legitimate goal. But we should demand that any solution not compromise the existing goals of the system of constantly improving the ability to save lives and improve the quality of lives. We should remind the leftists, and the public at large, of the many procedures that were life-threatening just a few years ago and are now routinely out-patient procedures, of the many diseases that have been eradicated or made far less threatening by the development of vaccines and drugs, of the many treatments and technologies that simply didn’t exist a few years ago and would not now exist if not for the American health care system.
We all know what benefits the American system has provided. When I started this series of posts, I hadn’t yet looked to see how many Americans received the Nobel Prize for medicine. But without even looking I would have bet Americans would dominate the list. Of course they did. Would any one of you have doubted it, even without looking? So why don’t we talk about this more? Why are we so willing to fight on the leftists’ battlefield, arguing about what, if anything, can be gained from the new system, and nearly ignoring the huge benefits of the old system that are threatened by the change?
At least in medicine, and I suspect in most things, most Americans want “progress” (in the sense of advancing toward goals that most people want, like improved ways to save lives and improve the quality of our lives). We’ll be more successful, if we tailor our arguments to take advantage of that fact.
Related posts:
- Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Progress in three parts
- Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Progress part 2
- Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Sound and Fury
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A week or so ago, I quoted from Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz”…
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew into richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they-this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.”
The bizarre reactions to “Avatar” (some people have fallen into severe depression, and even considered suicide, because they could not permanantly *live inside the film*, seems to be sort of a longing for the Garden of Eden…
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11227.html
I just saw this at Fox:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583670,00.html?test=latestnews
It sounds like the world governance crew wants to get into the control game too. John Bolton, where are you?
Well, DQ, you gave the perfect post, and David Foster explained why we’ve been diverted better than I could! I’d say that it’s human nature to take for granted the things that are good and that succeed around us, and complain about what is bad or lacking. Perhaps the quality of my life could be determined by what I complain about.
Heh, Mike!
The Princess and the Pea???
Where was this echo chamber of yours, again, DQ?
David Foster – “The bizarre reactions to “Avatar” (some people have fallen into severe depression, and even considered suicide, because they could not permanantly *live inside the film*, seems to be sort of a longing for the Garden of Eden…”
Heh! Paradise lost! I wonder if really is ingrained in our DNA and that Man’s historical fascination with flight (breaking the bonds of gravity) draws from coded memories of when we were angels. Why do all people from all cultures share such allegories?
David Foster’s link in #1 can take you to comments that are interesting concerning why people immerse themselves in a virtual reality and don’t want to leave it.
And you have got to read the comments of some of these people he’s talking about, concerning “Avatar”!
From:
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/ecollywood/stories/avatar-brings-depression-and-suicidal-thoughts-to-some-moviegoers
Feelings expressed on the Web have ranged from an extreme desire to escape reality to thoughts of suicide. Ivar Hill is a 17-year-old from Sweden who is studying game design. As he described his post-Avatar experience, “When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning.” Further, his thoughts took a grim turn. “I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”
I live in a dying world?!?!?
A user named Mike takes it a dark step further. As Mike wrote on the forum, “I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar. “
And the article’s conclusion:
There is some good news out of Pandora. The fan community of Avatar is reaching out to its depressed members. They are encouraging people to seek positive and constructive activities outside the virtual realm. As CNN reports, “becoming a part of a community of like-minded people on an online forum has helped them emerge from the darkness.”
Hey, Ivar and Mike! How about taking a trip to Haiti, and walking a mile in those shoes… A little thing called “perspective” may help you with your own personal Reset button.
expat’s link in #2 is WELL worth the read! My God!
By the time you get to the end… the specificity of all the ways in which these international bureaucrats are enviously contemplating trying to cheat people of their hard-earned cash promote responsible use of human monetary resources…
When I got to this paragraph, I thought, “Uh-oh”
The full EWG report lays out in some detail a battery of other possible consumer taxes on citizens of rich countries for such things as alcohol and tobacco use, weapons sales, and airline travel, to create a burgeoning medical R&D industry spread across the developing world.
And then:
The Internet or “digital” tax offered up as an example by the EWG would amount to 1 cent per 100 emails, yielding a conservative $3 billion a year. It “might be appealing to politicians and consumers, who will accept a low tax across a broad base with an altruistic purpose.” But almost in the same breath, the document observes a complication, that “introducing a new tax or expanding an existing tax may require legal changes, nationally and internationally, and ongoing regulation to ensure compliance.”
“… ongoing regulation to ensure complaince.” That’s where any humor I’d retained, reading this article, left me.
“…conservatives have done themselves and their cause a disservice by abandoning the idea of Progress as we understood it in the 50s and 60s and letting the leftists define the terms of engagement.” – DQ
I think the left has so intertwined the concept of progress with social justice the idea of returning to a materialistic definition is likely to be rejected as too selfish.
That and the fact we are entering into a new dark age of anti-technologists. Remember the lefts idea of technical progress is windmills.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying– I’m not sure I want to link it to “progress” given how the left has co-opted the word.
As has been said before nowadays, progress=fairness.
“A central paradox of American progressivism arises from the divergence between its democratic aspirations and its aristocratic ambitions. On the one hand, progressives sought to democratize American politics by putting government in the service of, and giving greater say to, the people. On the other hand, they favored the enlargement of a distant national government, and the creation of an administrative elite that reduced popular accountability.
In the progressive classic The Promise of American Life (1914), Herbert Croly identified the source of this paradox with startling candor. Centralization and elite control were necessary to advance democratic ends because American constitutional government was based on “erroneous and misleading ideas,” and “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
The new progressivism is not so bold. Or rather, it boldly seeks to obscure its awkward combination of egalitarianism and elitism through a rhetoric of reform that presents partisan and eminently debatable goals as dictates of reason, practical imperatives, or truths of the heart. Academic schools have arisen to refine this rhetoric, and President Obama has brought leading representatives into his administration.
For example, former Yale Law School Dean and now State Department legal counsel Harold Koh is a prominent advocate of transnationalism, which purports to derive universal principles of international law from moral reflection on the conduct of states, and vests power to enforce these derivations in unaccountable foreign courts and officials.
Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, now head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has championed pragmatism, a theoretical approach popular among law professors and political theorists that overtly reduces questions of principle to questions of what works, and then covertly transforms these into questions of what works to advance progressive goals.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, like President Obama, extols empathy. Law professors have burnished the idea that empathy for the ways of ordinary people based, however, on experiences of exclusion and oppression available only to minorities and women, provides grounds for deciding the hardest constitutional law questions.
All three approaches equate the progressive agenda with justice itself. All three provide rationales for circumventing people’s expressed preferences. And all three present end runs around voters’ wishes as higher, purer forms of democracy.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-new-progressivism-same-as-the-old-progressivism/2/
I recognize that progress and progressivism aren’t the same, but I think it is confusing to try and confuse Joe Sixpack by, on one hand extolling our “progress” while at the same time railing against “progressivism”.
We need to shine a bright light on progressivism and its current incarnation for the statist, elitist and anti-democratic movement it is.
It claims justice as it’s goal, but delivers elitist authoritarianism instead. It is dishonest and dangerous.
In the progressive classic The Promise of American Life (1914), Herbert Croly identified the source of this paradox with startling candor. Centralization and elite control were necessary to advance democratic ends because American constitutional government was based on “erroneous and misleading ideas,” and “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.”
For this reason alone, what passes itself off as intellectualism should be repulsed for the sham it is. I’m not anti-intellectual, but navel gazing and the cocktail elitists debating “what the meaning of is is” should be exposed for the sham it is.
It’s just plain snobbery.