Cultural Intelligence
Discussion
Stevef McIntosh:
“Post-progressivism defines cultural intelligence as the ability to recognize the mutual interdependence of America’s three major worldviews—traditionalism, modernism and progressivism. This comprehensive overview perspective sees how the positive values and enduring accomplishments of all three of these value frames form a kind of symbiotic cultural ecosystem, in which each worldview has an ongoing role to play.
Cultural intelligence provides the ability to integrate and harmonize these three sets of values. This process begins by clearly distinguishing between the upsides and downsides of each worldview. Just as progressivism includes positives and negatives, modernity brings forth both dignities and disasters. Modernist values include economic and scientific progress, individual liberty and the rule of law. Modernity’s pathologies lead to environmental degradation, gross inequality and nuclear proliferation. Traditionalism also has both upsides and downsides. Positive traditional values include loyalty to family and country, duty and honor and altruism. Traditionalism’s pathologies lead to racism, sexism and homophobia.
Once each worldview’s positives have been clearly distinguished from its abiding negatives, it becomes possible to integrate positive values from across the political spectrum. Yet, crucially, this integration process does not eliminate the political challenges that each worldview poses to the others. Cultural intelligence seeks a kind of dynamic integration, which preserves the natural polar tensions between these worldviews. This approach helps make these ongoing conflicts more functional and constructive by fostering deliberative relationships of challenge and support, wherein each worldview can influence and improve its cultural competitors.
Rather than viewing modernity as a corrupt system of greedy neoliberalism, which must be overthrown, post-progressivism can see that modernity’s economic freedom is a crucial component of the liberty and prosperity that it continues to deliver. And, instead of viewing traditionalism as merely a mythic fairytale, post-progressivism can appreciate how traditional values continue to provide the moral foundations of our society. Yet, even as post-progressivism renounces progressivism’s rejection of established American culture, it refuses to agree with those who reduce progressivism to cultural Marxism or who otherwise see it as a virulent ideology that must be crushed.
Post-progressivism wants a fairer economy, but it remains pro-business—it recognizes that business is increasingly becoming a force for good. The post-progressive political position also wants to vigorously combat global warming, but it doesn’t want to impoverish the world in the process. And post-progressivism wants to atone for the sins of the developed world, even as it continues to cherish and defend the unprecedented achievements of western civilization. In short, post-progressivism seeks to both transcend and include progressivism, with a more competent and adaptive worldview, which can pragmatically address our society’s problems, while preserving the best of what has come before. As Hegel put it, a synthesis can only be achieved through a partial “negation of the negation.”
By advancing an inclusive new political position and using the cultural intelligence that this perspective provides, post-progressivism is able to integrate more gratitude into its grievances and thereby make its challenges to the status quo more effective. Even as it continues to fight against the persistent pathologies of both the left and the right, post-progressivism remains grateful for the enduring gifts of all three major worldviews, and for America as a whole.”(https://areomagazine.com/2020/05/20/towards-a-post-progressive-political-perspective/?)