I found Nicholas Pell’s op-ed in the Washington Post proclaiming the gospel that humanity is no better today than it was a century ago hopelessly confused:
Each time progressives invoke the current year, they give up an opportunity to rigorously defend their position and convince others to see their point of view. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prompted cheers in November 2015 when he answered a question about why gender parity was important in his administration by saying, “Because it’s 2015.†Similarly, Bustle, reflecting on Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointees, lamented, “It’s 2016 . . . and in this modern age, you might’ve thought we’d come further in terms of equality and diversity than, well, it now looks like we have.†Missing is any argument about why Trump shouldn’t have selected the people he nominated or why diversity is important.
For one thing he repeatedly confuses technological progress with moral progress. You are much more likely to survive a heart attack than you were a century ago. That isn’t a sign of moral progress but of technological progress. Medicine is a technology and technologies build upon the past so it isn’t surprising that a century’s worth of work, development, and enormous investment would yield some results.
Government, too, is a technology but for whatever reason it’s one more resistant to building upon the successes of the past than information technology, automotive technology, or medical technology. If there’s one thing that a life much of which was spent evaluating technology has taught me, it’s that the best technology does not always prevail.
Civilizational morality might be a technology, too, but I see no evidence that personal morality is. Mother Theresa’s notable morality will not make me more moral unless I elect to emulate her.
Besides, I think that Mr. Pell labors in vain. It’s too darned hard to improve on what G. K. Chesterton said on the very subject he attempts to address. Here are some examples:
My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.
Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.
An imbecile habit has risen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma was credible in the 12th century, but is not credible in the 20th. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays
For those who think that humanity has made aggregate moral progress, you might want to consider a few things. There are more people living in slavery now that at any time in human history. More people were killed in the last century by their own governments than the sum total of those who had been killed in previous centuries. The gap between the richest people and the poorest people is the greatest in human history.
Oh, please, of course the world is better off today than it was in times when ordinary people had neither voice nor rights. I could make a long list, but it would be pointless since anyone reading this can make the same list.
That said, I despise theories that involve things just. . . happening, la di da. Things happen because people make them happen. No, the evils of the past are not dead, too many people still crave a führer as we’ve just seen demonstrated. But you cannot draw a line from Genghis assigning each warrior a number of helpless prisoners to slaughter, to the present day where we spend billions to avoid killing innocents.
We do not have slavery in the developed world, we do not use germ warfare, we do not deliberately starve civilians – well, Putin does, but we don’t. It’s not that the world is a happy, perfect place, but I haven’t seen Huns or Mongols or Tatars anywhere near Marin County. As for the rich-poor gap, at least in the developed world it is a very different matter. Poor used to mean starving, or dying for lack of medicine. Now (at least until Trump and Ryan take healthcare away from poor folks) it means basic cable, day-old groceries and a ten year-old car. That’s bad and wrong and unfair, but it ain’t the middle ages.
Worldwide there are about 48 million slaves, 60,000 in the United States and about 12,000 in the United Kingdom.
The countries with the largest numbers of slaves are India and China.
Dave, that’s ‘modern slavery’ which the source never does quite get around to defining but which pretty clearly does not mean what we think of as slavery. “Slavery’ has become an almost meaningless word it’s applied so liberally.
The 60,000 estimate includes teenaged runaways who get trapped into sex trafficking, which is horrendous, as well as exploited undocumented workers. I don’t know to what extent the label of slavery is exaggerated for these people.
What I think ends up understating the problem though is the degree to which our supply chains rely on people in the third world who are unquestionably slaves. It’s as easy for Michael to claim a clean conscience by distinguishing the developed world from third world…but how is this really different from Yankees who reaped economic benefit from slave labor in the antebellum South?
Here is the definition of modern slavery. If you apply it to life in the past, then you would have had a lot more people then labelled as slaves. Just as an example, nearly everyone who worked in US coal mines would be defined as slaves if you use this definition.
“The index defines modern slavery as a situation where “a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception, with treatment akin to a farm animal.†This also includes victims of human trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage, forced or servile marriage, and the sale and exploitation of children.”
Steve