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I disagree. Read their writings, their poetry, their histories, examine the events of their time. They understood good and evil, virtue, honor, malice, human weakness. They were often concerned with the good life and how to secure it, and their execution was by no means the worst humans have done.
This is certainly the Progressive claim. And then there's the actual history, where Progressive attempts to implement the purest form of their vision have consistently resulted in some of the most concentrated evil and human misery the world has ever seen. Properly freed from tradition and hierarchy, truly Progressive societies have not demonstrated a solution to war, nor to hierarchy either, and it is not clear to me that attempting to eliminate hierarchy in particular is even possible, much less desirable.
This is not to claim that Marxism or Progressivism are Pure Evil, because they are not. Humans generally are not good producing anything pure. The fact remains that straight tabula-rasa year-zero Progressivism has a considerably worse record than any ideology currently in play, and judged by a balance of outcomes versus remaining influence versus length of influence, it's by far the most extreme outlier I'm aware of.
It is more or less necessary depending on circumstances. Cossacks and cowboys had very little hierarchy. Some versions of yeoman farmers didn't have much more.
Is hierarchy measured by number of layers, or by the influence the layers exert? I would bet most Cowboys and Cassocks who lived and worked together had a "boss", and I'd bet that "boss" had a whole lot of say on how things went. I'd bet, depending on the size of the group, there was even a fair amount of hierarchy below the boss. If your whole life revolves around working together, and that work is done under more or less explicit chain of command, I'd say you have "a lot" of hierarchy even if the hierarchy is only a few or even one level tall.
Yes, but at the same time if "exit" is easy (or at least not significantly harder than non-exit, b/c let's be real cossack life in any circumstance wasn't a picnic), and if the hierarchy is in many respects directly-answerable to the group (e.g., the election and deposition of Cossack "hetmans") or a function of ill-defined "prestige" or respect, then that hierarchy may sit comparatively lightly on one's shoulders.
Of course all this is theoretical, and I'm not a cossack or cowboy so if I'm blowing wind feel free to disregard.
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I'm not conflating good and humanized here. Ancient civilizations both had deep and profound traditions, and also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people for no conceivable progressive reason, for glory and conquest and just mere power. But marxism is less violent, in both ideology and implementation, than - easiest demonstration - the mongols, or some of the wars of ancient china.
Post-WW2 society does seem to have less war than ancient societies (... althouhg that's a weak claim, "post ww2", ww2 was recent!) - which is perhaps related to 'the glory of conquest and war' being a value modern progressives despise, which was not true in the past.
Why must the reasons be "conceivably progressive"? Romans believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Progressive polities likewise believed that their sociopolitical system was the best, and the more of the world it ruled the better everything would be. Sure, the "everything" that "would be better" was based on different values, but why should we concede that International Socialism was a more worthy goal than "Rome Eternal"? The Romans appear to have been self-aware of the Pax Romana; I'm not aware of an equivalent Pax Sovieta or Pax Franca. The Enlightenment did not derive the blessings of peace and prosperity or The Good Life from first principles, and they manifestly sucked at actually securing them.
What justifies this choice of dates? Progressivism's first real play was the French Revolution, which resulted in some of the largest wars the world had ever seen. Progressivism's next real play was the Russian Revolution, which was pure hell on earth and helped sow the seeds of WWII itself. Further plays resulted in multiple genocide-analogues post-WWII. The Soviets were no strangers to Glorious War and Conquest. Neither were the Chinese, or the Vietnamese, nor the Cambodians, nor Che and Castro, nor many others besides.
The first poem from your link:
...To be clear, your argument is that such sentiments have no analog from, say, The Great Patriotic War? Such a claim seems entirely unsupportable, but perhaps you'd like examples?
We're talking past each other tbh, and it's probably my fault - I don't really know how this is a response to my point, or where exactly we disagree. I was arguing you seemed to be claiming progressivism was somehow more violent or brutal in a way 'untethered by tradition', and my response is just that 'both progressivism and traditional societies have been quite violent, and violence = bad seems somewhat progressive'. I'm not saying progressivism is better, or that WWII didn't involve patriotism. And I did note that the 'actually reduced war' claim was a weak one - the stronger claim is the progressive claims 'war is bad and there should be less of it', even if he follows through on it poorly, while many trad societies do not claim that, and indeed had violent wars. This isn't saying that progressives are better ... just that your argument has a bit of progressive in it.
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