Clearly certain kinds of questions are best answered by the accumulative type of knowledge: how to build a house, how much weight a bridge can hold, how to treat a Streptococcus infection, etc.. These are important questions to which we all sometimes need answers, but they are not the kinds of questions that most of us spend most of our time worrying about. Rather we spend our time worrying about how to navigate relationships—with other people, with the various parts of ourselves, and with various Other Things that may or may not be part of ourselves. This is not irrational or neurotic of us: it is in these relationships that we in fact find nearly all of the satisfaction and joy and misery and terror that are our lot in life.
Over the past 150 years and especially in the past 50, a lot of effort has gone into producing scientific answers to questions about these types of relationships. Approaches have varied. At one time surveying “test-groups” and “control-groups” was in vogue. Now I hear neural imaging’s all the rage. And there’s a lot of popular reporting, in magazines and on websites, on the supposed insights provided by these methods. However, no one I know has actually found any of it useful in answering questions like, “Should I marry the person I’m dating?” or “Why does my job seem so meaningless?” or even “How do I talk to my roommate about the dishes issue?” and “Should I go home for Thanksgiving?”
Will accumulative knowledge someday be found that bears on these sorts of questions? You may choose to keep an open mind and say that it might, but, if you are not entirely fanatical, you will have to admit that it also might not. That is, the questions to which we are most eager to find answers may be matters not of knowledge, but of wisdom. If they are, this is no threat to science, so long as science is content to speak only on those subjects about which it can speak. So long as it is content to be only one little system, not the whole System of Everything.
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In the same way, we should contemplate the limits of progressivism. No doubt certain types of societal virtues are of the sort that we can pile it up like scientific knowledge, but others may prove slippery, and the slippery ones may turn out to be the most important. Maybe, even as we are working to make everything more just and more kind and more fair, these slippery virtues are slipping away. Maybe every incision we make in the fabric of culture to insert something good is a hole through which something else that we do not even have a name for is draining away.
What would these slippery virtues be? They would be things that are easy to sense but difficult to define. If we could define them, we could hang onto them. Whatever can be definitely described can be definitely remembered and definitely preserved. But, again, some things leach out of the very words of which they seem to be made.
The progressive believes that changes made for the good of society will in fact increase the good of society; therefore, the progressive seems to be in favor of change and in favor of justice. The opposing position is not (a) a desire for things to stay the same or (b) a preference for injustice. The opposing position is a kind of caution with regard to change, a sense that there is something delicate and precious mixed in with all the ugliness of the world, and that these delicate precious things are the easiest to lose sight of and thus the easiest to lose altogether.
A person who holds this opposing position is interested in conserving something, and so we might call her a conservative, but she need not hold any of the particular positions that are today associated with that term. Likewise, the particular political positions that we associate with the term "progressive" are only a small subset of the issues to which a progressive outlook can be and frequently is applied.
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