The Liberal Victory of Same-Sex Marriage

Good times, 2015

When same-sex marriage swept the United States, it was a stunning liberal victory. In 1999, no state in the union even had civil unions for same-sex couples. By 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land. Hats off to Vermont for igniting the movement. I fondly remember in 1999 when Vermont’s supreme court called bullshit on limiting the benefits of marriage to cross-sex couples. Then in 2000, Vermont became the first state in the US to allow civil unions between same-sex couples. Other states followed Vermont’s lead, establishing either civil unions or marriage for same-sex couples until, in 2015. the US Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in all fifty states. 

The implicit message of the gay-marriage campaign was that our institutions are good, and that everyone should have the right to be part of them. Marriage is a good thing, they said. Most voters are married, and the gay-marriage campaign validated married life. It was a positive message about love and commitment. Who doesn’t like a rainbow? 

If your political opponents are associated with happy things like rainbows and parades, you’ve lost. Opponents of gay marriage came across like haters, which is not only accurate but also politically convenient for liberals like me. I’m hoping that legalizing weed can be another feel-good campaign for liberals, and I think it’s about time, but that’s another story. 

Meanwhile, the proponents of marriage equality did not ask heteroes to confess their hetero privilege. The leaders did not have their eyes on dismantling western civilization. Smashing hetero supremacy was not on the agenda.

In terms of human history, gay-marriage advocates accomplished something remarkable. In societies all across the globe, strict gender roles have been the norm. Gender-nonconforming people were generally expected to take on a different gender role rather than transgress the boundaries of the gender role that they were born into. Modern liberal society, in the other hand, is remarkable for how loose gender roles are, relative to the rest of history. Same-sex marriage seems fine to kids born into our society, but it was unthinkable for our ancestors except perhaps the last few. In terms of being something new under the sun, same-sex marriage really is.

Sixteen years is a short amount of time for such a momentous change. The gay-marriage campaign was a big success, and it was part of a successful movement across the globe. When it comes to social justice, I like approaches that work, and that’s why I’m a liberal. Maybe we can learn from what’s worked and do more of it. 

Discussing Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Please read Ibram Kendi’s
How to Be an Antiracist 

tl;dr Racism is a vast, global, perennial injustice that deserves authors who are willing to take risks. In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi takes risks. Some of his book I agree with, some I disagree with, and some I struggle to come to terms with. With Caste, Isabel Wilkerson risks little. In 2019, an earnest antiracist in my Unitarian church said that her book discussion group had been reading antiracist books for years, and she still had no idea what she could actually do. Caste would fit in with the books that this woman’s discussion group read. Read How to be an Antiracist.

Exploring Caste

If you read Caste, I’d suggest rounding out the experience by considering some of the following questions. Wilkerson’s topic is so big and important that it demands extra thought, research, and information. For these questions, some answers I already knew, some answers I had to look up, and some I still don’t know.

Wilkerson says that the way to address racial injustice today is to understand the “origins of our discontents” and for people to undergo a change of heart. What evidence does she offer that this approach is effective? What schools of political thought are in line with this approach? What alternative approaches do others advocate, such as Martin Luther King or Ibram Kendi? 

Wilkerson makes her case primarily with metaphors, analogies, anecdotes, generalizations, and hypotheticals. Where does this approach originate from? From critical race theory? Counter-storytelling? Journalistic style? A little of each?

What historical social system did Southern plantation owners see themselves as emulating? 

How is racial stratification in the US different from what Wilkerson describes in Nazi Germany and Hindu India? How are the lynchings she describe different from the killings she recounts from Germany and India? How is the historical arc of African Americans different from that of German Jews and Indian Dalits?

Wilkerson cites scholars who have identified the US racial structure as a caste system. If this framing has been suggested before but has never been generally accepted, what is different today? If the nation were to adopt this framing, what benefit could we expect?

Wilkerson describes the racial caste system in North America as originating on American soil in 1619, and she describes anti-Semitism in Germany as resulting from Nazi propaganda. What were the larger historical contexts in which these injustices took place?

