Progress and Progressive

History, Imagination, and Teleology

(the above painting is titled American Progress, painted by John Gast in 1872, and it is included here not because it depicts my views, but something like the opposite. the image is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.)

The first thing I do every morning, before I haul myself out of bed and go for my morning run, is to check my phone. I know that that’s not what you’re supposed to do—that it’s bad for everything from your mental health to your eyesight—but it’s what I do. I begin my day with a scan of my email, a glance at the weather, and a few interesting news articles. All of that, then, gets processed while I’m running, and by the time I’m showering and getting dressed, usually something is percolating in my brain.

This morning I saw an interesting piece in the New York Times by Blake Hounshell on the use (and possible abandonment) of the term “progressive” by people on the left. It’s a piece about politics (filed under a series of reflections on the impending midterm elections), but it also engages a wider conversation about political stances and ideologies and the way we frame our relationships to culture and society. Hounshell is reporting on how many on the left feel that the word progressive relies too much on the myth of progress—the sense that the world is moving forward in a linear fashion from states of oppression and backwardness and toward better qualities of life and systems of governance. This myth of progress can be seen operating in a number of places, usually places where there is a lot of privilege and obliviousness to the experiences of others. In American history, for example, there is the narrative that America was founded by religious pilgrims and refugees who were fleeing persecution in Europe, and that while it has not always lived up to its highest ideals, America has slowly but inexorably made progress toward equality and fairness. Such a view is labeled as a “myth” because it’s only intelligible from the perspectives of European colonizers and their descendants, or those who have accepted their perspectives. Native people (who were decimated during the same period of history), enslaved Africans and their descendants, women, anyone who cares about the environment—lots of people would have a conflicting or competing view of the same period of time, and whether it can be said to represent “progress.” The myth of progress is a shorthand way to say that the idea of progress itself is a figment and tool of some people to be used against others.

Hounshell is setting the progress in progressive up against other terms, like liberal, that have also lost their currency over the years. People on the left, he says, are searching for a self-identifier that describes the range of ideas that make up that coalition, while also not perpetuating misguided views of history. It’s an interesting point to make, and a real question about the word progressive. It’s also, as he points out, a broadside against some shining stars of the left. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” is as good a summation of the myth of progress as you could hope to find. Barack Obama was (and is) fond of citing that quote, and it seems to be a good summation of his whole political ideology: that despite our differences, we can come together to make the world a better place than we found it. It’s what so many of us found so inspiring about Obama, and also what frustrated so many of us as his presidency wore on, and he was stymied by other politicians who seemed hell-bent on pointing the arc of the moral universe straight into the ground.

I am a self-identified progressive. I usually use that word to refer to my place within the spectrum of Christian ideologies; I am a left-edge, progressive Christian. Curiously, when I talk about my politics, I prefer to the use the word liberal. I’m not sure why that is. But religiously, I think of myself as a progressive Christian. I have been thinking a lot, over the past few years, about what that term means and what work it does for me, and whether and how it is entangled in colonialist thinking. I wrote a book not long ago with progressive in its title, asking: Paul the Progressive? The answer to the titular question is, kinda, if you squint and look a the apostle the right way. But as I was writing that book, I went looking for definitions of the “progressive” in “progressive Christianity,” and came away mostly disappointed. It’s one of those labels that gets applied and claimed a lot, but which doesn’t get argued for or described very well.

This morning as I was running, another recent NYT article was jangling around in my head, an opinion piece by Jay Caspian Kang, whose work I have enjoyed for a while now. It’s a write-up about an academic controversy involving the American Historical Association and the question of how much we should frame our understandings of the present (including current events and contemporary identities and ideologies) in terms of the past. It’s a question that’s related to the ones in the first article, I think, because both are wrestling with questions about how history works. Kang’s piece is pointing out how some feel history is misused when it is lassoed into explaining everything about our world, as if oppression in the present is always tightly linked to histories of oppression, and that we cede critical thinking about our own time and place to the past. Kang cites Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is probably my favorite contemporary writer, as an innovator in the genre, but also points out that the recent spate of anti-Asian violence has often been explained as an outgrowth or recurrence of America’s histories of oppressing Asian populations. What does that citation of history buy us for understanding contemporary acts of violence? Current intellectual trends would say that it purchases us a great deal of understanding, and I count myself in that trend, but the AHA controversy Kang is discussing suggests that others are not so sure. Does history repeat itself, and/or does it reach out of the past to push us around in the present?

