Sustainable Progressivism

The great Dr Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.”

I agree with this - but only when thinking in the short and medium term. In the long term, true, sustainable change can ONLY be achieved by changing the heart.

As an example, consider the overlapping issues of racism and slavery. At the height of the Age of Imperialism and the “New Imperialism”, a century and more ago, there was a widely held view that “the white man’s burden” meant predominantly white nations should occupy other nations, and seek to impose their views of how to live on those other nations, whose people were seen as inferior (see also here). To simplify considerably, that view of inferiority was significant in considering slavery to be acceptable.

Nowadays, many, if not most, people in those nations see racism as wrong - or, at the very least, highly questionable; most, I suspect, see slavery as wrong.

What has changed over the last few centuries? Laws, certainly - slavery has been subjected to increasing legislation for around several millennia [see Note 1 below], and advocacy against slavery dates back quite some time as well - for instance, the Roman Emperor and noted Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in support of the Stoic view that people are equal – although he didn’t take action to end slavery (see here for a nuanced discussion of the obstacles and issues, and also here; incidentally, the word “stoic” has changed: in the context of this paragraph and the referenced historical era, it is a philosophy more akin to Buddhism than the connotation of repressed emotions the word has today).

However, there has also been education and face-to-face interactions and deliberate campaigns and some good science (to counter the bad science, including the appalling applications of eugenics) that have shown the perceptions that people had that ownership of other people as property was wrong, and that has shown many people - perhaps until the growing, fear-driven xenophobia of this millennia - that racism is founded on wrong presumptions, and thus is unfounded, and is actively harmful, and thus is actively morally wrong.

To choose another example, consider sexism. As with racism, there are still a disturbingly large number of people who are sexist, but, also as with racism, their number and the vehemence and violence of their views have been reduced as compared to a century or two ago. As with racism, legislation - often in response to campaigns which, effectively, educated and thus changed the heads, if not the hearts, of Parliamentarians - has helped (e.g., giving women the vote, first done in the then colony [now nation] of New Zealand in 1893 and the then colony [now state] of South Australia in 1894 [see here]), but what has made the change sustainable is, in my opinion, education, face-to-face non-stereotypical interactions and deliberate campaigns.

Science is less clearly an advantage in the fight against sexism, but it has been beneficial, for instance, in dealing with homophobia (e.g., Evelyn Hooker’s 1950s study) and, to some extent transphobia - although bipartisan education to counter stereotypes and other fallacies and misconceptions by those who had never had to think deeply about their gender identity helped in achieving the final stages of anti-discrimination legislation here in the late 1990s. (It was also not helpful that it took so long for scientists to listen to trans people and stop assuming that problems being experienced by trans people were due to being trans, rather than the vicious discrimination experienced from bigoted people. [See Perkins, R, “Transgender HIV/AIDS Needs Assessment Project”, 1994; McNeil, J et al, “Speaking from the Margins”, 2013; Dept. of Health (Vic.), “Transgender and gender diverse health and wellbeing: Background Paper”, 2014]; Note 2) Subsequently, the normalisation of gender identity issues has proceeded, often with education, but recent backlashes suggest there is a need to not take gains for granted, and find a way to educate those who are most personally threatened or insecure (or simply intellectually wrong) about the range that does exist in gender identity.

The backlash also shows the need for, in the short to medium term, legislation to, in Dr King’s words, “restrain the heartless”.

The longer term approach of education to change the minds and then the hearts of those who are discriminating could be described as “social engineering”. However, if that is the case, it could equally be argued that it is undoing the deliberate, wilful and malicious social engineering of people who created ad propagated such hate in the first place.

At some point in history, someone decided – whether out of active hate, ignorance or intellectual incompetence - to teach their kids that “x” is “bad”, and actively demonised “x” to push that biased viewpoint in. My view is that by the time such warped “parenting” gets to the 4^th generation, when one is beyond any chance of talking to the originator of these malicious views, it will have been degraded to the furphy of “oh everyone knows that … “x” ”, and challenging it becomes much harder – as every advocate for social advance over the last few millennia has known.

That bad parenting, based on the “Mini Me” view rather than love and wanting one’s child to be the best and all that they can be, is active and malicious social engineering that harms the child as well as the victims of the child’s learned hate (bigotry).

In the short term, the acts of hate that are discrimination need to be banned – by governments.

In the medium term, affirmative action needs to be implemented to reverse the damage that has been caused by possibly centuries of such hate – and government needs to take a lead in this.

In the long term, education to counter and stop the passage of hate is needed, education until inclusive views become part of the endemic “oh everyone knows ..”. That education can be delivered to a limited extent by advocates, but for such changes to become widespread and established enough to be sustainable, the resources of government and its influence on education are needed, which will require recognition that hate is as harmful as drink driving or not wearing seatbelts.

Notes

Note 1: the following partial list is from this Wikipedia page, which also includes steps along the way to abolishing serfdom:

 - abolition of slavery in the Maurya Empire in India in the 3^rd Century BCE by the renowned Emperor Ashoka (I couldn’t find any independent verification of this online);

 - short term abolition in China during the Qin and Xin dynasties in China in the 3^rd Century BCE and 1^st Century CE respectively (I couldn’t find any independent verification of this online);

 - after some kingdoms made partial abolitions (for Christians only), abolition of slavery and freeing of any slave who reached France by King Louis X in 1315 CE;

 -  after abolition in quite a few other places, abolition in the United Kingdom in 1834, and the USA in 1865, which was partially countered by the notorious “Black Codes”; and

 - all the way up to a League of Nations Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery which was still being ratified by nations as recently as 2008, and new anti-slavery acts such as the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Note 2: there is some useful guidance on appropriate behaviour here.