The High Ground

what does it really mean to be 'progressive'?

It’s curious that one side of the political divide is referred to as ‘progressive’ - as if the other side is somehow against progress. It would be fairer I think - though admittedly oversimplified - to see the contrast of the political ‘sides’ in terms of revolutionary progress vs. evolutionary progress.

I am not interested however, in criticising the left or the right. Nor in praising either of them: One of the central arguments in all I do is that the old game of left vs. right does not serve us at all, and it is time that we found a way beyond it.

Historian Carroll Quigley, right back in the 1960’s, described a reality in which:

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. … Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”¹

People are waking up to this. More and more are talking about the need for ‘some kind of new way of doing things’. There is a hunger for something which can reverse the trends toward sterile technocracy and increasing top-down control. Something that can begin to change the dynamic in which investment is increasingly directed to what is destructive, just because it is profitable, while the truly progressive is constantly dismissed - by all sides - as ‘unrealistic’. There is a hunger even for something that can start undoing the long-standing process of cultivating passive, ill-informed, mis-informed, frightened human beings, and instead recognise the population as a vast untapped potential to participate more actively in society and thus dynamise it in a way that all the top-down control-freaks could never dream of.

A genuinely new perspective, however, can by definition not come from our existing social and conceptual frameworks. It cannot emerge from the realm of any known ideology. I would go further and propose that there is a more foundational realisation here: We must recognise that ideology is almost always the problem, not the solution. With such a suggestion however, we find ourselves quickly departing from the old road and on apparently tricky ground: Surely, as soon as one speaks of any ‘framework of thought’, any ‘perspective for looking at things’ one must be in the world of ideology?

In fact, that’s not so. An alternative consists in archetypes. Ideology is prescriptive. Archetypes are not. Ideology involves intellectually created ideas that prescribe certain actions and policies, which, it is believed, will produce certain responses from a complex system called ‘society’ (and which, almost always, produce responses other than the anticipated ones). Archetypes, on the other hand, are eternal but evolving truths that are inherent in the nature of reality, irrespective of what human beings do or don’t think about them. They mandate neither that we should respond to their existence, nor, if we do, how. It is generally favourable however, for us to act in ways
that take account of them, since they are fundamental elements of reality. In fact, and in accordance with the argument I have been gradually developing in ‘World in Transition’, such a shift from, let’s call it, ‘mechanistic cause and effect’ to a more complexity-based, alive and archetypal thinking, is the only thing which can lead us out of the growing sense of calamity.

CULTURE, STATE AND TRADE:

Specifically, the archetype I want to concern myself with here is a hidden and ever-evolving dynamic that is inherent in the nature of the world and of the relationship between ourselves and the world: An ever-shifting and yet ever-present relationship between free cultural activity, the legislative state and the need to produce and trade commodities. Or, to say it more briefly, between culture (founded in freedom), state (founded in equality) and trade (founded in collaboration). That’s ‘liberty, egality, fraternity’, made practical.

A clarification: I am endebted to reader and Substacker

RebeccaGrrrl

for questioning my earlier comments about the role of the state in ‘equality’, vs a role in ‘enshrining values-based rights in such a way as to encourage a just and flourishing society’. (Think US Constitution, English Magna-Carta etc).

The question gives me the opportunity to clarify something that I have not in previous pieces made clear enough - namely, what is really in my mind when I use the word ‘equality’. What I don’t mean is ‘positive discrimination’ and ‘equality of outcome’ etc - I leave such things for others to argue about. What I'm speaking of is the imperative that all must be equal under the law. I am referring to the function of the state in enshrining a framework of rights based in the values of those who elected them, and applying it even-handedly.

It is a hallmark of archetypes that they exist and grow and develop whether humanity has recognised them or not. (Though they become more potent once they are conscious). And indeed we can trace the evolution of this one over millennia:

Over many thousands of years, each of the three principles has taken a turn at dominance: Looking back to Ancient Egypt, for instance, we find pure theocracy – a nation ruled by the cultural sphere (specifically, by the religious aspect of culture). This of course happened in a great many other places too - Egypt serves only as an easily-recognisable example.