Wilkerson cites laws and customs from the South as representative of the caste system. How would her narrative be different if she took the laws and customs of the Yankee North as representative? What major 19th century event in race relations does she mostly elide, and how would including this event change her narrative?

What is the original meaning of the Portuguese word “caste”? 

What is the original meaning of the Sanskrit word “varna”? 

When European scientists identified “Caucasians” and “Negroes” as different taxonomic groups, how close did they come to identifying ancestral groups, as identified by modern genetic research? When early Americans differentiated people by “white” or “black” skin, what difference did they imagine themselves to be identifying? How well could height have served to identify the same difference that early Americans thought they were identifying? 

How well do Latinos and Asians fit together into a “middle caste”? How well does the “model minority” concept fit this American “middle caste” or middle castes in Nazi Germany and Hindu India? How would Wilkerson’s narrative be different if she gave Latinos and Asians more consideration?

Where do Jews fit in Wilkerson’s caste formulation? Are they middle-caste “model minorities”, like Asians supposedly are? What does it mean that Jews are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than African Americans? What caste did Einstein appear to be in? 

Where do Native Americans fit in Wilkerson’s proposed caste system? How would her narrative be different if she gave substantial consideration to Native Americans? 

According to James Henry Hammond, who were the “mud sills” of the North? How did Northerners react to his infamous speech? What alternative view of what makes a nation prosper did Abraham Lincoln offer?

What can we learn from majority-white nations with substantial Black populations that don’t have a caste system? For example, since Canada did not have a hundred years of Jim Crow, what can we learn from the success of the African-Canadian population? More generally, what are some good examples of societies where people of different ancestries live together harmoniously, such as East Asians with Africans or settlers with Indigenous people? What can we learn from those societies? Where in the world today can we find the most successful African-descended population?

Wilkerson recounts the 1990 case of Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife and blamed the crime on an African-American man. In recent years, what are some famous cases where reports of outrageous interracial crimes turned out to be hoaxes or mistakes? 

As if channeling Jordan Peterson and his infamous lobsters, Wilkerson talks about natural human hierarchies, using wolf packs and their alphas, betas, and omegas as a template. What was the primordial social order system of _Homo sapiens_? What new social orders did our ancestors develop over the last 50,000 years or so, and why?

Wilkerson recounts the tragic, outrageous case of [REDACTED]*. What pertinent details does she leave out? 

Wilkerson points out that, contrary to stereotypes, most African Americans are not poor, and most poor Americans are not Black. If you share this information with antiracist activists, with what emotional tenor might they respond?

Wilkerson points out that being shot by the police is a leading cause of death among young, African American men. What is the leading cause of death for that demographic?

Wilkerson builds her argument about “caste” by describing racial stratification, and she talks little about class. How would her narrative be different if she paid more attention to class?

Wilkerson mentions that white evangelicals predominate in the Republican base but touches lightly on religion. To what extent could opposition to liberal policies and support for Trump relate to religious beliefs? How prominently has Christianity featured in support for Trump compared to race? If the caste system tells whites that they are superior, to what extent do evangelical Christian beliefs tell believers the same thing about them? Would American voters rather vote for an African American Christian or a white atheist?

To what extent does American nationalism tell white Americans that they are special and on top? Toward whom would Trump supporters feel more warmly: an African American waving a US flag or an ethnic Russian waving a Russian flag? 

Only 43% of white voters voted for President Obama in the 2008 election, a low figure that Wilkerson attributes to the caste system. How does that percentage compare to votes earned by previous Democratic candidates? What single demographic trait best predicted whether a voter chose Obama or McCain (also Hillary or Trump, etc)?

As Wilkerson points out, the US military is noteworthy in the way it provides real opportunities for advancement to African Americans. How does the military establish solidarity among soldiers from different ethnicities? What practices did the US Army establish in order to integrate its officer corps? What professional cadre elsewhere in the world, if any, is more racially integrated than the US Army officer corps?

Wilkerson says that African Americans have been denied reparations, while reparations have been granted to other groups that have suffered discrimination. What are some good examples of such reparations.