The “myth of progress” also relies on a view of history that ties the present closely to the past. It assumes that history kind of builds upon itself, in an inevitable march toward perfection or utopia. This is a caricature in some ways, but it’s not always an unfair one. Progress suggests that things are getting better, and that our existence in 2022 is better than it was in 1960 or 1860 or 1060 or 60 or when we were all living off the land without running water or electric cars. It puts the past in service to the present, and the present in service to the future, and it ignores that both time and experience are variegated, with differing things happening for different people in different times and places, many of which cannot be described as progress.

The recent work of my colleague Miguel De La Torre has helped crystallize some of my thinking on this. What would it mean to “embrace hopelessness,” he asks, recognizing that a sunny view of history is the kind of privilege that isn’t available to most folks? I find his work very convincing, and it’s a good rebuttal to the unearned hope that can pop up on the left. One of the things his writing has pushed me to do is ask what I think the progress in progressive is, and what it has to do with history and time. Do I think things are getting better? I don’t think I do. But then, what can progressive actually mean?

For me, this is a question of teleology. That’s one of those words you learn in graduate school, but it really just means that we’re thinking about the purposes or ends of things. It’s a way of asking where things are heading, and what it means that they are heading there. Teleology might force us to ask the same questions being asked in Hounshell’s piece—are we beholden to a mythology of progress?—and it might help us enter into Kang’s debate too—does the past control the present and the future in some deterministic kind of way?

De La Torre’s work has pushed me to ask whether history is the right framing at all for why I think of myself as a progressive Christian. I don’t call myself that because I embrace a view of the world as getting better all or even most of the time, despite my admiration for King and Obama. I don’t think the universe has a moral arc, and if it does, we don’t seem to be moving along it quickly enough to discern any difference in my lifetime. I’m much more of a Coatesian thinker, convinced that the conditions of the past put restraints on possibilities in the present and the future. So what does my progressiveness mean?

I think I have a teleology not of time, but of imagination. Instead of thinking that the world is headed somewhere in particular, I call myself a progressive Christian because I think that we can imagine a better world, and if we can imagine such a world, then we can compare it to the one we actually live in, and make changes. Is that progress? At least it is a teleology. Whether or not history is moving toward justice (debatable) or holding us captive to the sins of the past (seems likely), we still have the capacity to imagine a world that has more justice in it than this one does. The progress in question, then, is progress not toward an inevitable endpoint of history, or progress away from the morass of the past, but progress toward our imagination of what might be. We can be hopeless about this world, and rightly so, while also holding out a vision of what might have been, what might yet be. I think this is what Jesus meant by the “kingdom of God.” He wasn’t claiming something about either the past or the future, but rather saying something about his imagination of a different possibility.

We already have some kind of teleology of justice, whether we realize it or not, because we can look at a situation and judge for ourselves whether it seems just or not. To what are we comparing it? We all hold a kind of ideal of justice in our minds, though we certainly don’t all hold the same ideal of justice. (Shout-out to Plato, by the way, who spilled a lot of ink on just this subject twenty-some centuries ago). We already measure the present against not only history but also some imagination about what ought to be. Could being progressive be as simple as holding that vision up against reality, and asking how we get there from here? Can we affirm that the arc of the moral universe has not moved far enough toward justice, while also imagining ways that it could? Could we live as if a different world were possible—to paraphrase the late Vincent Harding—and keep living it until it becomes real, or we die trying? I think that’s what I mean by progressive.