Social Revolution Creates Moral Evolution
September 23, 2008 by elcap
This weekend I had the privilege to visit Central High in Little Rock with Liberty Girl, the school that – as she points out in the previous post – 51 years ago today was an international focal point for racial justice. Two ideas quickly stood out in my mind as I watched video clips of angry white mobs screaming at and attacking innocent blacks:
First, what the Little Rock 9 and their advocates battled back then far exceeds anything that we’re dealing with today, both in terms of justice and courage. Second, our morality has rapidly advanced in a short time.
1. REVOLUTION: It takes a lot of balls to fight for liberty: to go up against the teachers unions, to battle powerful developers that want to bulldoze our homes, to stay out of the Oklahoma prison system…. Yet our fights occur for the most part from the comfort of our computers. And kids today are getting at least some education, the victims of eminent domain usually get a lot of money and the Oklahoma outlaw still rests soundly at night in his Virginia home.
Consider how outrageous it is to forbid an entire race of people from doing something as simple as share a water fountain or classroom with a white kid. Think about how much courage it would take to be one of the Little Rock 9, to risk your life walking through a crazed, violent mob to go to school and then be constantly in fear every time you set foot in the hallway.
2. EVOLUTION: I find it utterly shocking to watch the video above and realize that it took place just a few decades ago. Racism and prejudice still exist in our country, as evidenced by the force of current immigration debates and anti-Middle East views. But we’re eons away from segregation.
The Governor of Arkansas in 1957 opposed racial integration and called on whites from across the state to gather at Central High, creating the infamous Central High mobs. He spoke publicly in favor of segregation and yet was voted in a Time magazine poll as one of the most admirable men in America. Today, no sane person could speak like that in public and no politician could get elected on such a blatantly racist ground.
More importantly, far fewer people in the United States harbor such racist sentiments. Fittingly, the presidential favorite at this very moment is black.
How did this drastic moral evolution come about? It’s a question worth asking and devoting serious thought. As advocates of justice, liberty and equality, we seek to change our neighbors’ minds. We fight for nothing short of a societal revolution to advance today’s moral standards.
Steven Pinker gives us a clue where morality comes from in his article The Moral Instinct:
The five moral spheres [harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity] are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
The racist whites in Little Rock where driven by instinctual hatred that was fueled by culture. Liberty Girl ridicules white people in her post – and rightly so – but these white people deserve credit for consciously fighting to change their racist ways.
Racism is a type of group loyalty that exists in all people in all cultures, but many cultures haven’t purged it as well as others. Saudia Arabia, Sudan and China are not nearly as tolerant of other cultures compared to, say, the United States.
ZEITGEIST NOT RELIGION: If morality is a product of evolution and conscious cultural adjustments, then few people get their morality from the source most often credited: religion. This is self-evident because our holy books, unlike our morality, are unchanging; further, they are filled with stories condoning genocide, slavery, rape, brutality, violence and oppression. We cherry pick pieces from these ancient texts that sound good as judged by today’s moral standards and we tend ignore the stuff that offends us.
Indeed, our morality comes in spite of our religion, not because of it. Religion has been a barrier to the greatest moral advancements: the abolition of slavery, female suffrage and equality, racial and homosexual equality, freedom of speech, thought and association.
In Little Rock this weekend we drove past a crowd of religious people. One kid, probably about 10 years old, held a large sign that said, “God hates fags.”
Why is that sign offensive? It’s not in some cultures, and wasn’t at one point in our own. Moral shifts come from many places, including grassroots awareness campaigns, court rulings and cultural leaders like Martin Luther King. This is important because we can help create those shifts through carefully crafted litigation, cultural icons and campaigns.
Is there any doubt that the Supreme Court order to integrate Central High was an essential aspect of our recently improved moral shift toward racial equality?
Liberty Girl and I had dinner this week with a prominent libertarian thinker who wears a necklace with three As attached. They stand for Aristotle, Anarchy and Atheism. Perhaps you consider these ideas too extreme, but at least acknowledge this: To advance liberty and progress morally, we must think clearly and logically. We must resist superstitions and instinctual convictions that lack justice, reason and evidence.
