Moral Progress Has Always Pissed Us Off

Why do we have to learn the same lesson over and over?

Moral progressives are not popular people, at least not during their time. If they’re lucky, they’ll live to see the change they fought for, and then get a pat on the back about 20 years too late. Until then, they’ll be written off as proselytizers, zealots, and cult leaders.

This is a bad habit of ours, because it slows down change significantly. How quickly would women have got voting rights if we didn’t have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into progress by the few people that could see injustice for what it is? What’s particularly strange, is that this sort of thing keeps happening. You would think, after the masses were wrong about two or three things, we’d learn to develop a skepticism towards illiberal ideas, and hear the trailblazers out a bit more. Instead we mock, or worse, attack them. We assassinate their character in public, and perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to preserve the status quo. We’ll go through this rigmarole every time, until eventually the next generation turns around and says “They were right all along, actually”.

“I guess you guys aren’t ready for Desegregation yet - but your kids are gonna love it”

Every generation thinks “Well, the people from the previous generation had bad ideas, but we really have it worked out!”, all the while conveniently forgetting that that’s exactly what the previous generation thought and they were wrong. Genuinely, there were people that unironically believed that slavery was a moral abomination, but we should draw the line at sharing water fountains.

Here’s a quote from Abraham Lincoln:

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“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.”

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Man, what a guy. A moral exemplar. Now let’s hear what he had to say about Desegregation:

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“I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

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“Jesus, Abe”

At each stage, we enjoy the freedoms and privileges that come from winning the previous fight, while trying to squash those trying to win the next one. No one ever wants to admit that we have that much further to go, even though all the evidence suggests otherwise. Everyone in the last 300 years has falsely believed that theirs was an enlightened age. What are the chances, really, that we’ve not fallen for the same illusion?

In 1913, Emily Davison ran onto the track at Epsom Derby holding a Suffragette flag. She was hit by a horse and died. This is what a newspaper said about her.

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“pity for the dementia which led an unfortunate woman to seek a grotesque and meaningless kind of 'martyrdom' "

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This was the typical view of her at the time. She was seen as mentally unhinged, overly zealous, and misguided. Fast forward a hundred years, and we’re building statues of her.

What’s the lesson here? Well, maybe whenever we think activists are mentally unhinged, overly zealous, and misguided, we should pause and deeply consider their view, instead of speaking about them like this:

Maybe they’re actually onto something, and they’re being “disruptive” for good reason. If they’re right that we actually are contributing to injustice, they’re also right to be disruptive. It might be the case that they’re the modern day version of Emily Davison, and we’re the modern day version of the people pointing and laughing at her.

We keep forgetting this lesson, even though now we’re at a rate of progress where you can see moral changes happen in real time. When I was young, same sex marriage wasn’t really seriously considered. Hell, even Obama felt he had to say he opposed it during his first campaign run. 7 years later, the Supreme Court ruled state same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional. I’m only 28, and even I’ve seen vast change - yet still, we keep falling into a false sense that now we’re at the finish line. Sure, we thought that 10 years ago, but this time it’s really true, and those protesters just need to get a life.

To anyone paying attention to the trend, it’s obvious we’re not done yet. I’ve undoubtedly done some things that my grandchildren would look back at with despair. It’s not always easy to know exactly what that is (although, this is one obvious candidate), but I’m never going to know if I plug my ears whenever I walk past someone with a picket sign. Sure, the people holding the sign might be wrong, but then we should dismiss them because we have good reasons to think they’re wrong, and not because they’re annoying us. We’d be better off if we showed a bit more humility than our predecessors, and acknowledge that we don’t know everything yet - because that’s the only way we’re going to learn something new.