The American’s Progress

John Bunyan, a contemporary of John Milton, wrote the religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress in two parts in 1678 and 1684. It remains the most famous Christian allegory, never having been out of print since its publication, translated into over 200 languages, and at one time second only to the Bible in popularity. For Bunyan, his archetypal work would have such wide-ranging influence from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist subtitle, ‘The Parish Boy’s Progress’, C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, to the 1954 science fiction novelette, The Enchanted Duplicator, even an episode of Family Guy. It is a sweeping tale of the journey of the protagonist, Christian, a good man struggling with the knowledge of his own sin. He carries that burden on a journey that follows him from the fires of Hell to deliverance in Paradise.

But it is also the story of man himself, burdened by the weight of his imperfections; seeking grace and forgiveness to better and more fully pursue a life of virtue. The story is timeless and universal, seeped into a collective cultural conscience as to make it seem cliché. But if life is to be universally accepted as a journey, whether or not it contains a religious aspect, it must have a beginning and an end. There is a history and a future from which we are building on and towards which we further a foundation. But now, in a tumultuous time when virtues are conflated with power and religion is perverted into politics, we sever truth from history in order to fashion a new type of future centered on an ideology that reduces humanity to an exclusionary society emphasizing differences for the sake of alienation rather than celebrating a cohesive diversity.

When we become untethered from the traditions and mores of our past, allow our society to accept a deluded narrative that America was never, and is not now, a good and just nation, we have failed our duty to concatenate that strong foundation set by our predecessors. And even – to go down this wayward path – is to bear witness to our self-destruction because we have degenerated into a fearful society.

This did not evolve overnight. It was not a novel idea born of a certain generation nor philosophical theory. It is inherent in man. It is part of the journey. The question, though, is what we do with that ever-present sense of apprehension? Do we cede to its power – enabling is to spread and control our thoughts and actions; or do we press on, accepting fear as an inevitable part of a risk-laden life, but also leads to the incalculable satisfaction taken in its defeat? In this moment, it appears that fear – and those weaponizing it – are in control. It is present in the people who are held hostage to COVID, walking alone on the sidewalk dutifully wearing a mask (or two!). It is present in the parent who sees the shaming of his child at school because of the color of his skin, and is too afraid of the consequences to speak out. It is present in the Minneapolis neighborhood around George Floyd Square, residents who don’t push back on a destructive police ‘reimagining’ scheme for fear of violent retribution. It is in the cowardly silence of Democrats in the face of anti-Israel propaganda because they don’t want to draw the ire of their outspoken colleagues. But most importantly to our nation’s foundation, upon which all other strengths are built, it is fear of defending the good, just, and right.

If our confidence in the ideals of our founding wanes, it causes the erosion of our ability to continue to be a force for good in the world. We cannot capitulate to those who demand we rewrite our history – who demand the beginning of America’s journey was built on irredeemable evil. If we become unmoored from our history – especially of that of man’s journey through the ages from oppression to freedom in all realms: religious, intellectual, economic, and cultural, we risk falling back into that from which we came. When we debase beauty, we embrace the repulsive. When we reject truth, we believe lies. When we refuse discipline, we accept chaos.

The 1619 Project is an example of not only the rewriting of history, it is the testing ground for the courageous to defend right. And it appears there is an unfilled position of the virtuous leader. While we do have small victories in this ongoing battle, the war is still waging in favor of those seeking power by deceit and their collaborators who claim the mantle of moral superiority by signaling their virtuous ‘inclusiveness’. The ‘wokeness’ that crept onto college campuses and universities has now permeated the Human Resources departments of our major institutions, corporations, media companies, and public and private grade schools. Interlopers on the right who insist the cultural norms and traditions being swiftly destroyed today lay the blame at unsophisticated average Americans and reserve the harshest condemnation for Donald Trump, all the while denying any part their capitulation-through-avoidance played in the current disintegration.

A stunning piece was written for The Hedgehog Review on May 4th. It details the consequences of an attack by aggressive antiracists on a religious institution weak in its self-defense and assuredness in its values. It is a lesson in bending to those seeking to destroy religious faith in favor of woke dogma. Unless we fight it, we are complicit in our willful suicide. We can no more claim humanity’s journey as our own if we disavow that from which we come and to where we meet our final fate. We have been conditioned to think our earthly desires and wants are the ultimate goal of our existence. The fear of an unfulfilled life is now more often confused with trading a self-centered life – one undisciplined in our passions. A trade of shallow materialism for moral virtue is not freedom, it chains us to a feudal fate.

The Hedgehog piece is a model of our society and the shallow perversion of our traditional institutions. It’s notable that these conclusions – just as it was to Jodi Shaw at Smith College – are so often made by people who consider themselves Liberals or leftists. They are betrayed by the intolerance of their own progressive politics. What they discover is an ideology that flips a progressive, traditional religion-as-bigotry narrative to claim any established religious belief is heretical to the anti-racist dogma. There is no coexistence. It is no coincidence that the first to be vitiated and morally attacked are the most stringent believers, as they pose the biggest threat. A pressure campaign to delegitimize them with the full complicity of the feeble ‘believers’ more interested in being liked than becoming martyrs for the most noble cause. John Milton said, “None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.” Those men not brave and bold enough in their convictions will succumb to their resentment and seek to control those who exhibit such virtues.

We cannot lose our humanity as individual souls. A campaign of fear has its goal of making people representatives of the most superficial characteristics that places them in ‘victim’ or ‘oppressor’ groups as the diktat deems them useful for political control and power. There is a clear way out of this for America. It will not be an easy journey out of this path into the morass for America, but it is clear. We come to a crossroad in a world increasingly without moral laws or lawmen and so the decision comes to each of us: accepting the cowardly edict of a reductionist history, even choosing to erase Classical Western history itself to assuage those who balk at the idea of a common humanity, common struggles, and common ideals in this life and after, or claim a proclivity to sustain a moral preening based on unthinking blame – such as an opposing political side – without regard to the gradations of historical judgment and context. Those who choose the latter – often modernity-minded, condescending ‘conservatives’ – reveals a lack of discipline of character completely the opposite of what they preach. Promoting this type of sanctimony is the outcome of placing personal animosity, unmoored from any traditional sense of mores, ahead of any broad, self-examination of the ideas and failed political actions that got us here. It reminds me of a pointed passage in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, “Is it not enough? The instinct of self-preservation is the normal law of humanity…It is a law, doubtless, but a law neither more nor less normal than that of destruction, even self-destruction. Is it possible that the whole normal lase of humanity is contained in this sentiment of self-preservation?”

What is needed is a return to the action of what Bunyan describes in the journey in Progress: an openness to thinking in a meditative and transcendent aim to combat the calculated thinking of the comfortable and easy. Man, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger stated, “is in flight from thinking.” It is the cursory and uncritical way to follow without question the radical tide sweeping away generations of Americans. Failure to challenge or even question what we know as truth: about gender, the evils of communism, the cultism of Critical Race Theory, of conforming to public policies out of fear of being ‘difficult’, will cause our unraveling. We must never forget the examples of the brave men who stood in defense of history, of truth and beauty, or traditional religious order, or freedom, of liberty, of the righteousness of the repentant soul balanced with grace. It is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Hong Kong dissident Jimmy Lai, Heinrich Maier, and Natan Sharansky. We were given the capacity to know good and to steer clear of the path that leads us to a journey guided by apathy and fear. Now it is time to stay the course, boldly, fearlessly, unapologetically.

“When a man is afraid and accedes to fear, he will always find arguments to justify his own surrender.” Natan Sharansky 1988 Fear No Evil.