Just today I discovered this essay written in December of 2023 by Benjamin Kerstein. It’s entitled “The rise of barbaric progressivism,” and subtitled “Antisemitism, racial hierarchy, violence, and an alliance with radical Islam have seized the commanding heights of the movement.” The phenomenon has only become clearer and more intense since then, but it was already apparent. What sounds as though it might be an oxymoron – “progressivism” allied with “barbarism” – is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is perhaps inevitable, a built-in feature of the former.
Kerstein writes:
Shortly before he died in the late 1930s, Sigmund Freud, by then a refugee from Nazism, wrote, “We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism.” He was referring to the rise of fascism and communism, and their combination of the most modern forms of science, technology, economic theory, and even aesthetics with the most horrific and savage forms of violence and sadism.
Freud was a man of the Enlightenment—perhaps the last man of the Enlightenment—and equated modernity with progress and civilization. Thus, to witness the degradation of modernity as it comingled with the kind of animalistic brutality that he saw as belonging to earlier and less enlightened stages of human history was shocking to him, as it was to many.
His obsession with this problem dated back to the carnage of World War I, in which the most “civilized” part of the world had turned itself into a technological charnel house that consumed millions of lives seemingly without reason. In the face of this, Freud eventually reached very dark conclusions about human nature and the nature of human civilization. He concluded that because civilizational progress required greater and greater repression of the most basic human drives, people are more and more repressed and unhappy the more they progress and the more civilized they become. Eventually, this repression cannot hold, and the savage energies built up beneath centuries of sublimation explode in periodic eruptions of horrendous violence and destruction. Progress, in other words, leads inexorably toward barbarism.
It’s become fashionable and commonplace to denigrate Freud and even mock him, but by no means was he wrong about everything. In this case, I believe he was right, although he didn’t go far enough.
Kerstein’s entire essay is worth reading and contains many thoughts that could each be a springboard to a lengthy post or even a book, but I’ll just say a few things here. The first is that “progressives” have hijacked the word “progress,” because the progress they propose is illusory and only a dream. It is also wedded with barbarism not merely because of what Freud asserted – which I believe is correct – but also because it contains an unrealistic Utopianism that goes so strongly against human nature that it requires totalitarianism to attempt to implement it, and totalitarianism requires barbarism.
Or, as one of my favorite quotes from Milan Kundera states (found in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting):
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.
There’s a seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom in always-futile attempts to impose that dream and make it reality will end up with humans being crushed like insects. And “progressives” (leftists) will in the main applaud and justify the crushing.
However, the current alliance of progressivism with Islamic jihadism may seem odd. And yet, as Kerstein writes, it’s not odd at all:
… [P]rogressivism’s increasing antisemitism … naturally leads it to align with fellow antisemites. Statistics have consistently shown that the Muslim nations are the most antisemitic in the world. …
Progressives share more with radical Islam than hatred of Jews, however. For example, both movements have an essentially messianic worldview. Islam has its final day of judgment and the progressives their blessed society. The two groups are also obsessed with the same alleged evils, such as imperialism, American foreign policy, and Western civilization in general. The alliance further plays to progressives’ obsession with race, as they have convinced themselves that all Muslims are “people of color” (they aren’t) and therefore oppressed by “white people” (they aren’t). Despite the Muslim world’s considerable trade in black African slaves, which continues to this day in various forms, progressives have decided that radical Islam is simply pursuing the shared task of overturning the global racial hierarchy and defeating “white supremacism.” That the Islamic radicals seek to replace it with Muslim supremacism does not perturb the progressives, as they likely consider it just revenge for centuries of depredation.
Most important of all, however, is that most of today’s progressives and all radical Muslims are against freedom. In the case of radical Islam, this is obvious, as they make no pretense of valuing freedom, and the movements and regimes they have built are, without exception, brutally oppressive, violent, terroristic, and totalitarian. In the case of progressives, the issue is less clear-cut, as they publicly proclaim that they value freedom, particularly for oppressed groups. But if we examine progressive actions rather than rhetoric, a different picture emerges.
Please read the whole thing; food for thought.
