Why does the adherents of progressivism or ‘wokeism’ behave as though they were part of a particularly fundamentalist, autocratic religion, ready to damn all about it for blasphemies against the faith? This is very obvious but it only struck me earlier, and the answer is that it is a fundamentalist religion. Progressivism is the ideology or faith if Progress - that through the increasing scientific mastering and manipulations of matter, a utopian reality inevitably opens up for man. I’ve a long piece on the ideology of Progress here: https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2012/11/progress.html.
Brave New World is more or less an examination of what kind of world man might end up in time creating for himself as a result from uncritically bowing down to Progress a virtually sacred materialistic ideology. Not a good world.
As I wrote in the linked piece: “The dominant ideology of the relatively modern era, its ambient background, is that of Progress, which could be described as the belief that the increased understanding and harnessing of matter automatically leads to a bettering of human life. That even though these immersions in matter would be ‘pure’ and unimpeded by irrelevant ethical concerns - which interruptions would be alien to these scientific investigations - that life as a whole, including the ethical field, would also somehow benefit as a matter of course from the increased harnessing of matter. The manipulations of matter would be intrinsically ‘good’ in their effect, even though unencumbered by concern with the good.”
Just to mention, an ideology like Marxism is specifically within the umbrella of Progressivism, or that the progression towards the future Marxist utopia is a rational inevitability; that history is ultimately scientific. It’s actually very unromantic, where rather than some Byronic hero or rebel, the Marxist revolutionary is a kind of tool and slave of matter! He’s just a tool of scientific progress.
Anyway I realised why transgenderism is almost the pinnacle sacred cause for progressivism. As I said above, Progress is a faith in the ever unfolding utopia arising from and in tandem with the harnessing and manipulations of matter. Whilst this is going on though and the arising world taking shape, we could say mankind physically stays more or less as was, and it is his mind high is being manipulated to be in sync with the unfolding progressive utopia, or dystopia as it is truly is. The harnessing of matter is external to man and woman, which isn’t ideal. However here enters the sacred cause of transgenderism, as science manages to get its hands in the human body and start manipulating that as best it can also. Of course the fundamentalist believers in the progressive faith will go into ideological ecstasies over this manna from the materialist heaven. And to remind anyone that this faith is an offshoot of materialism, and indivisible from it, but the exaltation of Progress isn’t so much glorying in matter as much as glorying in the man-made world that arises out of our manipulations of matter - including human matter. It’s self-adoring secularism pushed onwards and onwards, and these victories of man over nature can quite easily be seen to extend into and equate to ancient spiritual issues of revolt against God.
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