Why “Progressives” Favor the State Over Society
By John M. Grondelski
The New York Times was abuzz March 5. The board of trustees of South Carolina’s Erskine College—a small, liberal arts college historically associated with the Presbyterian church—had issued a statement declaring that the school considered “all sexual activity outside the covenant of marriage [as] sinful and therefore ultimately destructive of the parties involved.” Not only did the trustees affirm what has been standard Christian belief and practice since … well, the beginning of Christianity, but they even stated: “As a Christian academic community, and in light of our institutional mission, members of the Erskine community are expected to follow the teachings of scripture concerning matters of human sexuality and institutional decisions will be made in light of this position.”
How would the trustees’ statement, worried the Times, be perceived by some homosexual and lesbian members of the volleyball and lacrosse teams?
What the Times did not worry about—indeed, did not even ask—was what vision of society underlay the self-styled “progressive” view?
Progressives generally perceive themselves as “socially conscious,” supposedly concerned with the “good of society” and the “commonweal.” The truth is: progressives really do not believe in society. They believe in the State.
Loud rhetoric about “social justice” and “concern for the community” notwithstanding, the progressives’ position has, at root, an impoverished view of society. That attenuated view of society, in turn, derives from their vision of moral values in the community, which one suspects is driven in large part by their commitments in the areas of life and sex.
For the progressive, what matters is the isolated individual and his will as it pertains to moral matters. In a toxic blend of three deficient philosophies—Ockham’s nominalism (perpetuated in American society through its Protestant roots), the social contract theory of the “Enlightenment,” and the Nietzschean Übermensch whose power and superiority is his will—the progressive gives us a lone individual who does not discover but who actually creates and constitutes right and wrong.
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