My speech at Verdurin book launch

How discussing progress as theory seems to miss the point

Last night saw a full house at the Verdurin arts space in Hoxton, east London for a launch of my book The Progress Trap. I gave a speech as did my fellow panellists:

• Green philosopher and Climate Majority Project Co-Director Professor Rupert Read

• Fraser Myers, the deputy editor of spiky online magazine Spiked.

• Verdurin curator and organiser Pierre d’Alancaisez, who chaired and made comments of his own.

We had plenty of discussion and debate to follow, with excellent contributions from the audience (including philosopher Nina Power, below) and even a bit of verbal pugilism at times, which was fun - even though I copped it myself a bit from Rupert.

Anyway, below is the full written version of the speech I gave: it was pretty different in delivery. Thanks greatly to Pierre d’Alancaisez and Verdurin for hosting the event: it seemed to go off well. Thanks also to Rupert and Fraser for their interesting contributions - and to the audience for showing up and striving to get a hang on this weird phenomenon called ‘progress’. My speech:

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Hello everyone. Thank you for coming. Also thank you to Pierre and Nina and his colleagues for organising this event.

Thanks too to Rupert and Fraser for agreeing to speak. I’m very much looking forward to hearing what they have to say, though I must confess I was a little worried that we had a ‘manel’.

Not very progressive, is it, having just blokes?

But the fact that ‘manels’ are now effectively unacceptable in mainstream conference circles is significant – it shows us the power of a certain type of progressive activist, who see men-only panels as regressive, backward, outdated.

And they have got a lot of traction: conferences now widely strive to avoid ‘manels’.

This sort of power to make things happen is the territory of The Progress Trap.

This book is not about whether we are right to believe in progress. I think people who are familiar with progress in the intellectual sense can’t resist doing this: considering the theory as a theory in the traditional way. Is progress as a theory right or wrong? Are we progressing? Is progress true of the past? Is it our destiny in the future?

I’m not saying these are bad questions. But they aren’t ones I’ve really considered.

The question I do address in the book is: what does this idea of progress do to us? How does it work on us? How does it play out in our society and our language?

If I mention a few prominent progressives, I think that might give us an idea. The first one I’m going to put forward is James O’Brien, who I quote at length in the book.

Another: Emily Maitlis.

Tony Blair: an arch-progressive obsessed with ‘modernisation’.

Meghan Markle: a very contemporary progressive, in the yearning, activist, saviour mode, with a huge dose of personal entitlement.

Different types of progressive

I’d also put forward Fraser Nelson, the former Spectator editor, who raised eyebrows this week by saying that life in London is better than ever. That’s a classic progressive framing: that the present is better than the past. And he also maintains that the future will be better than the present too: so even more so.

I’d also include Donald Trump. He’s the frontier-pushing individualist type. Elon Musk as well, though in a different way to Trump: hence their bust-up. Even Nigel Farage regularly uses progressive concepts, not least that of the inevitable victory for him and therefore for us.

These are different types of progressive.

The dominant version of progressivism for centuries in Anglophone countries has been Nelson’s version: a sort of loose, liberal account of steadily increasing freedom and prosperity. I think Musk has a more muscular, interventionist version of this. It’s a version of the Whig Interpretation of History.

Now, the closed, conventionally left-wing version of progressivism – we might call it hard progressivism – is clearly hegemonic at the moment, though facing challenges from likes of Trump, Farage and Musk.

This version isn’t interested in freedom as a general concept. But it is interested in maximising freedom for its favoured classes of people. It likes to lecture you on what to think and may want to get you arrested if it doesn’t like what you think and what you feel – Lucy Connolly being the classic example.

We have seen this tendency in action recently with the vote to decriminalise abortion up until birth. But at the same time someone praying silently near an abortion clinic can get you arrested.

The Sky journalist Beth Rigby said, just before the vote,

We are on the cusp of a historical moment - changing the law so that women can no longer be prosecuted for abortion – changing legislation from literally the Victorian times.

So here you have almost a full house of progressive ideas: that of the ‘historical moment’ used for something you like; maximal freedom for women; talk of ‘change’ and the assumption that legislation from back in Victorian times must, by definition, be oppressive and illegitimate. And I think these assumptions are embedded in the way we all speak to extent. You probably reflexively turn to them yourself – in order to justify some sort of change we denigrate the past.

The uses of social science

Going back to our list of progressives, James O’Brien appears first in my book in a chapter called The Uses of Social Science.

And I was quite careful about naming that: because what I’m thinking about is a certain comportment to social science, seeing it as a resource to be exploited rather than a domain of knowledge which must be respected according to the disciplines of knowledge acquisition. Social science is intrinsic to the progressive cause. But it’s often appropriating the idea of science rather than practising it. It’s about knowing without having to struggle with the difficulties of understanding.

It’s knowing what causes good things to happen and what causes bad things to happen. I quote the conservative former governor of Georgia George Wallace refusing to countenance the My Lai atrocity in Vietnam: he said American soldiers couldn’t possibly had done this because they were Americans. It boils down to: What we do causes good things to happen; bad things cannot result from our actions.

The social scientific-historical style gives us the tools to support our interests and beliefs. And I think you can see this in the titles of O’Brien’s books: How To Be Right, How Not To Be Wrong, How They Broke Britain. They are like instruction manuals for having the right opinions: do what James says. He says in How Not To Be Wrong:

In the history books of the future, it will be impossible to explain the election of Donald Trump without reference to the undiagnosed psychic damage visited upon millions of white Americans by the election of Barack Obama eight years previously.

You can see how he picks up on what the history books of the future will say as a source of authority. So he has advance notice of what consensus scholarly opinion will be at an undefined point in the future: he is an expert in history before the event. But also in psychology: he can diagnose the undiagnosed psychic damage to millions of people living thousands of miles away who he’s never met.

This is quite a big deal – and is consistent with how he presents himself on his radio show as someone who knows. It gives him a role as an overseer of society, history, the mind, politics: what is acceptable and what is not.

The columnist Martha Gill has spoken in a similar vein against free speech campaigners. “For public dialogue to make any progress,” she has said, “it is important to recognise when a particular debate has been won and leave it there.”

And who does the recognising, determining who has won? Well it’s her and her mates, of course. Her knowledge of progress gives her the authority to decide what we can talk about, what we think about, even what we are allowed to feel. It’s an exertion of authority.

Conclusions

So this is some of the ground covered in the book.

It’s not so much about what theories of progress say as what they do.

I see progress above all as a source of authority. It puts us on a pedestal, allowing us to take an overseeing position in society, fortified with a higher knowledge.

That knowledge is of the whole sweep of history – and it’s basically fake.

Assuming you have this knowledge means you have no need to seek knowledge. The world is known to you. It loses its mystery and becomes merely a place to exert power.

And this has many consequences – not least on traditions of intellectual activity. As I write in the book, sociology, psychology the notion of ‘expertise’, even religious traditions, all appear as techniques to exert power.

And that’s why, for me, discussing theories of progress as theories somehow seems to miss the point. It’s a nice thing to debate, but it doesn’t really shed much light on what is happening with progressives in our world.

For me, progress is most significant as a way of manufacturing authority: a way of gaining political legitimacy.

This is not just dry theory we’re talking about: it’s a source of power.