It is in the spirit of actively promoting new ideas and thinking about them clearly that social progress is possible. This is the sole means that marches civilization forward.
Great post, I take one issue: There is yet room for static religious text and moral adjustment to exist together (albeit in a more dangerous way than your static interpretation).
Consider this analogy. Every (good) scientist understands what kind of evidence will disprove her hypothesis. So, the theoretical framework that the scientist uses to explain the world adjusts to the information she gathers about the world through observation.
For many (pious) mystics, no worldy observations should contradict religious text (lest God exaggerated or tricked us). So, when encountering such observations, he must either abandon certain religious text (your notion of “cherry-picking”) or revise his interpretation of the contradictory.
In the second sense, the mystic adapts the theoretical framework for understanding the world and decision-making while continuing the authority of religious text. Perhaps it is the evolving nature of religious interpretation that presents the more debilitating obstacle to real moral achievement.
Certainly, any moral adjustments that further separate theory from observed fact pose the greater danger.
Solid post. A couple of comments. You claim that what the Little Rock 9 went up against “far exceeds anything that we’re dealing with today” and that “our morality has rapidly advanced in a short time.” Though I think both points have merit I’d disagree.
First, there is no doubt that equality before the law has gotten much better for blacks (and gays) in the past fifty years. But today the fight is not so much between one distinguishable group and another, but between the collective and the individual. The reason blacks were treated as second-class citizens is because one group (whites) was able to use the government to restrict their rights for their own benefit (or assumed benefit).
Today, the government is still used to subjugate the rights of others — individuals. But, since it’s difficult to distinguish between the oppressors (those who actively use government force to control others) and the oppressed (those whose actions are restricted and property stolen under the auspices of the “greater good”) there’s not as much of an outcry. It’s the classic story of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs coupled with Public Choice.
To take this further, it’d even state that the groups today are the rulers and subjects. State actors and their ilk have passed many rights-violating pieces of legislation that are every bit as damning to individuals as their legislation of yesteryear were to groups. And because the actual harm caused by the
Secondly, I would not say that “our” morality has increased tremendously. Rather, only that the law changed to better align with people’s stances. The problem with the legal process in the US (and most other countries) is that a judge or ruling body can in an instance change what is legal and what is not. For example, on Monday it may be “illegal” for a person to use a specific substance, or drive over 60mph. Then on Tuesday, based on what a judge or bureaucrat says, it’s all of a sudden “legal” to consume that substance or drive faster than 60mph.
Nothing magical happened overnight that made these activities legal. Instead, it demonstrates the arbitrary nature of man-made decisions, as opposed to spontaneously-emerging equilibriums. To get back to your post, I’d say that a court ruling that integrated schools was not responsible for the change in people’s morality, but that it was already changing on its own. And the fact is, many of those views would not have been held in the first place if the government would not have codified it into law (from the 3/5 clause in the Constitution to the Jim Crow laws) and indoctrinated people with it in government schools.
Pete’s last blog post..The NRA Demonstrates its Uselessness. Again.
Excellent post, LIFM! I’m old enough to remember that era, and I’d say your grasp of times before you were born is remarkable. Pete’s comments are valid, attitudes were already changing, but your title indicates you understood that. It’s Pete’s comment about rulers and subjects that worries me. In that regard, we are far worse off than we were 50 years ago. Despite Ron Paul’s unexpected showing this year, neither party even pays lip service to individual liberty, smaller government or free markets. So keep up the good work, we need you!
The three As need a major revision- Aristotle, Atheism, and Ayn Rand. In fact, collapse it all into Ayn Rand, she implies the other two.
cheers for a good post — the only other group I’d put in the same boat today as African Americans were in 51 years ago is drug users — just look at some of Radley Balko’s work at Reason — citizens can and do get killed with impunity either by law enforcement or as law enforcement looks the other way — one can only imagine what violence will be brought upon citizens and activists the closer we get to ending the war on drugs — even in a drug war ‘ceasefire’ like medical marijuana in California we see the DEA more than ready to bust the most conservative, mainstream, by the rules dispensaries and let the other more shady ones continue.