MZ: Well, no, hear me out.
Social progress is an illusion. It's a theory that holds up well only if you've been a member of the Western world over the past two hundred years. There is nothing inevitable about it; not everything new that is heralded as progress is, and not everything that is swept away was bad.
Moral progress is doubly an illusion. Humans are humans; they are both good and evil by nature, and I think it is very unlikely that living in the 21st century in blue-state America has actually made many people intrinsically better; it's just widened their in-group, and in a way that has been vanishingly, exceptionally rare in the history of humanity.
Does acting as if everyone in humanity is in your in-group produce better results than acting as if only the people in your tiny political tribe count? Yes, it absolutely does, as you rightly point out. But the morality of a person's actions aren't about consequences. They're about intent, and your intent operates within your worldview.
Most people in America end up either as standard liberals- socially liberal, economically liberal- or the polar opposite, with a fair amount of mixing. Out of all the hundreds and hundreds of ideologies and worldviews that have been promulgated throughout human history, isn't it a bit suspicious that most people in a nation of 330 million people have wound up with one of two, or a mixture of the two? Americans navigate to become liberals or conservatives. By and large they do so because of factors beyond their control, and although many people with good critical thinking skills move from conservative to liberal- I'll readily admit this is the case- it's not universal. Is it really likely that a social worker from Boston is intrinsically a better person- and I'm talking intent, now, not consequences- than someone from small-town Kansas, when we know that by and large their worldviews are bigger than the people holding them? I mean, I really think that to postulate otherwise is to posit that your circumstances of birth are grounds for moral judgement, and moral judgment not only of your actions but of yourself as a person. That's a fairly illiberal position, isn't it?
Critical thinking of the sort that changes people's ideologies takes a lot of work. It takes good analytical skills, which not everyone starts out with, and access to lots and lots of information and analysis. This is made a bit easier if you have the Internet. If you're the average GOP voter- median age of 50- you didn't have that growing up, and the cognitive jump you have to make to catch up at your age, if you're not a journalist or someone else who's constantly interacting with other worldviews, is unimaginably high for someone in their 20s and 30s. As for high-school bigots, they're still living on worldviews borrowed from their parents, and high-schoolers are nasty anyways. Those with the wherewithal to get out of their situations are going to be just fine. Those who never do probably didn't have the gumption to do that sort of critical thinking anyways. There probably isn't much you can do about them, but not everyone without good critical thinking skills is a conservative.
(I recognize this is a very unpopular way of looking at the issue, so unless there are further cries for me to explain myself I'm going to bow out- and, as a side note, I'm probably permanently agnostic, although with religious sympathies. But I'll just ask this question to the bystanders: scientific denialism and bigotry are not the only issues that society has to deal with that come more from people's circumstances than themselves. Crime and family breakdown are in that category too. But a large number of people on this board- including myself on my good days- are in favor of washing away the punitive aspect of the justice system and making it entirely rehabilitative.
Why do we have pity on someone who gets arrested for buying meth with stolen money, but rail against hicks who think the President was born in Kenya and wants to turn their children gay? The differences are much, much smaller than they look.)
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14908434 times)