The Politics of Time's Shape | John Michael Greer

May 22, 2013 (Archdruid Report) -- Last week’s discussion was a bit of a divagation from the main theme of the present sequence of posts on The Archdruid Report, but it was a divagation with a purpose.

The three movements I traced from hopeful beginnings to their final guttering out in fantasies of universal destruction -- Christian fundamentalism, the New Age scene, and the environmental movement -- each attempted to change the direction in which the industrial world is moving, and failed. Both the attempts and the failures are instructive, and make it possible to glimpse certain aspects of contemporary life that all parties involved have done their best to keep as obscure as possible.

To begin with, it’s important to recognize that no fixed rule sets apart those changes that get called “progress” from the ones that don’t. The three competing kinds of progress discussed in an earlier post in this sequence are responsible for part of that diversity, but the majority of it is a function of ordinary power politics. Any change in any part of society will benefit certain people at the expense of others, and in the bare-knuckle brawl of modern political life, slapping the label of progress on those changes that will benefit one’s supporters and annoy one’s enemies is an obvious and constantly used tactic. Just as common and effective is the gambit of pinning labels such as "regressive" on those changes that would benefit one’s enemies.

At any point in time, as a result, what exactly counts as progress is a fiercely contested matter, and the success or failure of a pressure group in the political sphere can often be gauged to a fine degree by noting where public opinion puts that group’s agenda on the spectrum reaching from most progressive to most reactionary. Those assignments can shift dramatically with changes in context and the relative strength of different factions. Thus the kind of Protestant religiosity that’s now associated with the far right in America used to be an ideology of the far left -- William Jennings Bryan, the radical Democratic politician whose fire-breathing speeches against corporate power make most of today’s anticorporate rhetoric look tame, was also the prosecuting attorney in the famous Scopes monkey trial -- and environmental protection was dismissed by the American left of a century ago as a reactionary notion that stood in the way of bringing prosperity to the poor.

These shifts are possible because the concept of progress has no content of its own. In one sense, to borrow a bit of edgy mockery from C.S. Lewis, the contemporary faith in progress can be described as the conviction that the word "better" simply means "whatever comes next." In the age of unparalleled abundance and technological power that is now passing, what came next was usually settled by the most recent round of political and economic struggle, and the winners of each round were pleased to see their partisan agenda redefined as the next inevitable step in the onward march of progress.

And the losers? That’s where things get interesting.

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