Progressivism (1)

What is progressivism? According to Wikipedia: "the support for or advocacy of the improvement of society by reform." This may be true, but the emphasis is oddly placed. Who's not for improving society? If reform will get the job done, who wouldn't support it?

Here's a definition I find more revealing: Progressivism is the belief that, by dint of constant effort, injustices can gradually be eliminated, the world made progressively better. The key word, of course, is "progressively." Very few people would deny that great effort can occasionally make the world better. The controversial and therefore defining element of the progressive position is the belief that this improvement can be sustained over time, that the improvements can be made to accumulate.

For the progressive, then, having a society is like doing science. Or perhaps I should say: a scientist is a type of progressive. In a science, knowledge piles up. Error is gradually removed. Science progresses.

But there is another kind of insight—let's call it “wisdom”—that does not work like this. Wisdom does not accumulate. It resides in ancient texts as surely as it lies in modern ones, perhaps more surely. Because, in order for something to accumulate, it must stay put. Wisdom will not stay put. It slips away, sneaks off just at the moment one thought one possessed it, leaches out of the very words that it seemed to be composed of and leaves them dry and empty, goes into hiding, reappears somewhere when one was not looking for it, is glimpsed from a new angle and mistaken for something new and strange, then revealed in a flash of understanding to be something old and strangely familiar.

In order for something to accumulate, it also must be transferable. Science is a cumulative project because the moment I discover something, I can tell you about it, and then you have it; you don’t need to go out and discover it again for yourself. You can replicate my experiment, but to replicate is not to discover: it is only to confirm, and thus to reaffirm the communality of scientific knowledge. This is why science is powerful. But this is also why it is anti-human: the individual journey no longer matters. The individual is displaced from the center of thought to its periphery. The project of learning, of discovering, of knowing, becomes one in the service of which individuals may act, but whose result, whose purpose, whose subject lies beyond any individual.

But wisdom does not work this way. Wisdom cannot be transferred. It is perfectly possible for you to tell me, in the plainest words you know, what you have discovered in the way of wisdom and for those words to mean nothing to me, or—worse still—to mean something entirely different to me than they mean to you.

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