I can’t really remember the first time I heard the term “progressive” attached to left wing political beliefs. But I do remember finding it odd for a while that left wing beliefs about justice, or economic and social institutions could be progressive. On the most plausible reading it seemed to refer to the quality of left wing beliefs to be open to reforming society. To be open to destroying the old institutions and rules, and implementing new ones. This certainly seems to be how it is thought of when younger generations are described as being ‘progressive’ and so unlikely to vote for right wing political parties. The same reading seems to underlie discussion around the constitutional referendum for an indigenous voice to parliament, where although the issue has not exactly fallen along party lines, its overwhelming support by left wing parties around the country have run together with a description of the voice as a ‘progressive’ idea.

But, there is something quite hollow about this. After all, how else were you supposed to realise your political views other than by destroying old social institutions or laws and replacing them with new ones? Why is that special of left wing views? It seems people want to associate their views with a word that has nice connotations rather than interrogate the content of their beliefs. In anycase, I think like many left wing people, I simply stopped worrying about it. At the very least it signalled your views were not conservative. It at least signalled you didn’t think the status quo was satisfactory and that you at least wanted to reform society.

But over the last few years I’ve begun to think those with broadly egalitarian or socialist views should give up on trying to be ‘progressive’. And this has only seemed more relevant with the referendum for an indigenous voice to parliament looking likely to be defeated. Oddly I have come to believe this because of an article by G.A Cohen on conservatism. In Rescuing Conservatism, Cohen, a socialist, argues for a form of methodological conservatism made up of three tenets: valuing things for what they intrinsically are as opposed to the value they bring, valuing things because they have some personal relation to you, and accepting some things as given rather than shaping everything to our ends.

Cohen’s argument for the first tenet is simply that if an existing thing has some intrinsic value then we have reason against its destruction purely to replace it with something of greater value. If we did not have this bias for the bearer of intrinsic value then we would actually simply be valuing it instrumentally for being a vessel of value. The argument then stands on the notion that there are things we intrinsically value as they are, rather than merely instrumentally for the value they bring us.

The argument for the second tenet is that people want particular things. And, they want them because they want the history of the thing to be part of their lives. As such in wanting particular things we value them as part of a social and cultural landscape that we belong to. In short, we value them for their personal value to us, rather than for the value they contribute.

Cohen offers no argument to defend the third tenet on the grounds that it is beyond the scope of the essay. Nevertheless, Cohen’s remarks on it suggest that we have a normative requirement to accept some things as given because otherwise there could be no intrinsically valuable things. This is somewhat ironic because the most obvious line of defence is that some of the fundamental principles are fact sensitive, so we must accept some things as given and unalterable to our ends. But of course Cohen is strident about fundamental normative principles being fact-insensitive.

What then does any of this have to do with progressivism? Well, that, like Cohen’s conservatism it is ultimately a methodological tenet. And, also like Cohen’s conservatism it is compatible with left and right views meaning it is not intrinsic to or cannot define either. There is nothing special that ties methodological conservatism to right wing beliefs and nothing special that ties progressivism to left wing beliefs. As Cohen himself says, “I do not have conservative views about matters of justice.” How does this square with his belief of valuing things with intrinsic value even if they could be replaced with things of greater value or created by unjust practices? Cohen says, “Wanting to conserve what has value does not imply wanting to conserve exploitation and injustice, since they lack value. Wanting to conserve what has value is consistent with wanting to destroy disvalue.“

There are three important points to take from this. The first is that conservative methodological tenets don’t justify a form of conservatism that tries to ‘bring back the past’. For Cohen that would simply be destroying current bearers of value. There is nothing particularly conservative about that. The second point is that it is also not a simple status quo bias. Cohen does not think the current bearers of value trump matters of justice and accepts that preserving some things may require the destruction of others. The third point that emerges from all this is that Cohen’s account of the conservative disposition shows that it and progressivism are in fact two complementary methodological tenets. When we need to destroy injustice we should be progressive, and when we need to preserve justice we should be conservative.

So what do I mean by the left should give up on progressivism? I mean something like holding it as the sole methodological tenet. That always maximising value is not desirable in itself. And that outcomes are not just purely because they are changed from the status quo, rather they must have independent reasons for their pursuit. One example of this was the argument that there should be an indigenous voice to parliament because the current social and economic state of indigenous people is bad and current policies should not continue. This sort of argument relies on the idea that the voice as radical change from the status quo will improve it. The idea being that, consulting the indigenous community will purely improve policy. The problem with this is that there is no real justification that more consultation will improve the status quo. A better argument in my view is that the voice enshrines indigenous people as the pre-colonial settlers of Australia as part of the political process.

Superannuation is another example. It is seen as a progressive policy success by many on the left because the state of retirement in the decades preceding it was so poor. In the The Lucky Country, Donald Horne, writing in the 60s, says that, ‘the greatest single disaster in Australia, however, is to grow old’. So something had to change. But the privatisation of the pension system although different from the status quo only projected the inequality in lifetime incomes to retirement.

This bare methodological view of progressive might be challenged as too simplistic. It might be said, it is in fact a more substantive normative ideal, namely that we ought continuously to see how the status quo can be changed to improve them. Doing this will allow us to keep moving to a more moral state of affairs. But even this I think is a plainly false view of history and social change which ends up in endless creative destruction or an insistence on Millian experiments in living.

It is merely the opposite of a crude substantive conservatism, that seeks to ‘bring back the past’ or maintain the status quo whatever it happens to be. However instead of a bias towards the past or the present, it is a bias against them. That nothing can be of value from the past or the present. The unidirectional view of history doesn’t make sense. There are always parts of institutions we ought to change and those we ought to keep.

So why has the left bought into this false methodological view? I have two hunches. One is that, at one point pure methodological progressivism served as the best approximation when left wing ideas were relatively new or were faced with a conservative establishment. But we no longer live in those times. The second hunch is that many people have a simplistic view of political outcomes and ideology. I suspect many think the political outcomes are arranged like a slope going up a hill. In the present, society is somewhere on the lower parts of the slope and that as long as one doesn’t move down the hill, society will always go up to the peak of the best political outcome.

But, the logical space of outcomes is a landscape of peaks, troughs and plains. Sometimes the peak we seek is in the opposite direction to the incline we are heading up. To navigate this we need a more precise view of our own ideologies. By which I mean we are better off being clear about hierarchies or distributions of resources we think are good. Far more ‘progress’ can actually be made about being clear about the rights regimes and social institutions we think are right to enforce. These views need not be limited by the age of ideas, the status quo or even history. There is a vast cavern of details to be filled in here of course, but the central point is we can have more sophisticated versions of what is good and right that allows us to see the landscape of political outcomes in a more complex way.