Progress Today or Progress Tomorrow (You Must Choose One)

Morning Thoughts #150

Today’s most vocal champions of “diversity” are, more often than not, really only advocates of short-term diversity. Diversity, in the long run, requires sufficient (and sustained) amounts of distance and isolation. The globalized world praises what it intends to destroy, so that when that destruction inevitably occurs, we may look for the culprit elsewhere.

There’s magic in those encounters when the fruits of separate isolation come into contact with each other (after the prerequisite long periods of isolation), so long as the spirit of kindness and curiosity prevails between strangers, between cultures. When we rightfully praise diversity, we are praising these kinds of meetings. A world that wants to bring us all together, forever, however, will end up eliminating the mechanism that creates diversity to begin with.

You may not believe me now, but you’ve been warned - there’s nothing more boring than an all-dominant monoculture. There used to be such a thing as counterculture, but now most of those who claim to be its latter-day representatives are really just engaged in a more ecstatic, collaborative push towards a monoculture’s greater domination (they’re not against the direction the world is going, they just want it to get there quicker).

In vain, in vain, I look for voices open to pushing for something entirely different, not some variation of the same theme of “progress” that’s been guiding our sails since at least the Industrial Revolution (but most likely as far back as Columbus…I’ve written fragments of a future essay called Columbus the Progressive, where I make just this case. Forthcoming, hopefully in late 2024).

Friends, the best way forward from here begins with necessary backtracking. Backtracking until we can right our flustered compass. Forward in a different direction, a direction we will only anoint as forward after a great number of uncertain, courageous steps! When today’s power brokers say forward, it’s not that I’m ignoring them, I simply reject their terms. I’m waiting for better directions! When they tell you we are moving forward, believe you me, they lie!

Progress never finds sufficiency because it never looks for it. So even when it temporarily provides a good solution, it always pushes beyond it, negating the good that it gave us, that would have been its final legacy if only it had the wisdom of satisfaction. Settling is not settling when it's just the answer. There's this pervasive lie that any stopping or accepting of any imperfect (or inconvenient) reality anywhere whatsoever is a kind of settling. To those who repeat this with their characteristic anxious pitch, I respond: settle down!