I often think that we don’t pay enough attention to the language we use. By that, I don’t mean that we curse or swear too much. I mean that we often use words, or use words in ways, that say things about the world that we may not mean or even believe.  This is a very important point to understand.

When I was in graduate school at George Washington University, most of my fellow students were politically liberal. They didn’t usually call themselves liberal, though. They usually called themselves progressive. This was largely because political focus groups long ago told us that Americans tend to associate “liberal” more with “socialist” or even “communist” than with “politically left of center.” Erstwhile liberals searched for a new label, a safer name for themselves that still represented their views and goals for society, and generally settled on “progressive.” It was an inspired choice. “Progressive” contrasts nicely with “conservative.” It gives the impression of looking to the future, of being open to and accepting of what comes, while “conservative” gives an impression of looking backwards, and, as William F. Buckley said, “standing athwart the flow of history yelling, ‘Stop!’” It also gives the impression of moving ever closer to a better society, closer to the best expression of the common good.

And there, I think, is the problem: I don’t think most people, progressives included, really understand what they mean when they say things like “better” or ”progressive.” I don’t even think most of us understand what we mean when we say, “common good.”  “Good” is a pretty particular word.  Let me explain what I mean.

For nearly all human history, people assumed the existence of objective moral truth, of Right and Wrong in capital letters. They assumed that, when they called some actions wrong it was because those actions deviated from a standard of conduct that existed on its own. They viewed wrong behavior a little like how we view wrong answers to math questions. They believed that they were just stating simple and obvious facts about the universe when they called certain actions “good” and others “bad,” or called certain acts “better” than others.

Yes, people in different cultures sometimes differed on what they thought good or bad, but they all shared the conviction that their understanding of right and wrong was not just a mask for their opinions or desires, or a cover for socially beneficial behaviors — anymore than we think that 2 + 2 = 4 because we want it to be so. They believed in a moral law that judged human behavior but which could not itself be judged by humans — something that existed apart from human desires and human actions as much as the times tables do. Moral language developed the way it did because people  assumed these beliefs to be true and self-evident.

Starting about a hundred years ago, however, Western society began to seriously question the existence or importance of an objective moral law. The questioning began earlier among the philosophers, most prominently Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, but by the late 19th and early 20th centuries their questions began to penetrate the public consciousness.

Freud, for example, believed that our conscience was simply a reflection of social norms, and that morality was basically social programming adopted to keep people from killing each other and to allow civilization to form. People learned what behaviors made societies work well, and their rulers harnessed religion (created from people’s need to soothe their fear of death and of the unknown) to reinforce socially beneficial behaviors and discourage behaviors harmful to society.  Marx believed that morality was basically the result of class struggles. The powerful figured out what behaviors among the common people would best perpetuate their own power, and then instilled values in them that ensured that they would behave that way.

The upshot for both Freud and Marx was that the notion of an objective moral law was a sham. Morality was all about behavior that benefited others — society (for Freud, and most of today’s anthropologists and biologists) or the powerful (for Marx) — not about what agreed with some supposedly objective moral law.  For the past fifty years, postmodernists, who used Freudian and Marxist beliefs about morality to build their basic (and invaluable) insight into the bounded nature of human reason, have worked hard to convert the rest of the West to belief in subjective morality — and they’ve largely succeeded.  What they haven’t successfully changed, however, is basic human moral language, and that is where we come back to the problem of being “progressive.”

As noted above, human moral language — terms like “good,” “bad,” and “better” — developed because people believed that morality was subject to rules as objective and unyielding as those of mathematics.  2 + 2 = 4, not five or twenty-two.  We see that five, however, is much closer to four than twenty-two is, even though it’s a wrong answer.  We can only speak this way, though, because we have absolute, objective concepts of 4, 5, and 22.  Those values are what they are, and only because of that can we speak of them as being closer or further from each other.  Only because of that does math make sense.

It’s the same with morality and moral language.  Only if there’s an actual, objective moral standard of what is “good” does it make sense to call anything “bad,” “better,” “worse,” or “progressive.”  If this moral standard doesn’t exist independent of human desires or social constructions, then it would make as much sense to talk about a “more delicious” society as it would to talk about a “better” society.  If “better” doesn’t receive real meaning from a constant “good,” it’s impossible to compare things – after all, there’s no accounting for taste.  We might not consider what one society thought best for itself (such as the chattel-slave status of women) to be good for us today, but who are we to judge?  It’s hard for us to condemn the Romans for putting unwanted infants out on hills to be killed by wild animals, or Southern US slave owners for viciously terrorizing the human beings they owned if we’re only comparing preferences, which is all that subjective moralities come down to in the end.  The Romans could only feed so many mouths, after all, and the Southern agrarian economy depended on that free labor to survive.  Both societies would have likely collapsed if they weren’t allowed to act as they saw fit, and what is the point of morality if not ensuring that societies don’t collapse?

What it comes down to, then, is this: it’s impossible for us to use meaningful moral language unless objective moral standards exist.  People who have no objective standard for what is really good can have nothing towards which to progress, and therefore, “progressive” has no real meaning at all.  If nothing is truly “good,” nothing can ever be “better” — or “worse.”  The same people who use passionate moral language to condemn racism, sexism, infanticide, or the death penalty are themselves often agnostic about morality’s objective basis, or convinced that no such thing exists.  Yet there can be no real moral language where there is no real, objective morality.  The absence of the latter negates the former.  It is a lesson that we who use terms like “good,” “bad,” “better,” “worse,” or “progressive” to describe actions, public policies, or societies must remember: when we say such things we are bearing witness (sometimes unconsciously) to the reality of objective moral truth.  Otherwise, we must be content with speaking gibberish about our more delicious society.