Progression, as a definition or description, always necessarily entails a direction, a goal, an objective. What is always amusing to me is that when you speak to a progressive their beliefs always tend to rest upon terms which are inherently impossible to define because they are idealistic to the point of rejecting realism/reality. ‘Good’, ‘Humanity’, ‘Equality’. The most intelligent minds on planet earth would fail to reach anything like a consensus on any of those words and yet some people are energized and motivated by them. Some people attach emotions and interpretations to these words which give them great personal meaning… and yet they are not real things… So where are we heading?
The finest philosophical minds that I am aware of all tend to accept that no good or evil can really be said to exist. Beyond Good and Evil is reality. When humans reach a state of relative abundance they detach from the natural world. Here ‘function’ is dependent on social and technological rather than natural environments. In nature dominant forms reproduce and inferior ones are more likely to die or experience predation. The biological nature of all life forms is, crudely, to perpetuate genetic material. As man becomes more self-aware, his intelligence perceives ways in which he can shift the odds in his genetic favour and beyond his lifetime. This is why, to put it bluntly, war, tribalism, racism, sexism and strict hetero-normativity are all perfectly sensible from a biological standpoint. All of these offer an advantage that increase the likelihood of genetic continuity within a tribe: the oldest and most organic social arrangement.
It requires technology and civilization, a very high level of Order and complexity, to mitigate the advantageous aspects of these behaviours. For typical progressives to demonize and pathologize naturally advantageous behaviours from a moralistic position, when it is technology that made these changes possible, allows one to understand why socialism, transhumanism, androgyny and anti-natalism are increasingly common ideologies. The thing they all have in common is that they all desire/demand a movement towards a totally fluid state of uniformity and interactivity and a rejection of nature and natural dispositions and designations. A social and technological singularity. The vague nature of equality, humanity and goodness makes them unfalsifiable given that they are not terms which refer to something tangible. So what we have is a movement towards a hive-like vision of the future where all pain is minimized and all limitations are reduced to the point of mitigation…but not quite. ‘Bliss’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Utopia’. These are terms which describe the desired state of affairs in some future never quite attained, never actually realized. This creates the ‘progressive’: one who is proud to make way for any changes that are deemed democratically and socially positive or ‘good’ lest he stand on the ‘wrong side of (social) history’.
The sad truth is that the ‘wrong side of history’ now has nothing to do with healthy natural dispositions of perpetuating you and your kind, and in fact has come to represent the perpendicular opposite. ‘There is only one race - the human race’, ‘I am not having children because we are overpopulated’, ‘noone is better than anyone else’: these are windows into the psychology of progressive politics, an out and out denial of the most pertinent aspects of nature exhibited by all known species except, increasingly, one. It’s extension is ‘I don’t matter because everyone is the same anyway’ making the system itself (or more accurately the process of systematisation) the new equivalent of me, or tribe or God: something within which ones life is fully encompassed. At some point humans will either become secondary to A.I. or will re-incorporate nature into our social and cultural models. It is worth mentioning that every remarkable achievement that man’s intelligence has so far conjured up have been resistance to time and to change, Order, be it a building, a discipline, an ideology or culture. The highest types of order have, so far, all been a resistance against the pressures of passing time, not a capitulation to it.
If change is the only constant then order can be described as that which predicts and endures the changes that time brings about naturally. This is why Will and Imagination are the highest traits that man possesses.