hello my name is Matthew Petrusick and I am the survey pinkeyer fellow of Catholic ethics at the word on fire Institute imagine possessing the power to advance your political goals simply by encanting a spell-like Litany of endlessly ambiguous words that Supply immediate and unquestionable moral Supremacy over your ideological Rivals terms like anti-racism intersectionality homo and or transphobia white privilege misgendering patriarchy triggering diversity equity and inclusion imagine being able to assert that mere disagreement with your self-defined communities political position is conclusive proof of your critics intellectual confusion and moral corruption imagine Society granting you the authority
to Proclaim that you are self-described lived experience can Trump all contrary evidence and that the Declaration This is Our Truth is sufficient to supply you with funny media coverage lavish corporate sponsorship and even civil legislation to protect and Advance your political aims imagine a world with no objective rationality below and only a utopian intersectional sky above a world in which winning an argument is as simple as silencing your opponents and silencing your opponents is as simple as calling them dirty names imagine best of all being able to use every economic political and social benefit of
the system while openly calling for the systems dismantling yes that's right heads you in tails everyone else loses if group dominance is the name of the game who would turn down those odds all this and more defines contemporary Progressive ideology also frequently referred to as wokism or or being woke before exploring the philosophical or I should say anti-philosophical roots of this ideology and how the Catholic Social thought tradition can and I believe should respond it is important to highlight that though the focus of this lecture series is on progressivism the Catholic Social thought tradition is
critical of all all political ideologies including utilitarianism Classical liberalism libertarianism and what I would call non-theistic conservatism or conservatism severed from a Biblical conception of God and morality there is plenty of constructive criticism to go around the ideological landscape this lecture series is not let me repeat not an argument against one ideology just to be in favor of another one the concern here however is progressivism or wokism and the reason is practical even urgent Progressive ideology has not only been ascendant in the past decade based upon its pervasiveness in higher education entertainment corporate HR and
marketing departments journalism professional sports non-profit foundations and even the government itself you could say that it has become the dominant ideology in the United States and much of Europe now while a host of competing ideologies remain contenders for the throne by the measure of sheer cultural influence progressivism has scrambled to the top of the ideological Heap and planted its its garishly discordant flag in Triumph the temporary and waning Triumph perhaps but uh a Triumph nonetheless and all of us are living the consequences thus this lecture series The idolatry of identity Progressive focused ideology and the
Catholic response to understand what defines contemporary Progressive ideology it is it is first important to understand what makes it attractive let me emphasize two responses one already not so subtly suggested in the opening gaining socio-political power for one's identity group it is vital to stress however that there's a non-cynical reason Progressive ideology can be attractive as well for all its faults which this lecture series will catalog and analyze progressivism can also appeal to those who have a sincere concern to address social injustice which could be broadly defined as systematic discrimination that targets groups solely on
the basis of one or more morally irrelevant usually immutable characteristic like like sex or skin color or ethnicity denying women the right to vote on the grounds of being women or denying black individuals their right to full participation in society because of their skin color are two obvious historical examples of social injustice in upcoming lectures I will highlight how Catholic Social thought not only takes the problem of social injustice seriously but contains the intellectual and moral resources to take it even more seriously and be more effective in addressing it than the ideological Alternatives including progressivism
it is in examining progressivism's conception of power however that most effectively reveals its intellectual foundations and its moral logic indeed it is fair to say that power acquiring expanding and maintaining it is that is the one thing that unites the ideologies otherwise wildly disparate even contradictory strands indeed perhaps unique among political ideologies progressivism has has no single easily identifiable philosophical Foundation for this reason I call it the the Frankenstein of political ideologies it is it is comprised of bits and pieces of scavenged parts from other political theories including obscure academic ones that were once safely
contained behind University walls this brickledge of ideas however has now amassed into an unwieldy intellectual monstrosity broken out of the Ivory Tower and is currently stopping highly motivated but aggressively disoriented through every institution in society swallowing those whose power it can absorb like well-meaning but naive social justice Advocates while seeking to crush those who oppose it so how can we understand and begin to assess progressivism's conception of power and an equally important how it exercises that power on society in the next few lectures I'll be identifying and examining some of the ideological components that constitute
progressivism though not exhaustive I aim to show how progressivism both appropriates and distorts competing political theories and then and then Yokes those distortions into the service of a particular group's self-interest the theories we'll be looking at include Classical liberalism and libertarianism utilitarianism post-modernism and post-colonialism see you in the next lecture [Music] [Applause] [Music]
