Mr Nick Clegg attracted some mockery recently by using the words cuts and progressive in the same sentence. Mr George Osborne, in his Budget speech, said: ‘We are a progressive alliance governing in the national interest.’ Some accused them of using the word progressive because it meant nothing.
In reality progressive means several things. Usage slides from one to another. Thus Mr Clegg had spoken in the same interview about reduced taxes for the poor (or, rather, ‘people on lower incomes’). Taxation which increases according to income is called progressive taxation. This appeals to progressive-minded people.
The latter sense is the most slippery. Fortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary last month updated its entry for progressive. In the 1989 edition, one sense it gave was: ‘characterised by (the desire to promote) change, innovation, or experiment; avant-garde, advanced, “liberal”.’ In last month’s revision, it dropped the sense ‘liberal’, but included the triad ‘advanced, innovative, avant-garde’.
I think that innovative is the early 21st-century version of ‘liberal’, a hooray-term with little content. My husband has banned its use in the house. In the 1989 edition, the OED had a separate section on progressive music of various kinds, all of them ‘modern, experimental, innovatory, avant-garde’. Innovatory is seldom heard now, and innovative is all the rage, even if no innovation is apparent.
One outmoded usage of progressive is in physical anthropology, according to an idea of some peoples being more evolved than others. ‘The progressive character of French dentition,’ noted the American Naturalist in 1886, ‘is in broad contrast with the primitive character of that of Italians and Greeks.’ Hence gnocchi and kleftiko, no doubt.
Politically, it was Francis Bacon, in a Machiavellian mood, that started it all. ‘It is good for Princes, if they use ambitious men,’ he wrote in 1612, ‘as they be still progressive, and not retrograde.’ That’s what we want: to go forwards, not backwards. Chesterton in his George Bernard Shaw (1909) pointed out the absurdity of this metaphor. ‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century,’ he wrote, ‘there appeared its two incredible figures; they were the pure Conservative and the pure Progressive; two figures which would have been overwhelmed with laughter by any other intellectual commonwealth of history. There was hardly a human generation which could not have seen the folly of merely going forward or merely standing still; of mere progressing or mere conserving.’ Now we can stand still and go forward simultaneously.
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