Linear History: Not Even Once

On Kohlberg’s Moral Stage Theory and the Great Myth of Our Time

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A few people have got in touch with me to say that they thought our latest Kulture Dads episode was especially important. In it we discussed the modern myths that animate the liberal West. When I say “myth” of course I don’t mean an untrue story, but a story whose truth is not the point. These stories locate us in a trajectory—they tell us who we are and who we ought to be.

I agree this episode was important. It’s a big topic—although we talked for over two hours, we didn’t get to half of what I wanted to talk about. In this article I will take up the major myth of our time and show how it has been injected into a scientific discipline, not in the interest of science, but in order to mobilize that discipline in the service of political ends. Once you know what our myths are, you will begin to see this everywhere.

There are quite a few current year myths such as WWII, slavery, and environmentalism, but these are not foundational myths. Sure, they’re important, but they’re buttressed by more basic myths that hold them up, and without which those other myths fall apart. These foundational myths are the myth of progress, the myth of social contract, and the myth of freedom. These are like the mythic periodic table of elements: all liberal ideology—which is to say, every other liberal myth—can be reduced to some combination of these.

Of these three, the major myth is progress, which is probably better thought of as linear history. The basic theme of linear history is to conflate technical advancement with moral growth. The bugman believes that the accumulation of technical knowledge is mirrored by the accumulation of moral knowledge, because he accepts that old Platonic idea that evil is a species of ignorance, i.e. that morality cashes out to propositions that are true/false and can be discovered by reason and evidence, which themselves have doubtless accumulated over time. If morality is a kind of knowledge,¹ then his reasoning on this point is unchallengeable.

The idea that we’re “getting better all the time” is the basic element in whig history, where this idea is nearest to the surface, and later comes to inform all historiography via progressivism. But it can be seen in the sciences too, it’s just usually better disguised. But not always. Steven Pinker has made a career of this, but he’s more of a Bill Nye style “science educator” than a real scientist, so he can maybe be forgiven. Sometimes the serious academic world will let the mask slip too though, and we can see this at work in Lawrence Kohlberg’s Moral Stage Theory.