Michael Huemer: Confronting progressive myths

After politicians and used car salesmen, political activists are perhaps the most dishonest group of people in our society. Nearly every piece of information they disseminate is a distortion or outright lie. Unfortunately, much of the information we consume in the political realm comes from activists and other ideologues. This includes a good deal of information that comes filtered through media and academic sources, who often uncritically repeat activist talking points. Activists tell us, for instance:

• That women earn just 82 cents for every dollar that men earn for the same work;
• That police shootings show a marked racial bias against black Americans;
• That global warming is an existential threat to America and the world.

All of those are myths. The truth:

• The pay gap statistics ignore differences in chosen occupation, hours worked, experience, and other pay-relevant characteristics. After controlling for those things, the pay gap disappears.
• The police shooting statistics ignore differences in crime rates and rates of police contact. After controlling for that, police shootings show a bias against whites. Laboratory simulations confirm this, finding that police are quicker to shoot white suspects and more likely to erroneously shoot a white suspect than a black suspect.
• Virtually no serious scientists think that global warming is an existential threat. Mainstream researchers anticipate global warming contributing perhaps a quarter percent to the death rate by mid-century and costing us 2.5% of GDP by 2100, making global warming less serious than many other world problems that have received far less attention.

Those are just three among many examples that could be cited; see my book, “Progressive Myths“, for more. Many of the political myths floating around our culture have a common theme: America is evil. Our society is founded on oppression and injustice, hatred of women and minorities is built into its very structure, and we are shortly going to literally destroy the world. This is the viewpoint of modern Progressivism, the hard left of American politics. And this viewpoint has infiltrated schools, newsrooms, and corporate HR departments across the country. This is what many of our intellectual elite believe and what they are teaching to the nation’s youth.

The roots of contemporary Progressivism go back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, which arose to fight genuine, serious injustices in our society. In addition to promoting social progress, that movement also provided a deep sense of meaning and belonging to its members, including large swaths of America’s intellectual class. The problem, for the activists, is that the movement succeeded too well. If they were to admit that the movement had succeeded, civil rights advocates might then have to disband and thereby lose that sense of meaning and belonging that the movement had given them. Instead, for the last half century, intellectuals of the left have set about developing increasingly sensitive “racism detectors” and increasingly sophisticated theories of how this or that seemingly innocent aspect of our society is really oppressive. Progressives’ current ability to take offense at nearly anything is the product of decades of work by the nation’s top intellectuals dedicated to finding new forms of oppression and injustice.

All of this should cause us grave concern. It is not just that progressives are mischaracterizing our society’s problems and thereby making it harder to solve those problems. It is that progressives are undermining loyalty and trust in our society.

Perhaps that would be a reasonable thing to do if our society really were filled with oppression and injustice. But in fact, our society is vastly better – richer, freer, more just, more peaceful, happier, more open to progress, and more egalitarian – than the overwhelming majority of societies that exist or have existed in human history. If you live in such a society, your first political priority should probably be to preserve the things about it that are working. To do that, you need to teach each new generation about what has made your society great. In our case, this includes such things as democratic capitalism, the norms of free speech and free inquiry, meritocracy, and respect for the rights of the individual.

This is not to preclude teaching about the flaws and errors of our society. But we should not masochistically fixate on flaws, and we certainly should not invent malicious slanders about our society to set different groups against each other.

If we continue to teach our young people that our norms and institutions are evil, we cannot count on those norms and institutions continuing to function. And what we should expect when social loyalty and trust fails is not an evolution to some even better society than we already have; what we should expect is that we will fall back toward the typical state of human societies, which is one of misery and oppression.

In the end, the myths of modern progressivism are more likely to promote collapse than to promote progress.

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of more than 80 academic articles in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics, as well as a dozen brilliant books that you should immediately buy, including, most recently, Progressive Myths.