In a recent blog for Cardus — the think tank that among its many other good works publishes Convivium magazine — I cited an item sent to me by a regular correspondent. It was, I wrote, a brilliant, step-by-step summary of the way in which so-called “social progress” has occurred during the past 30 years at the expense of long-standing Canadian tradition, custom and especially faith.
The summary read as follows:
o Find an extreme position calling for radical change and self-define it as moderate.
o Get your fellow travellers on The Long March through the unionized newsrooms of the nation to adopt your language.
o Define all who oppose you as intolerant extremists.
o See above re: fellow travellers, and repeat at teachers’ conventions nationwide. Concerned about their social status, teachers will adopt whatever position is portrayed as most fashionable.
o Bake in oven for two terms of government, use quasi-judicial bodies to institute pogroms against your opponents and, bingo, you have progressive social change no matter how much it might feel like a boot stomping on your face.
The only serious addition I offered was expanding item four to include professional associations: lawyers, doctors, Indian chiefs.
It turned out there’s more, and it came from an academic friend:
o Argue for a supposedly moderate change that goes just beyond generally accepted conventions and principles.
o When some people raise objections, accuse them of engaging in specious slippery-slope arguments, insisting that, of course, we certainly do not mean to advocate for those alleged consequences, and it is offensive to be so misrepresented.
o All the while secretly intend the normalization of precisely those furthermost implications down the road
o Once the change argued for is effected, argue for the next supposedly moderate, incremental change that will bring us closer to the realization of the desired (but temporarily too controversial) more radical outcomes. This involves reminding society of how its enlightened embrace of the previous change should lead them to consent to the next step, and mock those who object by pointing out that the sky hasn’t fallen.
These precepts explain the “how” of surreptitious social “progress” that has led to such travesties as the de facto abolition of the constitutional rights of parents to have schools that teach their children what it means to be Catholic, and Quebec’s pending abolition of our foundational Christian understanding of what it means to be human.
Having defined the “how,” however, neither set offered a proposal for what is to be done. Still, simply identifying the steps of the process creates the expectation that someone, somewhere, has some explaining to do. And that opens the door to challenging the dangerous presuppositions at the heart of the radical upending of our society.
Those presuppositions are:
o Any self-proclaimed “progressive” measure is always an essential step demanded by the “forward movement” of history, and its achievement is inevitable.
o The onus is always on those who are hesitant to adopt such “progressive” measures to show why they should not be adopted.
The deficiencies of both become obvious. The second one is grossly unjust and requires the logical fraud of having to prove a negative. The first contains a childish tautology: we want to do this because it’s progress, and it’s progress because we want to do it.
What this means is that the following demands should be made of anyone who proposes any self-defined “progressive” vision:
o State definitively what the historic end point of your progressive vision will be.
o State truthfully your confidence in your ability to forecast that particular historic end point.
o State plainly what existing natural rights and protections must be sacrificed for your progressive vision to be achieved.
o State concretely how your vision of progress differs from a reversion to barbarism.
Such demands are not obstructionist or reactionary. They are the simple precautions any sane people will take before agreeing to changes in the makeup of their society. The final question, of course, is whether it’s already too late for sanity.
(Stockland is the Director of the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal in Montreal.)