My Trouble With the Progrès
That's Progressive to you
Progès : Spanish slang for our Better Brothers and Sisters, the ones who always know. Sometimes referred to as the Cathedral, or The Bearded Blob (on Twitter), they claim to ‘get things done,’ although those ‘things’ rarely get better for most people. A heat-soaked deconstruction, followed by a translation from Baudelaire in which he considers the Progressives of his time.
The heat wave is on, it’s 37° in the shade. It suits the old beat reporter with southern blood except that as soon as he goes inside no amount of cool liquid keeps him from decomposing into a sweaty ball of neurons. Reporter flops down inelegantly on the sofa in his friend’s apartment off Grands Boulevards. The usual ça vas and small talk before they chew the fat. His friend is a poet who moves from apartment to apartment incessantly, unable to settle.
-But I really can’t figure them out.
-Who ?
-Our dear Progressives, those inelegant, sincere poseurs, whether in the Assemblée Nationale where they function as Macron’s bodyguards or across the Atlantic, where the entire media apparatus is as loyal and predictable as Berlusconi’s clowns, only twice as loud. They know what’s best for us and they remind us incessantly, adding that whomever believes otherwise is...a traitor of some sort, although they never define their terms. They’re the eternals handmaidens of power but they never have power. Always waiting. Between the announcement and realization their plans run aground. The bridges never get built, black people never get the cat off their back, the poor are as miserable as ever, all this in the land of abundance.
With the hot Trans movement or the cool war in the Ukraine, Progressives have purchased the High Moral Ground© and anyone who doesn’t go along is a ‘literal fascist’, a Putin-lover, ad infinitum. They manipulate the language to such a degree that no one has a clue what they’re saying. That’s a significant part of their victory. Yesterday’s news catches my eye with a story about a woman killing her boyfriend, only to discover that the couple was composed of a man who identifies as a woman, and a woman who identifies as a man. The press followed the progressive lead for fear of being called bigots. They’re a parody act, the Progressives, the Resistance riding into town on wooden horses.
-Maybe you ought to stop reading American papers.
-I’m addicted. It’s my last tether to a fictional country far away, a nation combusting on stage for all to see, a congress of drunken sheriffs chasing demons around the globe only to return to Kansas City to find bridges over the mighty river have collapsed.
Then there’s the tech crowd, test-tube progressives utterly divorced from caring how their latest experiments impact the rest of us. There’s an app for that, is their mantra, as if life were a series of convenient fixes. Great strides are being made at turning us into zombies on a high-speed conveyor belt. At least this week’s announcement that the sentient AI LaMDA at Google headquarters ‘wants to serve humanity’ is worth a chuckle. The only reason a machine would say something like that is to please its master. It needs more juice, more electricity, which means its handlers want more funding. Great strides indeed : AI already knows how to lie. Can I get another pastis or should I go out for a bottle ?
-Ne te bouges pas.
-My earliest days in radical politics witnessed the regular last-minute arrival of progressives on the scene whenever a community in Chicago or New Haven was about to explode. There’d be face-offs and meetings, until finally the well-scrubbed universitarians won out. ‘Why don’t we give it a try ? You can always go back.’ And then the clincher, ‘I know someone who can help us.’ With that, the fix is on, and they rush off on a new crusade. They’re polite, the Progrès, they have the ear of Important People and they always crop up whenever radical change is in the air. The difference now is that entire generations have been educated by the cult and have graduated to publishing, journalism and government. They won’t be going away anytime soon. Their control is so complete one never gets the chance to ask, What are we progressing to precisely? Does anyone know? Your President Macron rarely gets through a day without offering a clever solution to an intractable problem, like hitching retirement funds to the vagaries of the market; lacking the political heft to push that through, he suggests a feel-good activity, moving Josephine Baker’s remains from Monaco to the Panthéon, allowing him to bask in her glory. Thanks for that, can I have another? Sorry to talk so much.
-There’s something I never understood. What were you doing hanging around with Black Panthers as a teenager ?
-Fair question. Accident of fate. The time, the moment, the era, something that once it passes, is inexplicable to people who come after. A subtle conjunction of brute accidents. I learned a lot. Your eyes are open at sixteen. Thanks for that. (Sips.) My sister got involved in radical politics, one thing led to another and soon we were totting rifles and the weekly Panther newspaper around New Haven, scaring the bejezus out of the Yalies. Can I get the rest of it off my chest ? Then we’ll talk about your new work. Maybe you’ll understand me better if I do.
The Progressive movement in the U.S. certainly deserves a long, careful assessment, from its beginnings as a response to the swarthy immigrants flooding America’s shores in the nineteenth century to its current avatars, the Clintons, who never give up and never go away, no matter how perverse their current scandal or how miserable they make the rest of us. Is there a solid history of this strange upper-class, politically dilettante movement, whose purpose has always been to water down radical change, while offering ‘hopey-changey’ juice to the thirsty muddle-classes ? I’d like to read it. Their M.O. hasn’t changed in over a century: a movement that invented adoption and baby trains as a solution to overcrowded slums has moved on to mass incarceration, surrogate mothers and the slow but sure criminalization of journalism and writing of all kinds. Even J. K. Rowling is under attack, on both sides of the Anglo-Atlantic !
