Notes from Joseph Pearce's Talk on The Mistake about Progress

Joseph Pearce
The Mistake about Progress

“Progress is the mother of problems.” GKC

Joseph doesn’t like the word conservative because so many conservatives are idiots.

Chesterton says that even if you want something to stay the same, you have to keep interfering with it, because otherwise things devolve, if left on their own. (The gate post needing constant re-painting example.)

Reality is not in the process of becoming, whether you think it’s becoming better or worse, it simply is. The laws that govern reality is unchanging. Original sin is as real as thermodynamics. We can’t progress beyond what we are, which is the Image of God.

This age is decaying in terms of its understanding of virtue. Yet, we have these dangerous technological gadgets. Its not a very clever thing to do.

Rousseau’s big thing was that there was no such thing as original sin. He was behind the French Revolution. The danger of that idea is if you can make the system better, the government, the state, the environment, people will become better. Pearce believes Obama thinks this way.

To Chesterton, history isn’t linear. Christ’s incarnation was the center, and everything before it pointed to it, and everything since then, points back to it.

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man was a response to H.G. Well’s Outline of History, although he never quite says that, it is, says Pearce.

Wells’s assumption is that the world is progressing. Wells’s assumption is that the past was worse or inferior to now.

Chronological snobbery is a bit like racism. You treat people as inferior because of the time which they were born.

DWEM the new acronym, Dead White European Male, progressives dismiss DWEMs, even though it’s a racist attitude.

Progressivism is poisonous.