Wilkerson refers to two aspects of human nature: the universal desire to be free and the putative tendency to form hierarchies like wolves do. What other aspects of human nature, especially our social instincts, might help illuminate racial inequality in the US? 

Wilkerson says that the caste system hurt white America by, for example, distorting the meritocracy and preventing society from taking full advantage of everyone’s abilities. How would ending racism be good or bad for white Americans, and to what degree would it be a net benefit or drawback?

If we substituted the term “status” for “caste”, as in whites being “high-status” and African Americans being “low-status”, what would be lost and what would be gained? The same question goes for Wilkerson referring to gender inequality and age inequality as “caste”.

As we as a nation confront the injustice of racism, what personal and collective actions does Wilkerson advocate that we undertake, and which seem more promising?

If a gifted journalist were to write a parallel book that ignored all the racist history that Wilkerson recounts and recounted all the egalitarian history that Wilkerson ignores, how close could the author come to making it sound like race relations in the US are peachy keen? (This question is hypothetical because I do not advocate that gifted journalists write one-sided accounts of race relations in US history and society.)

* It’s taboo to question accounts of this incident even when the details in the account are questionable, and I’m no Wilfred Reilly. 

Review of Taboo: 10 Facts [You Can't Talk About], by Wilfred Reilly

Read Taboo if you want to get caught up on what gun-toting, center-right African American professors are saying about race, immigration, gender, and the alt-right. I know I wanted to get caught up. Wilfred Reilly is on the right, so he challenges our liberal views, but he’s not so far right that we can dismiss him as a crank or a hater. As liberals, we can appreciate the challenging facts and the perspectives that Reilly brings to issues even when we don’t agree with his subjective opinions or conclusions. Based my own research, Reilly gets his facts right. Thankfully, he writes informally and with a touch of humor. Reilly’s writing doesn’t drive me away the way I’m turned off by conservative writers like Heather Mac Donald, the author of The War on Cops.

With this book, Reilly enjoys a certain amount of good fortune based simply on the current nature of political discourse. By 2021, we’ve all became familiar with how bad the mainstream media are at covering contentious issues and how much worse social media are at doing so. The nation’s political rhetoric has gotten so extreme that an author like Reilly can make a splash and gain an audience just by saying things that come as surprises but that are backed up by statistics. For example, some of the rhetoric around police shootings implies that the police are intentionally and systematically targeting innocent Black men for murder, but Reilly points out that nearly all the Black men killed by police are armed. Can we liberals still pin these disparities on racism? Yes, we can, but it’s more about racism built into the structure of society than about cops shooting young men for the “crime” of being Black.

Most of the book is about how statistics reveal a more complicated and nuanced story than you are likely to see in a political meme. Differences between the white population and African American population extend far beyond skin color, so different outcomes can hardly be pinned strictly on people being treated differently from each other based on their skin. For example, younger people get killed by the police at a higher rate than older people, and the while population is significantly older than the African American population. If your goal is political mobilization, you might not value nuance, but if you want to understand where conservatives are coming from, Reilly is a big help. 

Reilly poses fair questions even if liberals don’t agree with his answers. Whereas radicals look back to 1619 for the source of today’s racial disparities, Reilly looks at the loss of fathers in the Black community starting around 1970. Contemporary sociologists have confirmed Reilly’s contention that a lack of fathers weighs on boys and young men, although they have found that it’s the proportion of fathers in the community that’s the major factor rather than a boy having a father in his own home or not [link]. As a conservative, Reilly is satisfied pointing to welfare as the reason that marriage rates dropped. As a liberal, I’d rather find an answer in the other demographic changes taking place at that time. A lot was changing in our society around 1970, and a lot has changed since then. Reilly’s statistics show that African American communities historically had a higher proportion of fathers in the home when racism was worse, so it can’t simply be “racism” that has led to this issue. Can Reilly be sure that welfare is really the culprit here? If so, he hasn’t backed up that claim by showing that other changes are not to blame. You can learn from this book, but be skeptical.

