THE PROGRESSIVE WORLDVIEW: YES, WE HAVE ONE OF THOSE

Not long ago, Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House, thus prompting everyone to ask, “Who’s Mike Johnson?” He provided the answer, himself, saying that if you want to know where he stands on any given issue, you should take a Bible off the shelf and read it, since this is his worldview; this is what he believes. And this was actually a helpful answer, since it gives us a good idea of the policy positions he has sought to advance in the past and will presumably continue to prioritize as Speaker.

Which prompts another question: Why don’t you ever hear progressives trumpeting their own grounding worldview? For the past twenty years, I’ve been periodically Googling “progressive worldview.” Things have gotten a bit better, but until quite recently most hits would take you to some conservative Christian website lamenting the descent of our culture into a progressive worldview. To the extent our country has, in fact, moved in a progressive direction over the past two and a half centuries—and it has, admittedly very slowly and painfully, and notwithstanding some serious speedbumps we’ve hit over the past decade—progressives have reason to celebrate this movement. But why then do most progressives seem reluctant even to use the word “worldview,” thus leaving it to our political rivals to define what our fundamental worldview entails? Contrary to what you might have read, after all, this does not include legalizing bestiality.

It is not as if progressives do not have a worldview. Anyone who bothers to think about the world in a serious fashion does. Indeed, as I argue in The History of Progress—the first volume in what will be a three-volume series titled The Progressive Worldview—human beings have been forming worldviews ever since they first had the language to sit around a fire at night and tell stories about the world in which they live. A worldview can be more or less completely fleshed out, but typically it will rest on a foundational narrative that answers, at a minimum, the following questions: Where did the world come from? Where is it headed? How does it operate? And what is the place of human beings within it? 

For the better part of two millennia, most Europeans held a worldview not much different from Mike Johnson’s, drawing on the biblical narrative to proclaim that, in the beginning—about 6 thousand years ago—God created the heavens and the earth, placing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and granting Adam mastery over all the world’s living creatures. Sadly, Adam sinned, and things have been going downhill every since, with Adam’s original sin causing the rest of us to mire ourselves deeper in sin, thus giving the Christian worldview its signature trajectory of decline. The only hope for the future, on this view, is that God will one day destroy the earth and remake it anew, restoring the paradise that was lost and presumably inviting people like Mike Johnson to inhabit it. 

Most of us who identify as progressives in the early twenty-first century gravitate toward a very different foundational narrative. Drawing from stories drafted by the likes of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, we believe the universe began in massive explosion nearly 14 billion years ago, with life then evolving on the planet earth over the past 4 billion years, eventually producing our first human ancestors some 6 million years ago. Most progressives believe, moreover, that human beings have continued to evolve since this time, not just physically, but also intellectually, culturally, and morally, with one of the most consequential advances being the emergence of the progressive worldview—and the entire modern world—on the heels of the Scientific Revolution some 400 years ago. Marveling at wealth of discoveries suddenly coming out of the modern sciences, Enlightenment philosophers began to insist that we are not destined to watch our world grow forever darker, with our only hope for a better future being divine intervention. Rather, if we start using our powers of reasoning to discern how the world operates, we can start changing the world, ourselves, making it better place. Our world, that is to say, can make progress over time, with human reason being the primary driver of this progress.

One way Enlightenment thinkers realized we could make tangible progress was by translating scientific discoveries into technological innovations, thereby gradually freeing humankind from the grinding poverty that had been the norm for the vast majority of human beings for most of human history. Another way was by changing how we organize and govern ourselves, abandoning the traditional hierarchical system whereby a tiny fraction of a society’s population commands the vast majority of its power, wealth, and privilege, and instead embracing a universalistic ethic that proposes all people are of fundamentally equal moral worth, and hence they ought be treated that way. The young United States pioneered the approach of building a system of government around this noble ideal. Granted, for a long time our country did a very poor job of realizing its foundational ideal, depriving many groups of their most basic and supposedly “universal” rights. Nevertheless, with a great deal of hard work, sacrifice, and suffering on the part of many courageous people, we have been slowly moving in a more universalistic direction. Our world, you could say, has been making progress. What our world now calls us to do today, therefore, is to keep this progress moving forward, particularly by continue expanding the circle of social inclusion until no one is left out.

Few progressives today will take issue with anything I just said, essentially an elevator speech for the progressive worldview. Nevertheless, most contemporary progressives still seem reluctant to stand up and say, “I hold a progressive worldview and I’m proud of it.” Why is that? I can suggest two reasons.

First, the whole concept of a worldview—a translation of the German Weltanschauung—got a bad name over the first half of the twentieth century when it came to be associated with Hitler’s fascist view of the world and Stalin’s Marxist view, both of which of led to genocide. Specifically, these totalizing ideologies had such definite ideas about how the world operates and where it should be headed that their practitioners could easily justify eliminating anyone who tried to get in the way. Many American liberals of the early twentieth century felt particularly burned when news of Stalin’s purges leaked out and it became clear that Soviet socialism, once viewed by many on the Left as a hopeful alternative to capitalism, had descended into murderous totalitarianism. Not wishing to be associated with either Hitler or Stalin, most progressives have since chosen to steer clear of any sweeping proclamations regarding how the world is put together and where we should be steering it.

Over the second half of the twentieth century, moreover, it became evident just how much lasting damage western imperialism had done to the world’s many former colonies. Accordingly, many progressives, particularly in academia, have sought to shine a spotlight on the world’s many non-western cultures that were all but destroyed by centuries of imperial rule. With the growing recognition that people living in different circumstances will naturally come to view the world in different ways, progressives came to worry that granting any sort of priority to their own Enlightenment worldview risked becoming just one more instance of cultural colonialism—even if this worldview celebrated cultural pluralism. Unwilling to disrespect other cultures by suggesting that we westerners have finally discovered the correct or the best worldview, many progressives have felt it better to remain quiet on the whole topic.

All this makes perfect sense, and I respect my fellow progressives for their desire to be respectful. That said, at a time when our progressive vision for society is under attack in a fashion none of us could have imagined even a decade or two ago, I do not believe this policy of respectful silence is sustainable. We do have a worldview, and if we do not proclaim our belief system for all the world to hear, trumpeting its many virtues, our opponents will articulate our worldview for us, showcasing its purported evils.

The three volumes of The Progressive Worldview, starting with the currently available Volume I: The History of Progress, represent my attempt to both articulate and celebrate what most of us believe as progressives, using this label in the broadest sense possible to cover Joe Biden as well as Alexandra Octavio-Cortez, but also Thomas Hobbes as well as Thomas Jefferson and Galileo Galilei as well as Martin Luther King. As this progressive roster suggests, the account of progressivism I am attempting to lay out goes far beyond the current headlines to investigate the history, philosophy, science, and social activism that has shaped our progressive beliefs.

With The Progressive Worldview Blog, I hope to discuss what it means to be a progressive in more informal fashion, throwing out ideas as the occur to me while working on the second two volumes of The Progressive Worldview or as suggested by the news of the day. That said, I do not claim to have any monopoly on knowing what progressives do or should believe, so I am hoping this blog will further serve as a forum for discussion where progressives—and perhaps even some of our critics—can share their own views on what it means to be a progressive and what we are called to do in these challenging times. I hope you will join me.