In many subsequent phases, around the world, society was ruled more explicitly by specifically earthly laws formulated by kings and military rulers – but in an arbitrary and autocratic manner.

Thirdly, some centuries ago, the Enlightenment (building on principles from classical Greece) began to displace the rule of kings, to lay the foundations of modernity. Yet while that gave birth to a great diversity of important and interlocking institutions that led to progress in every sphere of life, it also saw the influence of merchants, industrialists and financiers begin to rise.

In other words, following a first phase of broad rulership by cultural/religious elements, and a second phase of more earthly, but arbitrary, laws made by kings and military rulers, the world entered into a period that began with the aspiration for the rule of democratic law, but drifted into the rulership of money – a trend which has grown for centuries and has now become massively unbalanced.

Not only has social evolution cycled between the rule of culture, state and ‘corporate commerce’ in turn however: In the process, the three have gradually become more distinct from each other - precisely so that they can interact more cleanly and regulate each other more effectively. It is clear that humanity, even without a fully conscious awareness of the archetypal principle behind it, has long striven for this; striven for the church to be separated from the state, for the freeing of populations from medieval forms of economic serfdom, for education to be independent of both commercial and state interests (as well as widely available), for freedom of spiritual and religious belief, for science to provide an independent basis for knowledge. The judicial function has widely been separated from the activity of parliaments. (This separation is not yet complete enough, but that’s a theme for another day). And we generally expect commercial interests to be kept separate from political decision-making.

RECENT REGRESSION:

The long historical trend of this largely un-named and unacknowledged dynamic remains however, a work in progress – and in places is even regressing. The
endangered independence of the judiciary, banks that wield more power than governments, and churches acting as multinational corporations are but some examples. The economic strand has thoroughly outgrown itself, commerce and state have entangled themselves increasingly in each other’s affairs and the cultural strand is withering on the vine. Education and science are enslaved to commerce; erosion of democracy and disengagement with the electoral process are endemic
and culture is being handed down to us ready-made as a product to be bought and consumed.

RE-ANIMATING THE ‘THIRD SOCIAL FUNCTION’:

In my earlier post ‘A Basis for Hope’, I argued that with business interfering too much in government and government interfering too much in business, the only viable route to balance is the creation of a third set of institutions, able to form a mutually regulating triangle with the government and the corporate world. I also argued that as a natural balancing reaction, that has already begun to happen.

As the state/corporate partnership has corrupted the proper use of public health institutions (and even science itself), newly independent global medical institutions have begun to be born. As short-term interests of governments seeking re-election, commercial interests, and political propaganda have all poisoned the education process, millions around the world turn to home-schooling - a development which must surely be seen as a first step to it becoming part of a proper ‘cultural function’, independent of both government and state interference.

There are other examples too, but before we get to them, we must define more carefully what is meant by ‘culture’. The clue is in the prior reference to ‘culture (founded in freedom), state (founded in equality) and trade (founded in collaboration)’.

‘Culture’ from the archetypal perspective I describe, is not simply ‘that which is artistic’ (though it may be that too). It is all that which must be practiced in freedom. Activities such as these (as I have argued elsewhere²) must be differentiated from everything related to commodity production. Why? Because producing and trading commodities involves finite resources and sensitive environmental implications - so it is, and must be, subject to less freedom and more collaboration. Whereas for activities which are not commodity-based but still ‘for profit’, greater freedom is the order of the day.

Surprise: the free (and therefore ‘cultural’) activities include not just education, science, the arts, sport, and the spiritual, but such things as banking³ and the news media.

So what has been happening in those realms?

As the banking system has become a greater and greater bone of contention, alternative ‘means of exchange’ have again and again tried to break through - a fact which again represents an underlying push toward ‘institutions of the cultural’. This manifested, world-wide, progressively as LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) schemes in the 1980’s and 1990’s, then as a slew of local currencies⁴ around the world, and more recently as crypto-currencies.⁵

The advent of crowd-funding meanwhile, has marked the first small step on the road to moving the funding of cultural projects from the government to the cultural sphere itself. (I am praising the principle of crowd-funding - not necessarily the corporations which presently run it).

