Why I Am Not A Progressive

"It's 2015!"

–Justin Trudeau

"The last time I looked, the past was not a history book. That was just some linear perception.

–Big Thief 

"The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry."

–Red, upon his release from Shawshank prison

It is often characteristic of what they call interesting times that we find ourselves in a crisis of categories. While everything is being re-thought, interrogated and re-negotiated, swathes of people wander about, wondering what to call themselves, while a pantheon of labels and terms float ghostly in our midst, telling their many tales.

When somebody asks me about the things I do, I will sometimes say, I'm a musician and a podcaster and I write theology and poetry. When such a person then feels around for what kind of religious or political energies they might be in the presence of, I used to find it simplest to say that I tend to move in progressive circles, even if I felt like a slightly odd stick there (doesn't everyone?). For a while I used that term as a placeholder; a convenient label that would do for now, even if it was poor fit. However, over time my misgivings have only widened. The vague usefulness of the term seems totally outweighed by its problems as an idea, and indeed the kind of problematic culture it appears to be generating around itself, in my orbit at least.

There is always something interesting, alarming, and a little bit exhilarating about the moment you accept that you no longer wish to call yourself a this or a that. It's a threshold. If I'm not a this then what am I? These are the moments of re-orientation.

There's also a vulnerable edge to what follows. I should own that before I say too much. Not every group that describes itself as progressive embodies the troubling resonances that I'll explore here. Words are just noises and their meanings change. I am, no doubt, reflecting on my personal experiences of circles where the progressive label has flown high, and where it's rather linear imagination has produced a kind of hubris and blindness. And so, what follows is of course particular and subjective to those experiences. 

For this reason, while it would be easy to think of this term as a boundary marker by which some group is named, it might be better to think of it as an idea which ebbs and flows in various circles. At some point it's healthy to stop and ask: what are these ideas doing to us? How is the language we are using shaping who we are becoming? What are the buried assumptions beneath these markers? It takes a lot more than a dubious word to make the well bitter, but a dubious word can be a good place to begin trying to understand the deeper reasons for a bitter edge.