On immigration, Reilly argues from the perspective that our nation’s immigration policies should help our nation, while liberals often put the needs of would-be immigrants first. From his perspective, for example, Reilly questions birthright citizenship, which was written into our Constitution in order to address a totally different situation from the one we face today. On this topic, statistics can’t prove that we should or shouldn’t put our own nation’s needs first, but Reilly’s take on the topic at least gives us liberals a relatively reasonable conservative position to think about and argue against. He’s no friend of the alt-right, and we can’t simply dismiss his views on immigration as racist. (Obviously, of course, we can of course dismiss his views in just this way, but doing so is a missed opportunity to engage honestly with our fellow Americans who disagree with us.)

Reilly concludes by taking down the Alt-Right. This chapter doesn’t perfectly fit the theme of the book because there’s no taboo against trashing the Alt-Right, but it serves the purpose of helping us liberals remember that conservatives can disagree with us even while they also disagree with the nutters on the right. 

Are the “obvious facts” that Reilly cites really taboo? Yes and no. The “taboo” label applies only to the touchiest topics, such as police violence or gaps in outcomes between groups. They’re taboo enough that I’m not going to go into much detail with this review. Reilly pushes some hot buttons, and it’s not feasible to address them properly in this review. I can talk about birthright citizenship, but I’m not going to bring up… certain other topics.

If you’d like to get a sample of Reilly’s position, this Spiked article is a good start.

“Michael Brown: the founding myth of Black Lives Matter”

Compared to What? 

If you’re looking for a grander, more historical and global view from a perspective similar to Reilly’s, read Thomas Sowell’s Race and Culture: A Worldview. That book delivers such a strong challenge to the left’s take on inequality that I rarely recommend it. Race and Culture is from 1995, and Taboo is better for current events. 

If you’re looking for someone to use statistics to assess rhetoric in the field of gender politics, Debra Soh’s book The End of Gender is the same sort of book as Taboo, albeit from a liberal perspective. Like Reilly, Soh shocks the reader with taboo information that’s readily available but rarely sought out. 

Reilly on Twitter

I follow him on Twitter, and based on his tweets I figured I’d give his book a try. If, like me, you make a point of following people you disagree with, he’s worth a try. He’s @wil_da_beast630.

Calls to Liberal Action

Faux call to action

What policies or efforts can we support today in order to promote Martin Luther King’s vision of a better America? Maybe… 

• Medicare for all
• guaranteed income
• taxes on wealth
• higher taxes on high incomes
• legal weed
• an end to private prisons
• closing gun-purchase loopholes
• promoting education and training
• investing in green jobs and infrastructure. 

We have plenty of directions to choose from. In January, it was heartening to see so many Seattleites joining in the Martin Luther King march. There’s obviously a lot of energy around confronting injustice and inequality, which is great to see. What concerns me, however, is that the liberal project seems to have lost its momentum in the last five years or so. For a hundred years or more, we’ve seen liberal progress, but recently things seem to have gotten worse, not better. One unfortunate thing I noticed at the MLK march is a trend that I’ve seen elsewhere: a lack of calls to action. Protest signs at the march mostly seemed to declare what people are against rather than what we hope to accomplish. Declaring one’s opposition to bad things is easier than proposing a practical course of action, but it’s action that counts. Maybe if we liberals could put more effort into figuring out what we need to do next, then we could get moving in those directions.

If you go back 50 years or 100 years, the amount of liberal progress that we’ve made has been tremendous. Gay marriage, Obamacare, Americans with Disabilities Act, Roe v Wade, interracial marriage (my favorite), Civil Rights legislation, the Great Society, rights of the accused, the New Deal, and women’s suffrage. But if you go back just the last several years, one sees a string of failures: the Zimmerman acquittal, BLM’s attempt to reform policing, NoDAPL, Shaun King’s injustice boycott, and the attempt to keep the Republican candidate from winning the 2016 election. There’s a lot of energy on the left, but not a lot of results. I’m a natural science guy and not a political theory guy, so I want results.

