What does progress want? asks Paul Kingsnorth in his book Against the Machine. This is the most important question asked by the English philosopher in his magnum opus, and I’ve never seen anybody put it so bluntly before. Formulating the question is half the job of any inquiry. Kingsnorth hits it out of the park with this way of putting it.
What is the purpose of the progressivist project? We can see that it motivates people to make great sacrifices, to lay down their lives, even. There must be some great purpose behind this. Something so big that all of the upheaval the project creates would be justified.
And there is. This great, enormous goal is to move transcendence from the spiritual to the material realm. The project aims to turn humans into gods. It abolishes the otherworldly realm and endows human beings with the powers formerly attributed to God.
Why not? one might ask. Why do we even need God? Why can’t we establish our own moral framework and set our own goals? What’s so wrong with seeking transcendence our own way without involving the supernatural?
My answer—and please remember that I disagree with Kingsnorth on more than I agree with him—is that we, humans, can’t come up on our own with anything except the most crude forms of self-indulgent pleasure that rots our bodies and minds. On our own, we don’t transcend what’s low about us to go higher. To the contrary, we transcend what’s middling to go into the absolute gutter. We don’t do well without fear. Fear of God, illness, poverty. If we are liberated from all those fears, we won’t enter Golden Age. We’ll enter the deepest misery.
More later.
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