The Age of Cretinism
openthemagazine.com
openthemagazine.com
For instance, to protect our environment you should eat local and organic food, which unfortunately tends to be more expensive than its mass produced alternatives. When you earn enough, you can live the 'right' way and telll all your friends; people who have to save money and buy cheaper mass produced foods are 'worse' not just because they are poor, but because they live their lifes the 'wrong' way.
When you have a good job and live in a good neighbourhood, you might welcome immigrants and want to give them a new home in your country so they can escape all the sufferings from where they are coming from. But when you are poor, you might also have worries that those immigrants compete with you in your job or might overwhelm your neighbourhood. But again, morally this worry is 'wrong'; until recently, bringing this out in the open would make you a racist or worse.
So lower classes see themselves pushed in a corner where they are not only the losers in a financial way, but more than that, they are 'bad' people because they dare to have second thoughts about all those morally right choices above. As a result, there is a growing movement to let go of morals altogether, which is the cretinism from the article.
Migration, on the other hand, involves key elements of human dignity. The right not to be subject to racial discrimination (e.g. the bad old days of "no dogs, no blacks no irish" signs). The right to family life: to live with your spouse and children even if they weren't born in the same country as you.
People who are worried about e.g. people moving from Mexico to California but not Ohio to California need to take a look at themselves. Are we really saying that to avoid overcrowding and ensure access to jobs for locals, that countries would be better off with internal migration control? You'd need a visa to move to the big city?
I don't necessarily agree with him, but it is a valid point connected to the article.
Not sure about "hard to imagine a time in recent history"; "carpet-bomb" is after all a phrase from the Vietnam War. Or the 80s when nuclear MAD was such an omnipresent threat that it was all over pop culture.
To me it all seems tied to colonialism, which despite what everyone thinks is definitely not dead. Colonialism always comes with justifications for violence against the colonized.
Edit: ah, this article is about India, but I think the cultural drivers are the same - exclusionary nationalism by a group, in this case Hindus, opposed to the idea that minorities deserve rights as individuals.
I would like to see what will science in the future say about this period - if the culprit was an orchestrated destabilization campaign by the likes of Russia or if it was a natural and inevitable outcome of the change of human communication patterns brought by the internet.
"not being a progressive makes you a cretin" is not a good argument, maybe you should look at yourself to see why Modi is winning. This notion that progressivism is inherently and unquestionably good is a blight that comes from the West and has to stop.
It's still possible for one to be infected with the kind of unjust hatred that turns one into a bad or wrong kind of person. Perhaps our collective consciousness tells us that is not possible anymore--we are not really persecuting witches, anabaptists, the poor, racial minorities, etc, etc. It's deceptive because there's truth we have made lot of progress there. But what is still true is that these human behaviors that made all of this constantly possible throughout history are still a part of us. Hatred and wrongness is extremely infectious under the right circumstances and you would be amazed by how many people immediately conform to that, no matter how unjust, rather than at least ask questions. In that way the shadow of our unacceptable past still lives on in the present.
If it were not for this experience, I believe I would be ignorant of this and unbelieving in it: that the willingness to conform to unjust authority--perhaps the vital ingredient in all of the mass injustices in the world--is still something that most of the human population possess, not unlike in our past. Which is really scary. I hope I'm just particularly unlucky and wrong about this conclusion.
So why is Modi winning then?
What do you mean by "progressivism" here?
The BJP is doing the bidding of a colonial master that is now long gone, using brown-shirt mentality. So who exactly is importing "blight from the West" here?
All repeals are acts of Parliament. However, Acts are essentially diffs to the existing body of law. If you read one you'll see they're full of "insert paragraph X after paragraph Y" type language. An act that repealed a law would just be an act that stated such-and-such a paragraph in the law was to be erased.
The reason I ask is that I'm not at all convinced that it is that meaningful as a political term. For example, I believe that many problems have and can be solved by technical progress. Depending on the nature of technology involved, this position has been defended by conservative politicians (e.g. nuclear power, space race) and by liberal politicians (e.g. stem cell research, solar power). Hence, no political position corresponds to this aspect of 'being progressive'.
At the same time, what one group of people considers a genuine progress in the social domain, e.g. international human rights laws and conventions, is not considered progress by other groups of people.
So it seems after all to me that the term 'progressive' does not describe a group of people with very homogeneous political views. This is also a critique on the author of the essay who seems to identify 'progressive' with 'left-wing views', as is usual in US politics.
To give another example, in one sense of the word establishing a new Space Command is certainly very progressive. It may be a colossal waste of money, but that doesn't mean that it's not progressive.
That's just a minor semantic quibble, I do admit that in the US 'progressive' basically means 'left wing, leaning towards policies of the Democratic Party'. My point is just that it's misleading and confusing terminology, like most political terms in the US. (e.g. liberal != classical liberalism in the US, another weird naming tradition)
Many people grew up wondering how Nazi Germany could appear out of nowhere. We are seeing right now the institutions and power balances being eroded in western democracies. This article is about India, but perfectly captures the political, psychological, moral dynamics at play. These are not operating in a vacuum, and while the context is not exactly the same, those dynamics are absolutely similar and should be compared.
Also: Freedom of speech is a gradient not a binary, so its loss is harder to notice if done slowly; ditto the balance between nationalisation and privatisation (the fomer I prefer lots; the latter, I don’t really care where the balance is so long as it’s not either extreme).
Things it called for include stuff now totally non-controversial: free school education for everyone; women not being the personal property of their husbands; that sort of thing.
Yes, there’s also stuff I can’t even comprehend well enough to either agree or disagree (it might have made sense to someone in 1848 but not to me), yet it is surprising how much of it is now “just the way things are” — even in nations which hate communism so much that mandatory private insurance is demonised as “socialist”.