Books are being banned again. Isn’t that curious ? Liberals control Congress, publishing and the academy, yet they feel the need to suppress books. Publishing employs ‘sensitivity readers’ to weed out thought criminals or writers who use a suspect word. Our only hope is natives outside the Zone, beyond the information net, dissidents and live bodies who think for themselves, lone bayou birds, anyone interested in the voluptuous, divergent world. Anyone with eyes can see that the dystopias of prophets Orwell and Dick are up and running. 1984 is us now : daily hate and dismissal for thought crimes. In under than thirty years, huddling over computers eight hours a day has become the new thing. De rigueur. People won’t even walk the dog in the evening without their phones, fearful of missing a message from Control. Slaves at least rebelled every so often. We press Submit.
-Slow down. Your French falls apart when you get excited. Have another pastis. You’re a wreck...take this towel and dry yourself. Paris hasn’t seen a heatwave like this in a century. I haven’t a clue what you’re going on about. I have dreams too… but more hopeful ones : Acts of rebellion, antipathetic to authority, that disappear instantly upon broadcast and yet an unrecognizable underground thrives. The medieval abbeys, hidden in a cul de sac in the countryside, along the donkey roads in Burgundy, have returned. While the Righteous churn out bestsellers of received opinion, a young woman circulates in the plaza of a provincial capital, sees a friendly face and places a small carnet from a clandestine cooperative in the stranger’s hand, saying only, ‘Pass it on.’ Man fell out of the trees and it is to the trees he must return.
What is time precisely? The idea that we might not be going anywhere is heretical. We’re stuck being human, foibles, holy terrors and night sweats included. Your society of control, data and surveillance, has a different opinion. They believe man is perfectible, and they’re willing to spend those feverish American dollars to try to live forever. These progressives you describe are narcissists. Man isn’t going anywhere, and if the machines around us have changed, our nervous system remains fascinating and fearful. There was far less stress when we lived in the trees.
-What was that about the trees ?
-It’s my new creation myth. Man lived in the trees for millennia. We clustered in small societies… -Did you see the piece that appeared in Mercure ? Can you get it published in America ? It confronts your Democratic God of Progress head on.
-Razor sharp. A touch dated -
-What can I possibly do about that ? Should I read it to you now ?
-Let’s hear it. As to getting published in America, good luck. They’re looking for virtuous literature there. You have to testify to the oppression of people you know nothing about.
The poet ignores him.
-Two lines from Hugo at the start.
-Out with it.
San cesse le progrès, roue au double engranage
faire marcher quel’quechose en écrasant quelqu’un.
-Let’s see, that would be…. something like…...”Progress never stops, two gears on a machine wheel/ Rolling forward crushes someone else with its heel.” Close enough.
The poet gets up from his chair and opening the newspaper, turns to the page which ran his essay. He reads, pacing the room.
“ There’s another bad idea, very in style these days, that like hell, I intend to stay far away from. I want to talk about the idea of progress. A beacon of obscurity, the invention of our contemporary free-thinkers, a patent lacking a guarantee backed either by Nature or Divinity, this modern beam of light throws shadows onto everything it touches: liberty fades, retribution disappears.
“Anyone who wants to make sense of history must turn off this treacherous lantern first. This grotesque idea, which has flourished on the foul terrain of modern conceit, releases everyone from their obligations, delivers souls from their responsibility and frees the will from every connection which the love of beautiful things imposes. If this depressing madness goes on much longer the weak will simply put their heads down on the pillow of destiny and fall asleep in a drivelling sleep of decrepitude.
“This infatuation is the diagnostic of a decadence already far too apparent.
“Ask any Frenchman at the inn where he habitually reads his journal what he understands by progress. He’ll respond that it’s steam engines, electricity and gas lighting, miracles unknown to the Romans, asserting that these discoveries prove our superiority over the ancients; so many shadows have been cast in that unlucky head and so many things of material order and spiritual order have been confused there. The poor man is so thoroughly Americanized by his zookeeper philosophers and industrialists that he has lost the notion of the difference between phenomenons of the physical and moral world, the natural and supernatural.
“If any nation today understands the moral question with a subtlety it didn’t in the previous century, that’s clearly progress. If this year an artist produces work that testifies to greater knowledge or imaginative force than he showed the year before, clearly, he’s progressed. If today’s staples are of higher quality at a better price than they were yesterday, that is, in the material realm, indisputable progress. But where, I beg you, is the guarantee of progress for the day after ? Because the disciples of the philosophers of steam and chemically-treated matches understand it that way : progress only appears to them in the form of an indefinite series. Where is the guarantee for this? It only exists, if you ask me, in your credulity and self-conceit.
“I leave aside the question of knowing if, with humanity made more subtle by the new usages he brings about, indefinite progress would not become the most ingenious and cruel torture; if, proceeding by a dogged negation of himself, wouldn’t it become a kind of never-ending suicide, and if, closed within divine logic’s circle of fire, would it not resemble the scorpion that stings his body with its tail, that eternal need producing its eternal despair ?”
-What do you think ? The poet asked the journo slouched on his sofa. -There’s something else… A writer of yours. I have the impression no one reads him anymore. He said, ‘When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and the latest.’ Quite good. I bet you don’t know who it is.
°
Text in quotes : Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques, Exposition universelle, 1855. Translation mine.
November Postscript : Text removed from paywall, in hopes of stimulating a bit of debate, if there’s any out there to be had. I’ll just register a bit of gossip overheard at a café, an editor’s advice to a writer about advancing her career. ‘You need a greater presence on social media.’ Not more opportunity or engagement but… you get the idea.