Guest post: The next moral paradigm shift
Originally a comment by Artymorty on The dream has curdled.
If we’re being charitable, we can look at the The American Dream as a symbol of the moral system that America embodied for two centuries: a dignity culture: “opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”
Sociologists have argued that societies tend to develop from honour cultures to dignity cultures to victimhood cultures as the role of government grows.
The US started out with little centralized, organized authority to keep the peace. Conflicts had to be resolved personally, so blood feuds and duels became commonplace, and honour was the moral currency of the time.
At the turn of the 19th Century following the establishment of the U.S. Constitution, the government started to become stable enough to maintain law and order, and people began to derive moral worth from demonstrating resilience and personal achievement.
That moral paradigm shift was best exemplified when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in order to restore his moral standing following a personal insult. The outcry that ensued showed that the honour culture Burr adhered to had been replaced by the dignity culture espoused by Hamilton. In the new moral paradigm, Burr’s act was viewed as deplorable, not respectable.
It looks like we’re in the midst of the next moral paradigm shift, to a victimhood culture. They emerge as it becomes clear that, while a moral emphasis on personal achievement does keep the peace, it does not eliminate unequal outcomes for all citizens, so appeals to authority are increasingly made to correct perceived injustices. Both the left and the right in the US appear to have taken on that mindset.
They tend to spiral out of control and bring about powerful, totalitarian states. In victim cultures, high moral worth derives from allegiance to a powerful authority (a governing body, or a collective mob) which is held up as the sole means to correct the perceived injustice that permeates the world and prevents everyone sharing in equal amounts of dignity.
Many of the countless communist revolutions across the world in the 20th Century quickly descended into bloody and brutal totalitarian regimes. Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, etc, etc.
Here in North America, whether we go MAGA or woke: both sides are hell bent on tearing down the checks and balances that keep the system from breaking down.
The moral balance between personal responsibility and appeal to authority, which the US has kept running for 200 years, is rapidly collapsing.
Like a lot of attempts to generalize the course of history, this one raises a lot of “you sure about that” moments for me. In particular, a society that has moved to a ‘dignity’ culture in 1804 sure took its sweet time even attempting to provide said dignity to about, oh, 75% of the population (women, racial minorities).
I actually think the problem is simpler, in some ways. The U.S. is old. Not culturally, obviously–we’re the youngest of anything considered a ‘western nation’ culturally, except maybe Australia. But our system of governance? About the only one who can claim to be older is Daddy Britain (and there, I’m still not sure–the shift from monarchy to parliamentarian democracy with a monarch figurehead was a pretty drawn-out process, and thus harder to pin down than a straight-up revolution or constitutional convention).
Most of the world has undergone not one, but multiple revolutions, constitutional re-writes from scratch, or complete creation of new nations (Hello, Germany and Israel!) since the time of the American Revolution. That aging process has one key effect–deficiencies become increasingly obvious over time.
This, in turn, means that those who are ill-served by the government grow increasingly frustrated with those deficiencies, while those who wish to accumulate power and subvert the levers of power for their own purposes become increasingly more adept at doing so. In our case, the factors that lead to us being a two-party system (most notably first-past-the-post elections, but there’s others) enable both the shifting of the Overton window to the right, and the ‘forced teaming’ effect on the Left that we complain about here.
(Don’t get me wrong–multiparty systems aren’t an intrinsic panacea to all the ills of democracy. I’m just saying that our particular system has particular flaws, and that our age has led to those flaws both becoming more debilitating, and easier to exploit.)
My concern is that we’ve taken too long to get to a point where we could easily (ie, largely peacefully) transition to a newer government model. A new constitutional convention would be the subject of so much jockeying for advantage that it could very well be the ignition point of a civil war.
<… a society that has moved to a ‘dignity’ culture in 1804 sure took its sweet time even attempting to provide said dignity to about, oh, 75% of the population (women, racial minorities).
Considering human history as a whole, though, dignity culture very quickly lead to adherents extending the principles of equal human dignity and rights to all members of society. This is I think at least in part due to science being a product of a dignity culture instead of an honor one. In science, criticism and dispute are considered healthy methods for correcting error, not insults which require personal revenge. The early humanists who believed that women and racial minorities required special treatment due to inherent mental differences found that this was a claim which was not only falsifiable, but falsified.