Retrogressive Progressivism
I fear I was amused at the expense of one of my correspondants during a recent debate or discussion in this space.
Concerning the divine mystery and sacrament of marriage, and the mystique of femininity (of which the modern mind seems not to be able to find mysterious, and willing to recognize as sacred, but regards marriage as much the same as a commercial transaction for mutual benefit) one objection raised to the traditional role of wife and mother was that it was one of economic dependence, and therefore one not to be envied.
Now, this is a perfectly reasonable objection to make, particularly for someone afflicted with that colorblindness endemic to Progressives, that makes them talk and act as if the natural aspects of human nature, to say nothing of its supernatural aspects, where they cannot see the hues of human life, but blunder along by describing all things by their most crude and angular of silhouettes.
The mentally colorblind man not only cannot debate the shade of difference between azure and cerulean, he cannot even define his terms to correspond even roughly with reality, not even to tell that red means stop and green means go. The corresponding confusion regarding his mental traffic jams results.
In a word, the Progressive sees every human relations of any kind whatever as a power struggle between two incompatible and irreconcilable foes, and no mutually benevolent outcome possible, save that one emerge the cruel oppressor, and the other the helpless victim. Now, this is not true even in those sporting events artificially constructed with rules about score-keeping to prevent ties or draws: the mere presence of minimal good sportsmanship ensures that even the losing team derives some pleasure or benefit of the game; but even in modern commercial sports animated by the spirit of Mohamed Ali rather than the spirit of good sportsmanship, the losing team does not find themselves and their wives dragged off to captivity in Babylon, and their children’s skulls dashed against the stones.
Talking with Progressives is tedium, not merely because they talk only on the one topic of power and oppression, never stirring from it any further than a mother bird stirs from her roost atop her eggs, and not merely because the most absurd of trivial things become for them symbols and therefore realities of oppression (as if to protest the public debt were to whip black slaves in the cotton field, or as if to draw a superheroine in a pink skirt were to chain women in the harem), but also because there has been no progress in Progressivism in all the years since the Victorian Age.
Progressives talk and think as if unions of government-employed teachers, for example, are composed of factory hands toiling in 14 hours shifts in the steam-powered mills of 1850 southern England.
To show this odd anachronism, I have space here only to adduce one example. A correspondent dismissed the idea of marriage by remarking darkly that luring women into marriage was to lure them into a position of weakness and of economic dependence on men.
I offer, not for the truth or falsehood of the proposition, but only to show the hoary age, if not senile decrepitude, of the progressive objection, an answer to the objection written in 1910.
To put this in perspective, this was before the Great War, before Prohibition and the Flapper Era, before the Income Tax and before popular election of Senators, before women had the right to vote in the US, and before the invention of the heavier-than-air flying machine. These words were written over a century of years ago.
Some experience of modern movements of the sort called “advanced” has led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other people’s. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in modern “problem plays” is due to the fact that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict–that is a hard day’s work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase “Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?” The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn’t; except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere “pretty clinging parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the city and pretended to do something, while the banker’s wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of them economically dependent?
From WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD, Chapter XIII The Wildness of Domesticity, by G.K. Chesterton.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