And as the ‘mainstream’ media industry has moved ever-further from its role in providing objective information to the public, and increasingly well-organised organised ‘alternative media’, depending on voluntary contributions from appreciative recipients has emerged, and is most often, more informative and more objective than its predecessor. This (and the best of the citizen journalist / blogger community too) is once again a small step toward moving an important function, this time the news media, toward the cultural sphere. (Practiced in freedom, and closer to the people).

TOWARD THE NEXT PHASE:

To be genuinely progressive would be to recognise that the imbalance in which we are now living is not a three-part world of culture, state and commerce, but in a two-part world: If we loosely define ‘the cultural’ as ‘that which arises freely from the people’, we very quickly notice that in the early 21st century almost nothing arises freely from the people. Corporations and the government usurp everything and when there is no balancing influence from the ‘third social function’ of culture, the other two begin to corrupt each other. Perhaps many would go further and recognise that their increasing incest is a becoming a tyranny over us all?

Embracing the possibility of real change, in place of the empty old game of left and right, and the increasing tyranny of a state/corporate ‘Leviathan’ to which that game gives cover - now, that’s progressive.

RE-VISUALISING COMMERCE:

There is a clear implication in the re-emergence of ‘the cultural’. That is, the re-emergence, much needed and already becoming visible, of what in the late 19th century was called ‘civic society’, and which as it returns in the 21st) will take quite a different form, and extend itself considerably further than before. The implication is that the scope of activity not only of government but of commerce too will gradually change. (For reasons of space, let’s leave further development of the distinction between commodity production and other ‘for profit’ activity⁶ for another day. Let’s here just think of commerce as ‘businesses’, as is the norm of the day).

Even at that simplified level, the ‘mutually regulating triangle’ needs two basic realignments. And both, again, are already trying to manifest themselves.

First, employees, first through voluntary activity of employers, and perhaps later through ‘rights legislation’ should have a greater stake in the enterprises they work for. Along the way, and to benefit the dynamism of their companies, as well as themselves, employees should be actively trained to understand an enterprise in its entirety, not just a corner of it.

Along with that we can strive to get better conditions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in general – especially since they have yet again come under attack via the ‘measures’ taken from 2020 onward. We can also actively support businesses that profit-share and, to realistic levels, decision-share, and seek to widen those practices.

Again the doubter’s cry of ‘utopianism’? Well, in fact examples sufficient to prove the principle already exist. Just six of the best, spread across the UK, Germany and the USA,⁷ employ a quarter of a million people between them) - and have done so very successfully long-term.

Second, we must increasingly confront the abomination of ‘corporate personhood’⁸: Progressively granting to corporations rights originally designed for people has, little by little, effectively been taking them away from those very people they were originally designed and drafted for. This subject is big enough and important enough to warrant an article of its own - which at some time it will get. For now, suffice to say, large-scale, international campaigning to reverse ‘corporate personhood’ legislation already exists⁹ - though it is understandably not much mentioned by the ‘corporate persons’ which are media companies. (Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas). Sustaining pressure on this principle is one of the most important ‘progressive’ activities there could be.

THE NEED FOR A ‘BIG PICTURE’:

Society needs to create for itself a big picture. That is very different from saying that ‘society needs a big picture imposed upon it by a handful of philanthropaths’ - and it may be the most important ‘practical action’ of all.

We must sustain and amplify the increased engagement, debate and search for ideas and perspectives which has begun to awaken since 2020 (So please feel free to question, counter or compliment mine in the comments).But we should also recognise that while diversity and plurality are essential (and again already visible in the present process), no society has ever overcome deep-rooted problems without having a clear set of principles. And the best principles are those which are universally and timelessly true, but which become ‘progressive’ by being implemented in new forms.

As new cultural institutions continue to take shape and old ones are transformed, strengthened or rejuvenated, new dynamics will also emerge between them and the institutions of government and of production. Since new institutions of both culture and commerce will both carry significant responsibilities, those of government will necessarily reduce, and focus down on legislative frameworks of rights, not on results. Results will be determined, as they should, by the population, working through those cultural and commercial institutions.

The important question in all this is not “how long will it take for the eternally-evolving relationship between culture, state and commerce take to achieve, at some basic level, the ‘mutually regulating’ status that it has long been gravitating toward”? (That can already be seen as a millennia-long process, even in arriving at its current level of development).

