Progress is woven, not layered

Within the 21st Century version of Capitalist “Democracies” that we all live under, especially for those of us born after 1980, so Millennials, Gen Z, etc. We’ve come to grow fond of Social Justice issues such as; LGBTQIA+ Rights, Abortion Rights, Women's Rights, Immigrant rights, etc. As much as I am also fervently in favour of all of these and much more, there is an issue with the way that we’ve gone about them, and I don’t think the issue lies with the issues themselves nor the policy changes that have been achieved in correcting them. The issue lies with what we think progress is, or how it's applied to societies. Within the “liberal” framework of things, progress is layered on top of society, and this comes with one big issue. These layered policies can be stripped away by another government, very, very, easily. And there is no buyers remorse button for many western countries, once a country has voted in a Government there is very little that can be actualised to course correct a government that’s trying to strip back these layers.

Progress, or should I say Progressivism, the ideology of social, economic and environmental justice. Is one that is generally thought of as being linear, meaning that you start from one point to another, another and so on. But if we look at the course of human history, especially human civilization, progress is very rarely linear. The radical changes that have happened over the course of human history have been woven into the fabric of society to the point that they almost become traditionalised, to the point that centre-right to right wing parties fall head over heels trying to defend them. For example, slavery, the abolition of slavery wasn’t just legally ingrained into British and American law, but repulsion of it was woven into the hearts and minds of citizens for generations to the point that 191 years later, no party on the right (with some very fringe exceptions) would ever try to reverse it. Despite their ideological ancestors (and sometimes their literal ancestors) having been fervently in favour of the right to own slaves.

Now, of course you can make the argument that the reason slavery isn’t coming back isn’t due to just engrained progressivism but instead the rejection of the premise that some people are better than others due to race. But that’s not true either, given the racist fervor that still exists in the UK and US, as well as many other countries. In a weird sense, racists have somehow evolved away from wanting immigrants as slaves and instead just want to boot them out of the country entirely while referring to them in the most dehumanising language ever concocted. But I can give a more recent example, Gay Rights, mainly Same-sex marriage.

Same-Sex marriage is actually a really good example of ingraining yourself into the fabric of society, because passing it wasn’t the abolition of an entire system, nor was it the creation of a whole new system, it was the amending of an already existing institution for a more secular world. To paraphrase the late David Graeber “If you tell the [system] you want to replace them, they won’t fight you, but if you tell them that they’re useless and they want to abolish you, then they’ll revolt to ensure that never happens”. In the wide scheme of things, there wasn’t that big of a fight against same-sex marriage, since it was the amending of a pre-existing norm, a change that some Conservatives could stomach and adhere to going forward. To this very day there are still some Conservatives in the UK parliament that are strong supporters of Same-sex marriage, despite the fact that their predecessors in the same seat for the same party, voted against it. Largely because, 1) It was an amendment to a societal institution and 2) It encouraged the normalisation of a group to “neighbour” status and thus couldn’t be brushed under the rug or easily scapegoated.

So how exactly did this happen and how do we use this as a lesson for other Progressive changes. Well firstly, when it came to Same-Sex marriage it was a open question, there was open and frankly ugly conversation around it that was also spurred on by scandal and tragedy like the HIV crisis, many people, families in fact were torn apart and spliced back together off the back of the HIV crisis. Many people had no idea they had a gay family member until their son or daughter were diagnosed with HIV, or worse, died of it. So that created an emotional tether in the community to LGBT+ people. Virtually no one in the 2000s couldn’t point to at least one person they knew of that was either openly or implicitly gay (regardless of whether they supported them or not).

Additionally, these conversations around HIV opened up the doors to conversations around sexuality and what that actually looked like, not just for the LGBT+ Community but also for the straight population as well. It creaked the door open to open communication around something everyone did, and everyone also wanted to get married at some point. So once people accepted that gay people did in fact have sex, then it was only “natural” that they wanted to get married as well, because they too, are in fact people like the rest of us.

The LGBT+ Community were already a known “unknown” of society, we all knew they were around but we didn’t know where. When the HIV Crisis happened we were all shocked to find out they were everywhere, including in our own families. This in turn, turned into open conversation around marriage and sex, not just in the LGBT+ context but in wider society which made for the legal and social amendment to what marriage was or could look like a lot easier. This is in essence evidence of social progress not just being layered onto society but being woven into it, crisis almost always provides progress. Am I saying there has to be a massive economic or social crisis in order for us to pull together as people and fix things? Ideally no, but the longer that we all sit around counting our pearls and complaining about how things are without actually changing anything, I do suspect that in many regards the crisis is coming, and it's coming much quicker than we could possibly predict. When it comes to Trans issues, that crisis is already underway, and frankly, the emergency reboot that will fix it doesn’t seem to be moving quick enough.

But if history is anything to go by, it will be fixed, at the very last possible moment. When it comes to economic issues. We’re heading right into a brand new economic crisis, call it what you want, a depression, a recession, regardless of the name we give it. It's coming, and a lot of us are going to be in a lot of economic pain over it. People are in all likelihood going to die, people will become disabled over it and we’ll have to have another major conversation about how to fix it and the minority is going to be butt hurt over what the answer is going to be (tax the rich). But there is also another possibility, a complete economic overhaul, which again based on our economic history in the west, we are due for. This could be a classical overhaul like switching to Socialism or moving over to something else entirely, and before someone says “fascism”, fascism is capitalism wearing Doc Martens, it's hardly an economic upset no matter what the screaming orange in the white house does.

Is there a way to “radically” transform society without blood or violence? The short answer is yes, but it depends on what you want to do. Firstly it has to be woven into society and not just bandaged on to it. As shown before, a change in one law is not enough to do it. It has to be structural, as we’ve seen by surface level attempts of bringing accountability into the police force, you have to fire a lot of people and re-structure entire federal departments in order to see any real change. The economy is definitely not any different to that. If you want to have true redistribution, you don’t just take power, tax the rich and dish out a cash sum to everyone and their dog. That only works for a couple of terms, and then you’ll eventually be assassinated. You’ll ideally want to change the fiscal policy, the independence of the central bank, the way that budgets are passed, the way that money maintains its value, the creation of new mechanisms that will allow money to “expire”, etc, etc. Basically it's not as easy as nationalising the means of production and hanging a picture of Lenin above your fireplace.

What we know about progress is that it is foundational, not layered, no matter how much conservatives of the time period will push back against it, it will come eventually. How quickly it shows up and cements itself into our societies and becomes the new normal is a question for liberals, progressives and lefties about how many people they are willing to let die from their inaction in the process, and the real answer to that is none, but the follow up question for you is, how do you plan on getting the ball rolling?