Angry in the Great White North
Progressivism and Entropy
Saturday, April 08, 2006 at 03:12 PM

Read other posts by Steve Janke published by the National Post
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In relation to my last post, I think I've come to some sort of understanding about the nature of "progressivism" as it is defined by liberals.

I discussed that it can't be progressive unless you have a goal, otherwise you can't judge if you've made any progress to that goal.

I was wrong. More to the point, I was had not considered the other possibility. You can measure progress to a goal. You can also measure progress away from something.

And with that realization, I suddenly understood why conservatives are inherently hard-working and liberals are inherently lazy. It has to do with which type of progress you are trying to achieve and entropy.

Yes, my flashes of insight are often weird and difficult to explain. Still, I'll try.

Let us say for the sake of argument that conservatives strive for general stability. That is to say, they are generally satisfied with the status quo and resist dramatic change. When they do desire change, it is usually a very focused and specific change that can be objectively measured in order to determine success. Take for example the Conservative government's five priorities. A very specific set of goals, limited in number and scope, achievable and measurable.

Liberals seem to think that the status quo is generally bad. For them, progress is anything that is not what it is like today.

And there is where the laziness comes in. It is related to entropy. Consider a jigsaw puzzle fresh out of the box, the pieces scattered on your kitchen table. The random jumble is in a state of high entropy, a term that comes from the field of thermodynamics, and is applicable to information theory as well. Think of it as randomness (though that is an imperfect analogy scientifically speaking). If your goal is to depict the bucolic scene on the cover of the box, you have to invest a great deal of time and effort sorting the pieces and fitting them together.

That is because there is only one correct configuration that shows the picture. To go from a state of randomness to one of order means injecting energy into the system. When completed you have a system of low entropy and high potential energy.

If on the other hand, your goal is merely to have a different configuration than the one you have on the table, all you have to do is mess around with the pieces by shuffling them about for a few moments. It takes nearly no effort, and you have achieve your goal of being different.

Of course, the system is still in a state of high entropy and low potential energy, but then you've injected virtually no energy into the system. Moreoever, by your measure of success, your have succeeded, which isn't surprising, since the bar was set so low. On the other hand, if your goal was to solve the puzzle, success is much harder to come by and failure is easily discerned.

Keeping that analogy in mind, think about conservative progressivism and liberal progressivism. For a conservative, a goal would be to increase Canada's birth rate, for example. That's a measurable goal, and hard to achieve. One step would be to strengthen marriage as an institution, not dilute it.

For a liberal, progress is merely being able to say that today is different from yesterday. Yesterday we did not have gay marriage. Today we do. That's progress.

In a way it is, because you have moved away from your previous state. But the new state is really not much different from the old state. Birth rates, for example, continue to fall. So though the configuration is different, it is still essentially that same (random noise, purposeless, chaotic), and achieving it really required no special effort. The liberal can hold up his achievement, but then any change from day to day would meet his weak definition for progress.

For the conservative, of course, that's not progress. Not because, in this case, of a fundamental problem with gay marriage. But because that change has done nothing to move the state of the system (birth rate in this case) to a desired goal (an increase), and arguably has moved away from it. So when a conservative says this does not represent progress, it is because he understands progress to mean something different. There is a specific goal in mind, and if that goal is not reached, or at least approached, then whatever changes have occurred are not truly progressive. The system is merely in a different, but equivalent, state.

The conservative's goals are much harder to achieve. He is trying to solve the puzzle. That takes incredible amounts of energy, given the puzzle at hand -- Canada. For the liberal, the goal is to continually fiddle, and any pointless or ineffective change is progress and so is a claim to success. Gay marriage does nothing to strengthen marriage or the family, but yesterday we didn't have it, and today we do, so that's progress. The long gun registry has done nothing to lower crime, but yesterday we didn't have it, and today we do, so that's progress. The additional billions thrown at healthcare have not improved the system, but yesterday we weren't spending it, and today we are, so that's progress. Nationalized daycare as envisioned by the Liberals would have resulted in almost no new daycare spaces, but yesterday we didn't have it, and today we would have, so that would have been progress.

The size of government is a function of this difference is "progress". Conservatives believe in having only as much government as you need to fulfill a specific set of goals. Any more does not help reach those goals and so does not help progress (indeed is an impediment in terms of wasted tax dollars). Liberals believe in large governments involved in all aspects of society. That provides the maximum capacity for changing things, which to them is the equivalent of maxium progress.

This is why liberals are always talking about an endless list of progressive policies and rarely any concrete goals. Progress is an end to itself, and what is "policy" but a word for how to change something, minus the actual goal. As long as things are changing (and they are directing the changes, of course), then, according to them, they have achieved their goal, because the goal is the change. Where the change leads is really not all that important, because wherever that is, they don't plan to stay there for long before changing things again.

I guess I know now why I tune out when I starting reading or hearing about progressive this and progressive that. At some level, I've always understood that all that nonsense about progressive policies never meant anything. Now I think I understand why.

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