Maybe one thing that keeps us lefties from winning more is that our calls to action are ineffective. For the last several years, I’ve noticed a lack of good calls to action from the left. See, for example, the documentary Thirteenth, which impresses on viewers the horror of mass incarceration but ends with no call to action. This year, the MLK march also demonstrated a distinct lack of calls to action. For example, a big sign that I’ve seen at earlier marches declared “Trump/Pence Must Go”. Great! I agree. What does that mean? Does it mean vote Dem in 2020? Impeach? Does it mean, let’s engage in violent rebellion against the US government? Engage in a national strike? Share memes on social media? 

My sign.
Next year, a call to action.

Plenty of other signs were phrased as if they were calls to action, but they really weren’t. Consider “Smash the Patriarchy”, “End Racism”, “End Racial Disparities Now”, and “Resist”. Those sound good to me. What’s step one? What’s the plan? What’s the timeline? Within the plan, what are the highest priorities? These are faux calls to action, and they come across more like creeds. Everyone who wants to “smash the patriarchy” can find each other thanks to signs like these. But once they have found each other, what will they do next? Burn down a bank? Castrate toxic males? Share devastating memes on Twitter? The beauty of a religious creed like the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is that it requires no change in actual behavior. Any Christian can affirm the creed that Jesus is fully human and fully God without being bothered to donate their wealth to the poor or to evangelize for the Lord. Creeds are easy. As with a creed, social justice advocates who want a better world can affirm a shared desire to “smash the patriarchy” without committing to any particular action. 

An actual call to action combines two things people don’t like: making a decision and taking a risk. To say “Legalize weed”, one has to decide that legalizing weed is a good idea, to decide that it’s a political struggle worth taking on, and to risk being wrong on both counts. Avoiding the risk of making a decision has built-in appeal, but those of us committed enough to carry signs should be willing to go the extra mile and accept that risk. The attraction of a faux call to action is that it feels powerful, but it risks nothing. 

Recently, we on the left have stopped achieving our goals. In fact, we have failed to set realistic goals in the first place. It takes real work to figure out what to do next, and we should do that work. Legalize weed. Medicare for all. Legalize prostitution. Tax wealth. Tax capital gains like wages. Tax high incomes. Get a Democrat elected president. There are lots of good directions forward, and we should point the way.

2020 addendum: I learned that King called on people to change policy and expect that hearts would follow. His entire “Other America” speech is worth a listen, especially as he directly addresses the controversial topic of rioting. Link. 

Evidism and Respect for Evidence

In the book Sharing Reality, Jeff T. Haley and Dale McGowan promote the idea that we science-oriented secularists should promote not particular philosophical conclusions but instead a disciplined respect for evidence. They point out that religions have been becoming more evidence-oriented, and they would like to hasten the trend. The two suggest a neologism—evidism—as the term for this approach to personal belief and public policy. In the tribal conflicts between atheists and believers, it’s easy for atheists to focus on hot-button issues, such as nativity scenes or the Ten Commandments on public land. Haley and McGowan propose that we should instead focus on respect for evidence and on spreading the norm that policy-makers use evidence to guide them. They have a point. “Evidence” is a winning touchstone to help people agree and collaborate. 

At Seattle’s March for Science in 2017, I said that evidence can bring people together. Sharing Reality makes a similar point. An advantage of pointing people toward evidence is that almost everyone says that they value evidence and thinks that they value it. Atheist PZ Myers makes the point that creationists try to bolster their position by portraying it in scientific terms. For example, they love to talk about the laws of thermodynamics, as if natural selection contradicts those laws. Even the people who disagree with scientists still affirm the authority of science. Likewise, almost everyone affirms the importance of evidence. Will evidence really convince anyone that they’re wrong? But without evidence the odds are zero. The authors expand on the topic at length, discussing the value of evidence and the best ways to communicate the importance of evidence. They show how a respect for evidence leads naturally to agnostic and secular behavior, even for people who believe in God and scripture. 

In my personal experience, I can confirm that people usually can’t ignore the importance of evidence even when they wish they could. People arguing on the Internet often rely on abstract arguments, but they recognize the value of evidence when you ask them for it. Focusing on the evidence might not change the mind of one’s opponent in a debate, but it impresses the audience. 

