Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
When I was a “preteen,” maybe ten or eleven years old, I remember watching a sci-fi program on TV (maybe a Flash Gordon episode). It was about a society where criminality had become the legal norm. It was a land where the “strongest” prevailed simply because they could. For instance, theft was legal because those from whom things were taken were weak. So when the program’s hero (who, for some reason, was not aware of this weirdness) intervened to stop a purse snatching, he himself was arrested for criminal behavior. I remember watching and thinking this is so abnormal, it could never happen. Now, a mere seventy or so years later, I discover that I was wrong.
Things have gone downside-up. What was once wrong is now right, or at least admissible. In terms of foreign events, Israel (the “light unto the nations”) has given itself over to stark barbarism and quite literally taken on the criminal demeanor of its past persecutors. Having spent decades forcing many Palestinians into various sorts of ghettos, the Zionists hypocritically cry bloody murder because, on October 7, 2023, the land thief (standing in here for the purse thief of seventy years ago) was given a bloody nose. The Israeli Zionist response to their victims standing up for themselves has been to murder (to date) over 47,000 Palestinians—for which the Zionists call themselves justified and even righteous. The West stands by as if this is admissible behavior and the United States sanctions international courts that disagree. The best we can say about Israel is that it is having an extreme national case of a battered child syndrome. And the West? Things have gone downside-up.
Here at home, in the U.S., we are making what was legally and ethically right into something inadmissible and even criminal. It took over a century for United States to face its racist history and ratify the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. To supplement that action, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson (Democratic) issued executive order 11246. It “forbade federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It granted the Labor Department the power to enforce its provisions through a contracting standards office.” In other words, it told those doing business with the federal government that they could not be racist or otherwise discriminatory in their hiring practices. This is the order which Donald Trump has now summarily retracted. Now, what is forbidden is exactly what 11246 required. This is what Trump considers to be “freedom” reasserting itself.
In any universe where the principle of fairness as an ethical standard meant anything at all, legally enforced nondiscrimination would be a step in the direction toward a better society. However, what is often forgotten is that at the moment of signing in 1965, order 11246 was felt to be a countercultural denial of “personal freedom” by at least half of the white citizenry of this country. In their heads, fairness was a strictly personal affair governed by local culture—in this case, interfering with a businessperson’s right to decide who to hire was just radical government interference. It was the Federal government telling them “how to run their own affairs.”*
This reactionary feeling of being done wrong did not go away. It emotionally stewed for the next 60 years, lending itself to “culture wars” and a growing rightwing movement. A sharp reversal came with the presidential election of 2024 and when, on 22 January 2025, newly elected Trump did away with a decades-long effort to combat a legacy of discrimination that was, in turn, centuries old. Thus, we have gone from racial discrimination being right and legal to racial discrimination being wrong and illegal and now back to racial discrimination being an element of personal freedom and thus right and legal.** Downside-up—and, let’s face it, enough to make you want to throw up as well.
Ethical “Progress” is not Linear
Unfortunately, when it comes to the behavior of humans and their institutions, this sort of reversal is not that unusual. For instance, at the end of the 17th century, monarchy in France was seen as a stabilizing form of government and thus “necessarily good.” At the end of the 18th century, it was definitely “bad.” Up until 1948, torture was widely seen as effective and thus not rare. Then, in that year, it was judged to be largely ineffective and bad. So it was made illegal by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—which, by the way, was drafted with the participation of the United States. By the 1960s and war in Vietnam, torture was again widespread because it allegedly worked.
In other words, if you are looking for relatively consistent ethical “progress” among humans, it is hard to find it, particularly in the realm of intergroup behavior. That doesn’t mean that, using a modicum of common sense, we can’t picture what such a more civilized society would look like. In fact, there have always been people, throughout history, who have strived for progress in this direction. So why haven’t such folks been able to institute a permanent fix? What is the problem?
