The Appeal of Regression
Hot Take Series
This post is a part of my new Hot Take Series.
This is just a space where I dump a lot of my ideas, ask critical questions, or reflect on what I am learning/have learned.
This series isn’t meant to be a serious inquiry unlike my typical Monday posts.
These are meant to be sporadic takes meant to get myself and my community to reflect on deeper issues within our society.
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Now on to the good stuff…
The Appeal of Regression
I was recently scrolling through Facebook (yes I still use Facebook) and saw a Tik Tok video one of my old high school buddies had shared.
This video went on to describe some of the well known issues in society (inflation, isolation, people losing jobs, etc.). While these issues are well known, well agreed upon, and well documented… the subsequent solutions were misguided.
The man in the video began to preach the gospel of “going back to traditional values”.
This is something I’ve noticed more and more in conservatives circles, this fixation on going back to a “better” time with “better” values. Typically conservatives mean going back to Christians ethically White values with 1950s style gender norms.
Even if someone argues against my explanation of “values” from a conservative perspective, what do they mean by values and why?
Why would the values from one time period be better than the other? Why would values from one region of the world be better than the other?
See, this is where we get into the crux of the argument.
Each time period and region we look at has some form of undesirable problems.
The 1950s was a good time for ethnically white males from an economic and job perspective in America but was also the time of Jim Crow and racial segregation.
If we pick the “values” from a religious authority we have to content with the moral hypocrisy (because there typically is) of that authority and it’s members throughout history.
This also goes back to my earlier question but in a different way… Why go with the religious values of one religion over the other? It’s not like we have a compelling logical reason for doing so.
Going with one religion over another isn’t based largely on reason but emotional and social needs… That might be sufficient for an individual but not for other people.
All of this pondering to get to my central point, there is a fundamental issue with appealing to values especially “traditional” ones. While we have certain political philosophical approaches which attempt to have universalized values (I am thinking of liberalism) there is a fundamental problem with universalizing values.
My fellow leftist see this as epistemic violence or injustice, I see this as a philosophical conundrum. How do we get others to have our values and how are we justified in doing so?
The appeal to regress given the clear problems in modern society makes sense. In math when we have an answer that doesn’t make sense or is wrong in some way we often backtrack to the beginning of the problem. However, society is infinitely more difficult to control and predict than a problem in mathematics.
In every time in history and in every region of the world, human society in every iteration has had some sort of problems. Whether those problems were small in scope or not isn’t up for debate, just the simple true fact there were problems.
Instead of seeking a utopia free from problems I think we are better off embracing a certain set of problems within a given context.
The coercion of neoliberal capitalism has problems arise that relate to its competitive oxymoronic nature. It claims to maximize freedom while it forces us between two options, work or starve. In America we do not have rights as workers, we are overworked and underpaid compared to other countries, and we often have little say over the quality or direction of that work.
Capitalism often posits that human nature is greedy, so it props up the worst aspects of humanity. A few folks who are ruthless and exploitive enough horde most of the wealth, leaving us to fight for crumbs. But I digress because this isn’t an anti capitalist post per se.
What I am getting at is that the set of problems within this system are not preferable. I rather deal with the problems in a system where we support the best aspects of human nature. I rather deal with problems in a society where people can choose their own direction and occupation free from the fear of perishing.
I also think people should be free from the corrupt oligarchy that is the state in America… this is why I closely align with libertarian socialism.
While going back to the past to fix the problems of today is alluring… we need to look towards creative solutions that take full advantage of our scientific and technological advancements for the betterment of society.
More of my thoughts on this topic later.