The term “evidism”, however, doesn’t grab me. If lots of people start using the term, I won’t be the last, but I’m not going to be the first, either. I’d rather call it empiricism. For some people, empiricism has negative connotations suggesting soullessness or faithlessness. That’s fine by me. I’d rather use a word that people care about than one that they don’t. 

Haley and McGowan say that believing in God demonstrates that the believer isn’t following the evidence, but I would not make the same judgment. While the authors reluctantly agree that it would be worth working with science-oriented believers, I would be enthusiastic about it, not reluctant. I don’t care if someone believes in God, but I do care if they respect science. I have more in common with an evidence-oriented believer than with an atheist who thinks that reality is constructed by language, by power hierarchies, or by the power of positive thinking.

Sharing Reality makes an important point, that focusing on evidence is a promising way to improve dialogs about policies, injustices, and other issues of general concern—especially with religious people. 

Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World. 

By Jeff Haley and Dale McGowan. Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA), 2017

Honest Debate: Religion, Good and Bad

Valerie Tarico tackles the intersection between
religious belief, psychology, and politics.

Atheists love to talk about religion, usually to criticize it. Here are two atheists, Valerie Tarico and me, debating whether religion is mostly good or mostly bad. The debate is the fifth in our series, using a format that prevents the debaters from talking past each other. The debaters also field a question from Daniel Dennett.

Podcast (iTunes)

http://bit.ly/podcastReligionTaricoTweet

After the debate, an atheist from the audience asked me if I really believed the positive things I was saying about religion. He also told me that I had made him think. He told me that twice. The debate format is designed to circumvent the human predisposition to block out what “the enemy” is saying. Most debates make people feel more sure of their own position, and we’re trying to do better than that. 

The moderator and I also run moderated one-on-one dialogs between people who disagree on political issues. The dialog uses the same “summarize in a sentence” structure that you see in this debate. 

I’d love to get feedback on the debate, especially the format, but also the content.

Valerie’s blog post

Valerie talks about how she “played the gender card” in our debate, as part of her blog post about #MeToo. Link to her post, January 15, 2018.

Participants (besides me)

“Bad” Side: Valerie Tarico, a psychologist and writer.

Moderator: Brandon Hendrickson, an educator and school founder.

Guest Interrogator: Miles Greb, a comic publisher.

Guest Interrogator: Jeff Haley, co-author of Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World.

Guest Interrogator (via email): Daniel Dennett, who promotes the discussion techniques that these debates are based on. 

MC: George Juillerat

2014

See ReThink Prize webpage here. 

Ten Secular Commandments

The ReThink Prize is offering $1,000 each for the ten best secular commandments, as determined by a panel of judges. The prize is promoting a new book, Atheist Mind Humanist Heart, which promotes a vision of atheism as positive and ethical rather than negative and reactive. Here are the ten “commandments” I submitted, each with a note on why I submitted it. 

Know yourself to be the gloriously evolved animal that you are. 

Our evolutionary history tells us two important truths: that we are connected in flesh and blood to all living things on earth, and that we are something new and wonderful. 

Connect yourself to a caring community. 

Secular people generally don’t connect to communities the way believers often do, so here’s your reminder. It’s natural and healthy to be part of a group that cares about you. 

Thou shalt not get sucked into the wasteful vices that corporations keep pushing on us. 

Some corporations run entirely on their ability to get you to consume their unhealthy products. They are devoted full time to distracting you from a better life. Enjoy what you like, but don’t get sucked in.

Focus on the things that you control and that make the most difference. In particular, focus on how you respond to things.

You can’t do everything, but you can do something. 

Be good to your “us” and be good to your “them.”

Invest in your community and the people you think of as “us.” Check your natural instinct to think ill of the people that you think of as “them.”

Expect exceptions as part of the natural order.

The world isn’t as simple as it looks. The mind expects bright lines and clear definitions, but nature is variable. In a world of exceptions, humans in particular are exceptional.

Pay your way and then some. 

Help humanity move forward faster rather than making it advance more slowly. 

Sing together. 

People find lots of occasions to do sing together. Find more. Coming together is the reason we evolved singing in the first place. 

Check your bias. 

