Like the title says. The moral struggles our societies go through is progress. Culturally, technologically, evolutionary and morally.
In light of last month’s United States Supreme Court decision saying we have come a long way on racial issues, which I agree with, they decided that the former Jim Crow states did not have to clear voting changes through the Courts, a decision that is premature.
Humanity has come a long way in terms of technology, such as electricity, water and sewage, medicine and other tangible matters.
But our struggles over civil rights have also morally improved us and are the biggest changes that we have gone through as human beings in the last 150 years. Morally speaking, we are all better people for treating people of different races, religions, genders, sexual orientations and otherwise with equality. Russia is just starting out on the gay rights issues. But with the enlightenment principles of Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hume, Voltaire and others put front and center in our founding ideals, and with two and quarter centuries of changes (and war) based on those issues, humankind is better off for those struggles.
Or am I debating the obvious?
Maybe obvious…except that there are still a shit-load of bad people who espouse racism openly and overtly. So, alas, we have to continue the fight.
This is why I would agree with you: the Supreme Court acted prematurely. The deep and foetid South still practices racial redlining, racially restrictive redistricting, racially unequal allotment of resources (i.e., longer lines to vote in majority Black districts.) Jim Crow is not dead. We kicked the hell out of him, but he’s still tottering around, doing his evil thing.
Progress is like the frog in the well in the old arithmetic riddle. We go three steps forward…and then slide two steps back again.
Overall? Progress. But the forces standing against progress will never wholly vanish.
I didn’t really start this thread as a swipe at SCOTUS over the voting rights decision, but rather as a point to make of three steps forward, two steps back repeated and over time results in human beings that are, on the whole, aiming and for the most part succeeding in raising the bar on morality for the species as a whole. Slavery is now illegal and repugnant, where 200 years ago it was just starting to be repugnant to many, and two thousand years ago it was the basis of the civilization.
Okay, fair enough. You used it as an example, and I used that as a springboard.
But, yeah, really, three forward and two back. That’s how the human race gets anywhere.
(Sometimes it’s ten forward and nine back!)
Well, where is it going? We do science fiction on where technology will be in 1000 years and how it will affect the human race. How about what will our moral achievements build to on the long view? Will we refuse to eat plants? Will we compost our closest relatives?
In the long run we’re all dead. Human civilization won’t last. Nothing lasts.
A thousand years from now? Either we’re at some unimaginable level of technology, with quantum computing, hyperintelligent AI, zero point energy, and mathematical tools God hasn’t even dreamed of…or we’re gonna be sitting around the fire and trying to figure out why clay hardens.
You are characterizing the ruling incorrectly. It did not say that jurisdictions could not be made to pre-clear voting changes but that the jurisdictions that had to pre-clear the voting changes had to be selected on the basis of data that was more current than what voting patterns were like 50 years ago.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” –probably Theodore Parker.