This world compares unfavorably to utopia, I concede.
Wealth is distributed with an appalling unevenness. We
are changing our planet in ways harmful to ourselves and the other lifeforms
with which we share it. Wars are fought. Women are raped. Children starve.
But this world compares favorably to every world that has
yet existed. Wars, murder, and death from infectious disease cause a smaller
proportion of human suffering than at any point in perhaps the last five
thousand years.
What we have accomplished in just two hundred years is
beyond even the fantasies of all preceding generations. We produce in an
instant quantities of material wealth that previous generations could not have
produced in a lifetime. We generate electricity by nuclear fission, unlocking
vast energy resources of which our ancestors were completely unaware. We
abolished slavery, eradicated smallpox, and walked on the moon.
Tomorrow, we will walk on Mars. We will map the human
brain. We will eradicate genetic diseases. Driverless cars will contribute to
saving the lives of the more-than-30,000 Americans that still die each year in
vehicular collisions and the more-than-a-million that lose their lives in such
collisions worldwide. Some substantial proportion of human drudgery will be taken
up by robots.
It is in this historical context that the racist
demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia took place.
Such worldviews are ostensibly about identity, and this
allows their proponents to sometimes speak as if what they propose is benign.
But such worldviews are about something much more
nefarious than identity. Such worldviews are fundamentally about truncating
one’s universe of moral obligations. These worldviews propose that some
people’s wellbeing counts and other people’s doesn’t. At the very core of such
worldviews is a desire to peg one’s dignity to the denial of someone else’s.
Is this worldview supposed to speak to me? Am I supposed
to be awakened to a sense of racial grievance by images of imbeciles marauding
around public parks with shields?
My response is revulsion. To describe such displays as
primitive is an insult to chimpanzees, who might be excused for failing to
exercise a degree of reflection and agency expected of Homo sapiens. Such convictions are rooted in the most loathsome imaginable
emotional nexus—resentment, envy, hatred, fear. To succumb to such behavior and
convictions is to achieve nearly maximum moral degradation.
Among the features of such worldviews that disgust me are
the degree to which they deviate from an alternative vision of cooperatively
achieved shared progress. We can continue to build on the rapid progress of
previous centuries, and we can extend that progress to greater numbers of our
fellow human beings. It sounds like a rhetorical flourish, but it is a
statement of fact: no generation of human beings has ever possessed a greater
capacity for the elimination of human suffering and the elevation and
enrichment of the human condition than our generation.
Will we cure alcoholism?
Will we extend human life indefinitely?
Will we terraform other worlds?
Or will we squander our potential marching around with
torches, barking paranoid delusions, hoping to inspire fear in the children of
other tribes?
There has never been an expansion of human flourishing
that was characterized by a truncation, by a diminution, of the social unit. We
have never done better as a consequence of caring about fewer people. And a
people infected by poisonous emotions cannot achieve great things, not for long,
and nor would they deserve to.
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