Your intuitions are generally accurate but bound to be biased in predictable directions. Just because you feel like something is true doesn’t mean it’s true. 

Contend with each other over actions and policies, but don’t fight over thoughts and words. 

Creeds and labels separate us into opposed camps. There are plenty of practical issues to disagree over, but don’t argue about beliefs or identities. 

Historical Note: The historical Ten Commandments are well known, but many secular people don’t recognize what was special about them. The first ancient laws were commonly lists of punishments for crimes, and most of the Hebrew law was like this, specifying punishments for transgressions. The Ten Commandments, however, issue absolute imperatives, such as “Thou shalt not kill.” This apodictic form of law was unique to the Israelites. In ancient law, murder was usually a crime that you should avoid because you’d be punished for it. In the Ten Commandments, Yahweh just tells you “Don’t murder.” Why were the Israelites unique in this? Maybe standard laws were created by rulers and promulgated to their subjects, so it made sense to specify the punishments that the rulers will mete out to transgressors. But the Ten Commandments come from a time when the Israelites had only recently given up nomadic life for permanent settlements, and their tribal egalitarianism was still strong. Maybe the Ten Commandments represent not a lord’s threat to his subjects but rather a community’s voice, declaring that they are, among other things, a people who don’t murder each other (or at least really really shouldn't).

Onward Liberal Soldiers

Calling for a hypothetical

revolution, ignoring the real one.

In a BBC interview in October, comedian Russell Brand called for a revolution. He denigrated the everyday political process as not worth his time, to the point of not voting. The irony is that global culture has already undergone a breathtaking revolution, but no one talks about it. In the last two hundred years, we have abolished slavery, rebranded war as an evil, enacted universal suffrage, advanced women’s rights, made racism unacceptable in polite company, established better rights for the accused, provided institutional support for the poor and elderly, and more. There’s plenty of work left to be done, but the work remaining need not blind us to the phenomenal social progress we have made since 1800. Neither conservatives nor liberals like to talk about this revolution because it doesn’t fit either side’s narrative. The liberal narrative is founded on how bad things are and how desperately we need change, so liberals don’t want to talk about how much progress we have already made. Conservatives don’t want to tout our progress because it’s been liberal progress and they don’t want to remind everyone that they’ve been on the wrong side of history. 

One way to look at our progress is from the perspective of the vulnerable people that are being protected by the modern state, compared to how they were treated 200 years ago.

Women: equal rights in voting, property, work, and education; legal contraception; wife beating and marital rape outlawed.

Children: child labor laws, free education, child abuse laws.

Elderly, widows, orphans: social insurance programs.

Poor people: free education, welfare benefits, voting rights, subsidized healthcare.

Sick people: reform of nursing practice, universal health care, disability accommodations.

Prisoners: rights of the accused, rights of convicts, abolition of the death penalty almost everywhere.

Slaves: slavery abolished.

Racial minorities: voting rights, civil rights, discrimination prohibited.

Religious minorities: religious freedom, discrimination prohibited.

Soldiers, POWs: Geneva Conventions.

Workers: safety standards, fair labor laws.

Consumers: anti-trust laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer safety standards, labeling requirements.

Russell Brand wants a revolution but doesn’t vote. In the past 200 years, voting has gotten us a revolution. Whatever we are doing, we should damn well keep doing it. The status quo is progress.

As for which historical figure is most responsible for this social revolution, Friedrich Nietzsche named a candidate. He hated the spread of equal rights for all, and he laid the blame first and foremost on the historical Jesus. But that would be a topic for another post.

Save the Waitresses

Bill Picton—pig farmer,
serial killer of sex workers

Imagine if every few years the authorities found the bodies of murdered waitresses in a ditch, along the banks of a river, or on a pig farm. There would be an outcry. Lawmakers would investigate and reform the restaurant industry. We wouldn’t allow psychopaths to prey on our vulnerable women. We would make the world safe for waitresses. But enough imagining. The fact is that the women who wind up in those ditches or ground into pig food are not waitresses but sex workers. There’s no outcry because the people don’t much care what happens to “dirty whores”. Maybe we should cry out.