Template Progressivism

 

shutterstock_128011673Scan the headlines on any given day and you will see the left plotting to tinker with every aspect of society they can get their hands on. By its very nature, progressivism is allergic to Burkean restraint. There is no limit to the institutions they may try to overhaul. Not even the seven-day week is safe.

For eons, all manner of animals have lived their lives according to the cycles of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, the moon’s orbit around the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit around the sun. But why do we observe the week? 

As one who self-identifies as a non-college graduate, I cannot speak to what writers and journalists are being taught in America’s universities. I suspect they are, at some point, given a template with which to write articles calling for the rethinking of longstanding institutions. This is a good thing, as allowing such traditions to arise naturally from accumulated societal wisdom is foolish when contrasted against a plan devised while in Trader Joe’s while checking a bag of chips to ensure that none of the ingredients have been genetically modified.

Step one is to assert that the “norm” of today is only a recent development, and the world worked just fine prior to its establishment.  

The pattern of living on a seven-day cycle—with one or two of those days set aside for rest—is a relative novelty. Only in the past few centuries, with Western colonization of most of the world, have the majority of human societies adopted it. 

Step two is to demonstrate the nefarious ties to religion that the existing institution boasts.

As Christianity—which kept the Jewish week but moved the Sabbath to Sunday—and Egyptian astrology gained influence in the empire, so did the seven-day week. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, made it official in 321. Since then, the spread of Christianity’s influence—as well as that of Islam, which also employs a seven-day week—has imposed the seven-day cycle on most of the world.

And such a deplorable imposition at that. Long have we suffered under the oppression of the seven-day week.  

The third step is to explain how the world has changed over the last few decades, rendering the existing institution less relevant than in days past.

Today, advances in automation, computation, and telecommunications have routinized the large-scale coordination problems that challenged America’s 20th-century economy. The knowledge economy runs differently, and there is no longer such an overwhelming imperative for large numbers of people and goods to come together at the same place at the right times, or for those times to remain uniform across an entire society. 

At this point the author usually offers a vague idea of what their desired reforms look like, while avoiding having to lay out a specific vision of the replacement. It is simply assumed that any change will be a step up from the status quo.  

It’s hard to say what, if anything, should replace our seven-day cycle. Unlike the day, with its biological basis, there’s probably no universal need for weeks. 

The template is easy to follow and can be adopted for any issue. The Daily Beast for example hopes gays can help remove monogamy from marriage. After all, monogamy is only a recent development.

Really, it’s only in the last hundred years or so that monogamy has been taken so seriously, starting with the first wave of feminism and the 19th-century temperance movement.

And we have those crazy religious believers to blame for it.

If not, the future of marriage, in fact, may turn out to be a lot like the Christian Right’s nightmare: a sex-positive, body-affirming compact between two adults that allows for a wide range of intimate and emotional experience.

And by now you’ve realized that times have changed and have rendered monogamy obsolete. For seasoning, you can throw in lots of liberal university jargon.  The less sense it makes, the better.

And what about those post-racial and post-gender millennials? What happens when a queer-identified, mostly-heterosexual woman with plenty of LGBT friends gets married? Do we really think that because she is “from Venus,” she will be interested in a heteronormative, sex-negative, patriarchal system of partnership?

Finally, and predictably, it’s all gravy once you dump faithfulness.

So, if I had to predict, I’d go with a gradual realization of the conservative nightmare—only it won’t be a nightmare, and plenty of straight people will thank us for it. 

While my first instinct is to criticize this style of argumentation…actually, that sounds good. Let’s criticize it. Aside from the raw banality and paint-by-number quality of these articles, they suffer from the most common leftist blind spot: there are no consequences to being wrong in the virtual pages of Slate or the Daily Beast. There are, however, grave consequences to a society that dumps what has worked in favor of the preferences of those who reside primarily in the two institutions most insulated from the real world: academia and the press.

I too have a few long standing institutions that I feel should be uprooted and replaced. Armed with the liberal template, no progressive should be able to resist supporting my reforms.

We are all acutely aware of the high costs of a college education. Our young people are leaving America’s universities absolutely buried in debt. Did you know that universities are relatively recent phenomena? The oldest colleges in this country only slightly predate the founding of the United States.

Furthermore, are you aware that nearly all of these places of higher learning were once proudly Christian? Harvard was named for a Christian minister, while Yale was founded by a clergyman. What an outrage!

Meanwhile, the internet has completely changed the way we consume information. I don’t have terribly strong feelings about what should replace them, but I’m sure whatever it is will be superior to the modern university. 

Speaking of crippling debt, the average hospital stay runs about $4,000 a day in the U.S. How can anyone afford such an outrageous price? I can’t help but notice that modern hospitals a relatively recent creation and, wouldn’t you know it, the vast majority of them were founded by religious organizations. Their motives for creating such institutions are indecipherable, but I think we can safely say they were wicked in nature. Besides, how relevant are hospitals in the era of telehealth? Tear them down. Whatever replaces them will certainly be an upgrade.

I realize it can be difficult to consistently come up with new pieces for an opinion site, but let’s mix it up every once in a while.

Speaking of which, did you know online opinion sites are only a recent invention?

