A good analysis of our society involves, I think, the ability to look at everything from the perspective of an alien – to remove ourselves from the contingent fact of our place in history and negate the biases and blind spots that might result from it.
If you were to be dropped out of a time machine into pretty much any time in American history, you would see enormous injustices happening everywhere, as well as status quo that is either blind or apathetic towards these injustices.
Social progress is so sudden and final that it’s easy to lose track of this truth. Women have only had the right to vote for the last 100 years, and the first woman to be admitted to Harvard Law School was in 1950. I’m very confident that it will never again be the case that women will not be legally allowed to vote in the United States, or banned from institutions of higher learning. We’ve moved as a society in a direction that we are never coming back from.
Racial discrimination in voting was only technically prohibited after 1965. Just fifty to sixty years ago in the United States, we have elected officials who rose to power by proudly preaching Jim Crow and segregation, affiliating with the Ku Klux Klan, and boasting about chasing black people out of their restaurants with ax handles. Lynching was a common practice in the United States for hundreds of years; Emmett Till was brutally tortured to death for wolf-whistling a white woman in 1955. Professional photographs of lynchings were published as postcards, to be sold as popular souvenirs. Etc etc.
The point of all of this is just to say that it looks like we should have a really strong presumption in favor of there being current massive flaws in the status quo. The argument being: at basically any point in history, the status quo has been blind towards and accept of stunning levels of injustice. While the trend of history has been towards progress and a widening moral circle, we should still suspect that there are aspects of society today that are massively unjust unless we think that we are in an incredibly unique historical moment. We should also suspect that we are vulnerable to the same biases that people have always historically been blind to in failing to see basic moral failings of the society in which they exist.
This raises the question: What are the massive injustices going on today? Where are our blind spots? 100 years down the line, what will people read about us that will make them wonder how we sat by and didn’t do anything?
This is a really hard question, and I only have a few answers that I’m pretty confident about. One of these is animal rights issues. We are inflicting enormous degrees of needless cruelty on animals, and I get the sense that the average American’s attitude towards this is essentially total apathy (although there has been a definite change in this attitude in recent years). Another possibility is mass incarceration. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and we lock crazy amounts of people up for victimless crimes. Time in prison is brutally unpleasant, and for those that act out, solitary confinement is the punishment.
What other things do we accept in modern society that our descendants will look back on and hang their heads in shame about?