Progressing Toward Savagery

The Arc of History Is Long and Repetitive

A New Zealander contemplates the ruins of London: Gustave Doré (1872). Source: Wikimedia Commons

“You imagine that you are progressive: you should be sitting in a Kalmuck wagon!” So Pavel Petrovich accuses Yevgeny Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. Bazarov is a self-declared nihilist, advocate of revolutionary destruction, and literary precursor to the Bolsheviks. When Pavel asks Bazarov, “Do you seriously think you can take on the whole nation?” Bazarov replies prophetically, “A penny candle, you know, set Moscow on fire.”

With apologies to the Kalmyks, a Mongolic steppe people, the line between progressivism and barbarism has often been permeable. After all, the promise of future progress can easily justify present barbarism. Moreover, the tendency of progressivism is to deny the validity of the term “barbarism” in the first place, unless applied in inverted fashion to civilization. (Walter Benjamin wrote, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” True enough, but the reverse doesn’t hold: documents of barbarism are not also documents of civilization. In fact, pure barbarism doesn’t keep documents.)

So we should not have been surprised when many self-described progressives cheered and justified the worst forms of barbarism on October 7. Stalin’s purges, Mao’s cultural revolution, and, more directly relevant, indiscriminate Algerian terrorism all had their left-wing intellectual defenders. (Sartre: “To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man.”)

And yet many erstwhile “allies” were shocked to see, for example, the Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter posting an image glorifying Hamas paragliders. The liberal assumption had been that Black Lives Matter meant Black Lives Matter “too.” For many supporters, that’s surely the case. But for the vanguard of the movement (the Bazarovs), white-coded Jewish lives decidedly matter less than others. Jonathan Chait breaks down the progressive logic behind prioritizing lives by skin tone (the bolding is my own):

The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.

Does this legitimizing principle extend to “tactics” like child murder and mass rape? On October 7, we learned (or relearned) that for significant sections of the left, the answer is yes. Bumper-sticker slogans like “No justice, no peace” and “By any means necessary” intimate at the amorality of a worldview that judges actions based solely on the identity of the perpetrator. Yet the veneer of righteousness provided by ideological buzzwords—resistance, equity, decolonization, social justice—blinds the historically ignorant to the barbarism to which such “progressivism” may lead.

Of course, not all self-described progressives are willing to justify and cheer atrocities. But October 7 showed that many are, and that many others would prefer to keep silent and stay on the same ideological “team” as those who do. These are the fellow travelers, the mainstream sympathizers who are essential to the society-wide scaling of a radical vanguard. Their de facto attitude is “no enemies to the left”; even if, Judith Butler aside (“Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important”), the relation of a theocratic death cult to progress as normally defined is highly questionable.

So we circle back to Pavel’s riposte to Bazarov in the 19th century. The term “progressive” sounds nice. We all like the notion of moving forward, not backwards, in our personal and professional lives. But when it comes to progressives on a sociopolitical level, the key question is: to where exactly are they progressing? To a more just society, or to a Cambodian Year Zero? Similarly, conservatives should be judged based on what exactly they wish to conserve: time-tested values and institutions, or inherited prejudices and superstitions? Taking the long view means not falling into narrow, presentist definitions of left and right. It means looking farther out to see where bad ideas have led us in the past, and where, without opposition, they may lead us again in the future.