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  1. user_86050 Inactive
    user_86050
    @KCMulville

    This is how baseball came up with the designated hitter.

    • #1
  2. user_348375 Member
    user_348375
    @

    Your last line made me laugh out loud.  Appreciate the dissection of liberal “arguments”, and I fully intend the scare quotes!

    • #2
  3. Vance Richards Inactive
    Vance Richards
    @VanceRichards

    Sounds a lot like Mad Libs, except these articles are actually written by mad libs.

    • #3
  4. Guruforhire Inactive
    Guruforhire
    @Guruforhire

    I thought Napoleon put an end to this nonsense?

    • #4
  5. user_240173 Member
    user_240173
    @FrankSoto

    Guruforhire:

    I thought Napoleon put an end to this nonsense?

     There is much lamenting on the left that Napoleon was not able to squash all vestiges of religion, such as the seven day week..

    • #5
  6. tabula rasa Inactive
    tabula rasa
    @tabularasa

    I’ve always liked this comment by Russell Kirk:

    It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.

    • #6
  7. C. U. Douglas Coolidge
    C. U. Douglas
    @CUDouglas

    Frank Soto:

    Aside from the raw banality and paint-by-number quality of these articles, they suffer from the most common leftist blind spot: there are no consequences to being wrong in the virtual pages of Slate or the Daily Beast. There are, however, grave consequences to a society that dumps what has worked in favor of the preferences of those who reside primarily in the two institutions most insulated from the real world: academia and the press.

    There’s what is my argument with most Progressive Social engineering. They take ideas that work, dump them in favor of untried ideas that they swear will work better, and fail to have any foresight into what negative consequences an action might have.

    And wasn’t it revolutionary France that tried to concoct the ten-day, decimal week? The idea of getting rid of the seven day week isn’t as new or innovative as they’d like to think.

    • #7
  8. George Savage Member
    George Savage
    @GeorgeSavage

    Nouveau calendrier?  Très magnifique!  

    How about a 10-day week?  Let’s also make a day 10-hours in length.  And each hour should have 100 minutes.  Oh, and those outdated hetero-normative month names need to go, too.  

    Everyone will love the new system.  And if a few don’t, they won’t pose a problem.

    • #8
  9. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Metric Time Now!

    • #9
  10. user_138562 Moderator
    user_138562
    @RandyWeivoda

    It’s true that the 7-day week is arbitrary, it’s not tied to any natural cycle.  But so what?  There’s no particular advantage in having the week be any other number of days, so there’s never going to be any mass movement to change it.

    If we were colonizing a different planet, which would certainly have a different length of year and day, it would be worth debating what divisions we want to create that come between the day and the year.

    • #10
  11. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    The earliest ancient sources record a seven-day week in ancient Babylon prior to 600 BCE. Opposition to it is therefore racist.

    • #11
  12. user_137118 Member
    user_137118
    @DeanMurphy

    You are missing the subsequent step that is always implied but never stated: “Whatever replaces [the old thing we are destroying] will certainly be an upgrade.”  (because we, the self selected elite, have chosen it.)

    It is always a power grab.  Usually the institution they want to destroy stands in the way of them being in charge of everything, and thats the impetus to want it replaced.

    • #12
  13. Franco Member
    Franco
    @Franco

    Great stuff. Don’t forget that the Europeans are so much more advanced because of the metric system. Somehow, that failed by a mile. Then there’s Esperanto.

    • #13
  14. C. U. Douglas Coolidge
    C. U. Douglas
    @CUDouglas

    Franco:

    Great stuff. Don’t forget that the Europeans are so much more advanced because of the metric system. Somehow, that failed by a mile. Then there’s Esperanto.

    If it wasn’t for Esperanto, we’d not have the greatest William Shatner film of all time

    • #14
  15. user_1029039 Inactive
    user_1029039
    @JasonRudert

    There is a reason for a seven-day week, though, right? A full moon is split into new, full, waxing and waning. 28 days. Are these just arbitrarily defined points?

    Franco: Great stuff. Don’t forget that the Europeans are so much more advanced because of the metric system. Somehow, that failed by a mile.

     I was in elementary school during the waning years of Carter’s push for metrification. So for most of my young life, I was unable to discuss the size of anything with any adult. I didn’t know inches and they looked at me and scratched their heads when I say, described a really big spider as three centimeters across. 

    • #15
  16. user_1029039 Inactive
    user_1029039
    @JasonRudert

    Here we go:

    The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures. The earliest ancient sources record a seven-day week in ancient Babylon prior to 600 BCE

    So it’s Iraq again.

    • #16
  17. user_23747 Member
    user_23747
    @

    Misthiocracy:

    The earliest ancient sources record a seven-day week in ancient Babylon prior to 600 BCE. Opposition to it is therefore racist.

     There’s a well known source several centuries before that. 

    • #17
  18. iWc Coolidge
    iWc
    @iWe

    The 7 Day week is an unnatural unit of time. 5 day or 6 day weeks would fit better for either lunar or astronomical calendars. 

    But this is precisely why it is so important to keep the 7 day week. We are meant to improve Nature, to uplift the world around us, not to become enwrapped and enslave to it. The Torah defines the 7 day week as being tied to the Manna, to the relationship between Man and G-d, not between Man and Nature.

    • #18
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