What "Progress" should look like, and what we get wrong

Damien de Pyle is a veteran of the Australian Army and a student of the Australian Catholic University studying philosophy and Western Civilisation. The views expressed here are his own.

It’s becoming a common phenomenon that a poll will say that the vast majority of people in Western countries believe their country is heading in the wrong direction. Most pundits will chalk it up to some superficial policy that has recently been passed by their federal government, or a "recent" event that happened in the last 20 or so years. However, I believe the problem is much deeper and existential due to the very founding ideology that Western politics is built upon: political liberalism. The problem can be summed up with the question, “What counts as substantial progress in our political system?” To answer this question, we will have to look at the roots of political liberalism and see what an alternative may look like for Western politics.

Political liberalism finds its roots in philosophers like John Locke who argued that humans once lived in a ‘state of nature’ where everyone was fundamentally independent and lived their own lives. However, when dealing with problems of injustice, a community had to come together to give some independent body the authority to judge criminals and uphold some basic political rights. The purpose of the political community was to establish and maintain political rights and to enforce these rights.

Later, other political liberals like John Rawls and Robert Nozick said essentially the same things. Rawls said that the purpose of a political community was to establish a fair form of justice. This fair form of justice would protect and uphold some basic political rights that everyone behind a veil of ignorance (a state where people were unable to know what position they would hold in a society, before they created it) could agree to. Nozick said that the only thing that a government should do is protect basic political rights and maintain a justice system that enforces those rights. While these different philosophers disagreed with what those rights were, the general purpose we see among all classes of liberals from classical liberals to egalitarian liberals and even libertarians, is that the whole purpose of the political community is the protection of political rights and the enforcement of justice.

Within this framework, the only form of substantial progress would have to be around the concept of rights, and this is exactly what we see in the cultural narratives where substantial progress has been made in the West. If we look at the United States, for example, we see that abolishing slavery, giving women the right to vote, and the civil rights movement have all been areas where the U.S. recognizes that it has made substantial progress in its politics. However, if this is the framework of progress in the U.S., then why do people feel like the country is heading in the wrong direction? America has and continues to “progress” with more and more political rights. LGBT rights have been advancing recently, Indigenous Americans have been receiving more recognition and rights, and long-term racial injustices are beginning to be addressed. I’m not arguing that these aren’t substantial forms of progress within the liberal framework, rather, that people are beginning to feel that this framework shouldn’t be the standard for progress. People are onboard with many liberal outcomes, but are becoming disenfranchised by liberalism itself and they are looking for something different.

We see this attitude with the growing rise of populism on both the right and the left with people like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America, Mark Latham in Australia, and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. However, none of these figures have really given an alternative to the question of what should count as substantial progress within a political system. Most on the left still come back to ‘rights talk’ as the ultimate explanation for their policy ideas. An example is that Sanders talked about Universal Healthcare as a human right, rather than offering a substantive alternative to why the U.S. should want to value healthcare.

Those on the right don’t often talk about human rights, but neither do they talk about what progress looks like for them. Instead, they see conservation as the way to make things better, which isn’t necessarily bad, but they offer no vision for what to do once they have successfully conserved things. To answer the question of what an alternative to the liberal view of progress looks like we have to radically rethink politics. I think the best answer to this question comes from the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle said that the purpose of a political community is the collective pursuit of the good life. He said that each person individually tries to pursue a substantially good life and that each person has a different conception of what this ‘good life’ looks like. However, he shows that many of the things that people generally pursue in obtaining a good life, aren’t actually all that substantial. Money, honor, fame, and pleasure are all vacuous pursuits and don’t actually lead to living a good life. Instead, it is excellence of living, human flourishing, or what the Greeks called Eudaimonia that should be what we pursue. Obtaining Eudaimonia comes through looking at the ends of human nature and finding their excellence. An example of this is that because people are social animals, there needs to be excellence in the social realm, and this is what we call the virtue of friendship. This applies to all aspects of human life where work, health, intelligence, morals, family, and even things like recreation had an excellence that needed to be pursued for the sake of Eudaimonia.

So how does this get back to the idea that the purpose of a political community should be for the sake of the collective pursuit of the good life? Well, the fact is that we are very dependent upon others to achieve these excellences. It’s hard to be friends without anyone else to be friends with, and achieving excellence in wisdom usually requires dialogue with others. The same is also true when it comes to professions and trades. If I try to be my own builder, plumber, accountant, filmmaker, songwriter, farmer, and every other trade, I’m probably going to be a lot worse at everything than if I dedicated myself towards just one of those trades. That’s why we depend upon others to become excellent in their own professions and they depend on us being excellent in our own. Likewise, the pursuit of the good life needs to be done in a community where we can help each other obtain those things that are needed to live more excellently. That also includes the liberal concern for justice and rights. However, the difference is that justice isn’t pursued for its own sake, like in liberalism, but justice is there to help us live good and meaningful lives.

Substantial progress in this new political system would therefore have to first come up with a unified conception of what is needed for a human to flourish. Things like health, basic resources (food, water, housing), dignified labor (or a profession of excellence), recreation, family, friendships, religion, education, morality, and others. It would then need to consider what the standards of excellence in each of these areas are and how these can be achieved. All of this with the larger goal of helping people live meaningful and excellent lives. This new way of looking at progress would have significant impacts on most areas of life. Unions, for example, wouldn’t just be bodies that advocated for workers’ rights but worked towards the excellence of labor in a particular profession. Schools and universities wouldn’t just prepare students for the workplace but would also prioritize those areas that help students become better people. There is a lot more that can be said about how this would reimagine every aspect of our lives and how we view politics, but I truly believe that this is a much more substantial form of progress. It’s a much-needed vision that we need to embrace if we want to feel like our countries are headed in the right direction.