Part of the problem is undoubtedly genetic. For instance, if you have a narcissistic personality disorder (among other problems), your behavior is going to be at least partially influenced by genetics. More generally, our ethical sense that cooperation is good is also genetically influenced. How about upbringing? Are you growing up in a reactionary household in a part of the country with a history of racial violence, or a progressive household in a more socially tolerant area? Is dad a guy who drinks too much and can’t control his temper? Is mom attentive and caring or emotionally “missing”? What about your friendship circle and the quality of the neighborhood? Is there a damaging in-group versus out-group culture operating? Have you learned to think for yourself or to follow the crowd? These issues are not just relevant to modern Americans, in one way or another they are temporally and geographically universal.
The impact of such issues working themselves out at various societal levels produces a range of individual personalities and, at the same time, a limit to the range of mass behavior. For instance, out of a thousand individuals, one hundred might be on the outlier limbs of the ever-present bell curve, but the other nine hundred will be predictably group oriented, relatively ignorant of all but their local surroundings, and effectively culturally conditioned. Because such cultural conditioning is so ubiquitous, we get a predictable range of mass behavior. This means that historically, human behaviors are often repetitive and “progress,” to the extent that it exists at all, is anything but linear.
Technical Progress is Something Else
There is a usual objection to this assertion—one that tends to confuse just what sort of “progress” we are talking about. Most people in the industrialized world will tell you that our standard of living is the surest sign of progress. I was once riding in a cab with a well traveled journalist (I.F. Stone) who had spent time in India. He told me that he would trade that country’s Hindu spirituality for nationwide indoor plumbing. He no doubt had a point. And, of course, indoor plumbing is a very important achievement of the modern world. It certainly has contributed to the extension of life spans in those areas where it exists. The same can be said for modern medicine, mechanized agriculture, safe water systems and reliable heating and cooling. One can make an argument that these accomplishments are examples of linear progress because, from a scientific and technological point of view, they are products of a cumulative process. Yet this is material progress—actually the only sort of progress that is undeniable (though not without environmental drawbacks). Yet it is not what we are talking about.
Alas, material progress has little to do with ethical behavior. You can have all the accouterments of the modern world and still behave, both individually and collectively like barbarians. Not to beat a dead horse, today’s Israel proves this point. So, unfortunately there is no necessary correlation between material progress and, say, the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights.
Conclusion
I once made the “mistake” of explaining the repetitive shortfall in ethical behavior to a group of young lefty activists. They were all involved with various civil rights and anti-war groups. I told them that their struggle for a society that respected human rights for all people and put that respect into practice had been going on for a very long time and yet had never been permanently achieved. I think I mentioned Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy Lysistrata, written in 400s B.C.E. and that the prophet Mohammed had called for racial equality as an Islamic principle in the 7th century C.E. I might have also mentioned the ethical lapses of the Buddhist leaders in Sri Lanka. I told them that the struggle for peace and human rights may never end because there is no historical reason to believe their opposites, war and racism, would ever go away. On the other hand, those who struggle for these ideals often do so because of who they are — people who recognize that without this struggle for ethical “progress” things could be much worse.
I refer to this speech of mine as a “mistake” because it was not at all well-received. The folks who had organized the gathering were horrified. I was scolded for “undermining morale.” I never got asked back to such an event. I remember that I was disappointed, but not surprised, and maybe even somewhat amused at this reaction—it indicated that very few people take history, or biology and sociology, for that matter, seriously. Despite the distress of that day, the truth remains that human behavior can be repetitively unethical. However, an additional truth is that we usually recognize this is so relative to our local time and place. Moreover, some of us are always trying to do something about it. Perhaps those few are, at least in part, constitutionally driven to do so. Regardless, from an historical point of view, this struggle seems to be permanently with us.
* Never mind that we are fortunate that the government regulates the construction, finance, transportation, insurance and food industry etc, because historically too many businesses fail to sufficiently regulate themselves. Perhaps we are too burdened by red tape, but that does not mean that we would survive full deregulation very well. A good balance is needed.
** There is also the idea that racial discrimination was being used against white people because it took away an element of personal freedom (or privilege).
