02/07/2025 • Friday Philosophy • David Gordon Print this page [Progressive Myths. By Michael Huemer. Self-published, 2024]
Michael Huemer is a distinguished philosopher who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published outstanding work in ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy, and many libertarians will be familiar with his book The Problem of Political Authority, which I highly recommend. He also is not afraid to skewer the woke left with mordant wit. After he thanks several people in his acknowledgements, he writes, “None of these brave souls are responsible for any of the errors or cancellable offenses contained in this book. Any such misdeeds are due to my inherently evil nature as a cis-hetero white man.”
Our first question must of course be what Huemer means by “progressivism,” and he leaves us in no doubt about the answer. A progressive of the sort he opposes “sees America as a deeply unjust society, filled with prejudice and systematically designed to harm and oppress.” What interests Huemer is that, although this claim about America contains strongly evaluative terms, viz, “prejudice,” “harm,” and “oppress,” it is also an empirical claim that can be assessed for its truth. Huemer endeavors to show that the claim is demonstrably false, and in doing so, he is aided not only by the skill in analyzing arguments that we would expect from an analytic philosopher but also by his assiduity in amassing evidence about many different subjects.
There are, I regret to say, some problems with the book. Murray Rothbard and his fellow Rothbardians have written about a number of the progressive myths that Huemer discusses with greater penetration, but he does not cite them. Rothbard fully grounds his political philosophy in an ethics of natural law, based on self-ownership and property rights; Huemer, by contrast, begins with ungrounded intuitions. And there are other gaps in his reading as well: Richard Epstein and Thomas Sowell are absent from his bibliography. But I shall not go on about the problems. I come to praise Huemer, not to bury him.
My favorite section of the book returns to the quotation I adduced to show the author’s sense of humor. Woke leftists, he says, hate white men. “If you talk to a woke person, they will no doubt deny that they are anti-white or anti-male.” Huemer proposes a brilliant thought experiment to show the falsity of their denial:
Imagine you have a professor whose lessons always seem to have something to do with wrongs committed by Jews. The historical events he is interested in always seem to be times that Jews have exploited or oppressed gentiles. His take on any contemporary issue always seems to somehow connect it to evils committed by Jews. He swears, hand on his heart, that he is just very committed to protecting the rights of gentiles. What would you think of him?... If the anti-Semite’s denial wouldn’t fool you, you shouldn’t be fooled by woke ideology either. They are obviously anti-white, anti-male, anti-American, etc., bigots. Everything about their ideology telegraphs this constantly, and everyone but them can see it.
This looks like an interesting book to read, although it misses some of the more cogent attacks on woke by the Rothbardians and Sowell. I guess if the attacks Huemer makes on the Progressives and wokesters are as humorous as the above attack on Wokies, the book may very well worth reading.