Statues

A quick thought on the phenomenon of tearing down statues within the modern progressive movement. There’s no need to go into the particular cases and the declared justification for their tearing down; instead it’s better to look at the phenomenon as a whole and it’s reason for being. It’s very simple. Marxism, wokeism, etc are best understood by the broader term progressivism, which is the cult of progress, and within this supposedly scientific and deterministic doctrine, humanity must and will progress to a golden future. The job of its adherents is to facilitate this path to the future, and of course away from the past. The past is by definition bad, and to be moved away from. Thus the tearing down of statues is a kind of icon of progress, of the defeat of the past, which we are committed to moving away from. 

Also, to add, because progress must keep progressing, it’s probably much better to attack the past than put up icons to progress - like Lenin or Obama or some convenient martyr - since they will also become soon the past also, which we must in turn progress beyond.

And to be a bit scientific or rational about this allegedly rational ideology: progress means simply movement in a certain direction; it’s a confusion of meaning to imagine this involves things getting better alongside the movement. Look at a ruler for example: start at 0cm and let your eyes progress along the length of the ruler. Is 10cm better than 1cm? Or 27.5cm better than 11.3cm? 

So the crucial thing for the ideology of progress is simply that there is incessant movement away from the past and into a future. It doesn’t matter if this progress is ever more stupid and deranged, because that is progress, and the value judgement of its moral or inner nature is besides the point. Thus the human landscape of Huxley’s Brave New World is staggeringly shallow and totalitarian, but it’s progress! And actually since a core of the doctrine is that life is meaningless, then a human culture under its sway will naturally reflect that and become more and more shallow, progressing towards the realisation of this meaninglessness.

So we can look at Progress as a god constantly demanding sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the past. So a maybe amusing example of this is that within this historical movement of overcoming, the proletariat and the class struggle was the big banner for this progressivism a century or so ago, while the bourgeoisie in general and bourgeois decadence in particular were great enemies of this onward historical movement. Well now, things have progressed, and you won’t hear too much mention of the proletariat and class struggle anywhere, while the vanguard of wokeism are completely from the bourgeoisie, and their ideological banners amount to nothing but neurotic bourgeois decadence! You don’t get too many people struggling for existence spending too much time worrying about moronic things like how to address them by their correct pronouns!