A friend of mine recently said something about how future generations may judge us harshly similar to how we judge our earlier generations (at least in the US). Our children may think of us as barbarians as we do slave owners because we eat meat, she said.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, and not just about meat consumption. I don’t believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” as Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed as a nod to what I’d consider a reflection of American optimism.
I don’t think such a metaphorical arc exists, but even if it does, I don’t think its motion can be characterized as moving toward or away from “justice.” Because “justice” is not a stationary target. And sometimes, it’s not a knowable target at all.
There is no metaphorical arm because morality is not a single variable entity. Without even getting into whether there can be an objective framework for morality — even if we use a subjective perspective of morality, a society may become more “moral” in some areas but backslide in others.
The statement is even more problematic in its requirement for a universal morality.
For morality is not a temperature that can be measured. There may be measurable parameters for assessing the downstream effect of how “moral” a society is, such as the crime rate, these parameters are also subjective, because they are defined and selected by subjective minds.
Even if we entertain the notion that morality can be measured, and that moral universality exists, I don’t think time would be correlated to the progression of the arc. For morality is not like science, which is a knowledge that grows over time, morality is defined by the zeitgeist of the population, and is sometimes motivated by circumstances external to moral values.
If climate change creates a billion climate refugees who need to emigrate to the global north, I think we will see a backslide of this perceived “arc of the moral universe,” with citizens of the richer countries adjusting their morality to be okay with what they have to do to survive, or risk perishing along with their ideals. And I do not regard this reactive adjustment more or less legitimate than if it is moving in the opposite direction, for example, if the rising GDP of China leads to philanthropy being more expected from people as a consequence.
I, however, do believe that most Americans believe in what MLK said, and as a result, consider their contemporaries to be morally superior to their ancestors’. (For further reading, you can look up articles written on “chronocentricism.”)
This belief of moral superiority over the past, like all beliefs of moral superiority, requires the prerequisite of a universal morality, which is coincidentally the prerequisite for ideological conflicts. This belief is also central to perhaps all post-WWII American wars, to provide a self-fulfilling requirement to justify America’s wars. The firebombing of Dresden was okay, because it stopped the Holocaust.
So, how does this apply to the argument of our children may judge us for eating meat?
If you think this is true, then it must also mean that we judge our ancestors for their barbaric practices.
“We do!” you may proclaim, “we think they were evil for allowing slavery!”
But that’s not an apple-to-apple comparison.
If we are to limit the comparison to eating meat, I reckon that our ancestors would be appalled at the way meat is produced in our industrial farms, how much of it we eat, and how much of it we throw away. Case in point, it is far easier for me to picture my grandmother judging me for how much food I waste, than my yet-to-be-born grandchildren judging me for eating meat.
Thus, I think we are wrong about our feeling of chronocentric moral superiority over our ancestors, that we are somehow better because we have learned from their mistakes. On the contrary, I think we have merely shifted our moral values as society evolved. We have not become fundamentally more morally sound.
In more defined terms, I don’t think we have become more willing to sacrifice our own self-interest to fulfill whatever moral duty that has been bestowed upon us, although our priority may have changed. For example, we may use to donate $10 a month to feed the children of Africa, but now we donate $20 a month to a green energy program. Because society has grown wealthier, this may give off the illusion that we are giving more.
I understand that the MLK quote is usually used in the context of social justice, that social justice is like a science, in that it is a quest with a goal, and the goal is to move society toward that goal, to fulfill America’s destiny as the shining city on the hill.
But I think we are seeing signs, perhaps for the first time, in young Americans, that people are becoming wearier of this mantra.
Millennials on average have less wealth than their Boomer parents, in a rare reversal compared to previous gens. This decline in mental and material “wiggle room” may cause people to have less to give. Instead of donating $20 a month for whatever the cause-of-the-moment is, our children may not have $20 a month to spare because they are poorer. As society grows poorer, this may give off the illusion that we are less moral.
If I may introduce a different visual representation of moral — instead of an arc, we can use a vector, whose direction changes from time to time, but its magnitude grows alongside the wealth of the population.
But the abandonment of a universal morality need not mean to be defeatist or nihilist.
There is a constant cultural war between the conservatives and the progressive, with the conservatives thinking of the progressives as overshooting the metaphorical moral arc and the progressives thinking the opposite. As long as people are moral universalists, a truly empathic conversation is not possible.
I am not advocating for a “both side” approach, to meet in the middle, because that is just going for a baseless compromise that leaves everyone dissatisfied. I am advocating for discussing our discourse without being rigidly bound by our ideological frameworks. Concepts we consider to be fundamental and unchallengeable — like freedom — should not prevent us from empathizing with those who disagree with our values, nor should we completely break free from our values.
Ideologies are not shackles. They are bungee cords.
