[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.
In what follows, I’ll discuss a few of the progressive myths Huemer exposes as false. One of these is the claim that women are not paid as much as men for equal work. “In the U.S. and U.K., there has been a movement to obtain ‘equal pay for equal work,’ which many believe we do not have” and, even as I write this, this movement is much in the news in Britain.
In combating this myth, Huemer notes that the demand for “equal pay for equal work” does not mean “the same pay for the same work done by men and women,” but rather the same pay for different work that the proponent deems of equal value. Huemer tells us that “the gender pay gap statistics do not control for occupation or other relevant factors. In other words, they are not, in fact, about the same work.” If one does control for the relevant factors, it transpires that women earn slightly more than men.
Progressives tend to be greatly upset over the alleged malign effects of man-made “global warming,” arguing that the lives of the poor living in the “less developed” nations are especially imperiled by greedy American plutocrats, who burn fossil fuels for their own gain. Huemer responds in excellent fashion. He says, in effect, “suppose the progressives are right. It doesn’t follow that we should devote resources to helping the poor, given other problems that the poor face and the limitations of our resources.” As Huemer puts it:
The problems I mentioned above—malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, and intestinal worms—are huge problems. Millions die from these causes every year, and many more suffer greatly reduced quality of life. . .there are excellent interventions available for each of these problems—interventions that can make a huge difference to the problems with relatively little cost.
Yet another point Huemer makes in this connection is that the claimed bad effects of global warming are, for the most part, expected to happen fifty years from now, but the problems to which Huemer has called our attention are imposing costs which must be borne by society now. It is very likely that our economy will have grown to such an extent in fifty years that the costs of dealing with the effects of global warming will be easier to bear than they would be if addressed now.
I should emphasize that Huemer does not himself accept the estimates of damage caused by man-made global warming but rather has assumed the worst for the purposes of argument. (I am inclined to think that Huemer has given away too much in conceding that there is a global warming problem at all, but I fear he would respond by charging me with having been beguiled by a conservative myth.)
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.
I hope that readers will humor me by reading Huemer.