The right question is “how long will it take to make significant improvements over the current situation”? There are many incremental practical steps which can be begun concretely - some, as described, are already emerging spontaneously, and are essentially calling for more active support and cultivation.

More serious progress however, requires a broader, and indeed ‘cultural’ strategy: If we seek a world with more distributed responsibility, then the principles by which we seek to achieve it must first themselves be distributed. That means that the archetype must live more consciously in more minds and hearts: Engaging with, and sharing, its depth, its coherence, its historical reality and its still-unfulfilled potential, is essential. It’s a long road, but I am not aware of any other approach which can provide a ‘big-picture vision’ to guide incremental action, and which, over any timescale, can offer such a coherent basis for leading us out of the calamities that are everywhere developing.

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1. See ‘Tragedy and Hope’, Carroll Quigley, 1966.

2. See previous articles ‘The Economist is Wearing No Clothes’, and ‘The Circular Economy’.

3. I am not defending our present banks as a force for good. Far from it. I am saying that when money is treated foremost as a means of exchange, and not as commodity in itself, the first imperative of which is to multiply itself, banking will become a simpler and more honest activity, and closer to the people whose money it is. In that sense it should be practiced entirely in freedom, and is closer to ‘culture’ (the sphere of the people), than to the other two essential spheres of society - the state, and the activity of ‘commodity production’.

A good pointer, and some progress, in that direction can be found on the Substack newsletter ‘Web of Debt’ by

Ellen Brown

and also at The Public Banking Institute.

4. The ‘Stroud Pound’, the ‘Arizona Dollar’, ‘Potomacs’, ‘RiverHours’, South African ‘Oras’, German ‘Urstromtalers’, and countless others.

5. Crypto-currencies are currencies that exist only as encrypted ledgers on computer systems.
Current examples (notably Bitcoin, which has been hugely successful) are set up broadly in the following way: There is no centralised control, but rather, sophisticated algorithms which store a great many copies of the ledger on different computer servers all over the world and continuously compare them so that if one is corrupted it can be immediately brought back in line with the greater number of copies. In practice, it has proven highly secure. It is also anonymous, held only with a code, and no name. This means crypto-currencies (presently) function like digital cash. It you lose the key, you have lost your money – like losing cash. It is anonymous – like cash. At present, the creation and circulation of many cryptocurrencies (again, notably Bitcoin) takes place entirely independently of the banking system. In fact, because of its mirroring across many servers and its ability to ‘self-repair’, it has been possible to set it up with no central supervision or control at all – it is largely autonomous in operation. However, the world’s central banks have been developing proposals for global crypto-currency under their management, which will have the opposite effect – total supervision of everybody’s income and expenditure (including the power to shut it down when citizens are non-compliant with emerging rules) by a centralised power. Something along these lines is included within the WEF’s plan for a ‘Great Reset’ – a reshaping of society in response to covid-19

6. This is a distinction I introduced in my previous articles ‘The Economist is Wearing no Clothes’ and ‘The Circular Economy’, and is a theme I will be developing further in future.

7. In the UK, John Lewis Department Stores, Waitrose supermarkets, and Arup Group design and engineering consultants, in Germany, WALA, a manufacturer of cosmetics and medicinal products, and in the USA, Publix Supermarkets and Lifetouch photographic studios.

8. The original concept of a corporation as a ‘legal person’ dates back to 18th century, and was intended to limit the (considerable) risk of those seeking to start a major economic enterprise, legally identify a nonindividual owner of assets, and make it possible to sue a corporation in the case of wrongdoing. However through a series of court judgments between 1819 and 2010 (more detail in later post) progressively more of the rights originally designed for people have also been handed over to ‘corporate persons’, and has led to them becoming more powerful than governments, as well as marginalising the rights of the much less powerful ‘natural persons.’

9. There are campaign groups all over the world fighting the ‘corporate personhood’ issue, but the media succeeds in keeping it mostly off the public radar. The ‘Occupy’ movement had a vigorous campaign, on the issue. A couple of other examples at the present time are ‘Move to Amend’ and ‘Reclaim Democracy’.