AVI asked earlier if we are experiencing an illusion of moral decline. There are arguments for and against this idea.
He presents a long comment as evidence that it might be, and evidence also that deniers are just looking at evidence they prefer to look at. I have a counterargument to that idea, which I've been making for some years.
For some years I've argued that 'moral progress' is a mere illusion. Joseph W. and I used to fight about this, in that joyous and pleasant way in which we contested each other's ideas. My sense is that mostly people's values change by encountering other people -- ideas 'rub off,' as it were. Now people closer to you rub off on you more than people further away. It is possible to be distant in both time and space, such that people further away from you in time will look less like you than people closer. That means that we should ordinarily expect to see an illusion of progress, because (a) we take our own values to be right, and (b) the further back you go, the less people agree with us.
There are some obvious additional factors that make it easier or harder for people to 'rub off' on you: sharing a language makes it more likely at distance; belonging to a civilization makes it more likely that you will share at least some values with your ancestors, too. Still, by and large I think it's obvious that you would think of society as progressing morally simply by looking back and discovering that, the further away from yourself you go, the less people agree with your (obviously correct!) moral values.
A consequence of this reading is that the conservative and progressive moral projects are both illusions (but see the important exception at the link). Conservatives are always under the illusion that things are getting worse because there has been constant movement from a prior time they've marked out as an ideal: their childhood, the Victorian era, Arthur's Camelot, the Age of Muhammad and his Companions, the ancient Roman Republic.
Progressives, by contrast, assume wrongly that there is moral progress in their direction just because the current age agrees with them and all prior ages disagree more and more. Thus, there is an arrow of morality that points in their direction.
Both of these views are illusions.
However, there's an important empirical point AVI gets to and returns to as well: we can say that rates of violence, for example, goes up or down. That's not perfect; some violence is moral, and the loss of that kind of violence may worsen society. (Consider a society, like the present-day Canada, that bars violent self-defense. You may run from a criminal, but not resist him.)
That kind of empirical consideration of morality is what I was getting at by the end of the linked post.
I once heard a Buddhist argument that held something like: "To say that you have forgiven but not forgotten is to say that you have not forgiven." This is that argument in a developed form.
If you truly did forget, you would lose both any sense of moral progress, and any sense of moral crumbling. What would be left? Would it be enough?
There's a good debate in the comments of that post featuring many of you, dear readers. You might want to review what you thought at the time and see how it compares to what you might think now. For that matter, it might be helpful to write down what you think now first to see how it compares to what you thought then.
16 comments:
I taught an extended adult Sunday School class on forgiveness and will note that the "forget" part is a formal or official forgetting, and does not have much to do with your memory. You treat the event, or some aspect of it, as if it did not happen.
Easier said than done, but much more sensible than the idea that you must make your mind forget events that might be important to future decisions. I might, for example, decline to prosecute you even though I have entire right, but still not ever hire you again.
It’s interesting as a thought experiment, though. Say we forgot how things were done in the past; thus, we can’t imagine an arrow of progress nor one of decline. We’d still have a lot to go on in terms of judging how moral the current moment is, wouldn’t we? To your point, is that enough? What weight should the imaginary arrow carry, if any?
What weight should the imaginary arrow carry, if any?
Some weight--it's all we have with which to assess trends and thereby predict the future. The weight, though, should vary by our objectively assessed skill in predicting the future with that arrow as an input.
And therein lies the underlying problem: human ability to be objective about much of anything. Some are better at it than others, and the skill varies over time within each of us. And it's facilitated by having a variety of written-down histories.
Eric Hines
Say we forgot how things were done in the past; thus, we can’t imagine an arrow of progress nor one of decline.
Grim, it's been a few years and I believe I've in all that time failed to thank you properly for introducing me to "Chesterton's Fence" here.
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-problem-with-chestertons-fence.html
Thank you, most sincerely.
Now though, and in this context: if we forget, both personally and in culture, why the fence was built across the road, we are forced into mistakenly "assuming that all [our] fathers were fools"
Your illusion.
CK would continue: "but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. "
Our modern morals may be as opaque to our sons as our fathers' are to us.
You’re certainly welcome.
Chesterton assumes in that scenario that we might have forgotten what the wall is for. He’s ok with considering removing it, but not until a good accounting of why it was there is offered. So it’s an invitation to historical research or, where that is impossible, imaginative reasoning. Memory of why things like walls exist is often lost.
It is difficult to ask yourself such things in the face of what seems pointless. There is a Borges story where a known superlogical person does something antic intentionally in order to get people to notice and consider what is happening. (I swear there is a Father Brown story that uses the same device but cannot for the life of me remember what it is.) But if your brother never notifies you of his travel plans, but this time he does, without explanation, it bears pondering. Sometimes imaginative reason reveals itself quickly. But first one has to ask, and that is hard.
On the topic of forgetting, I think AVI's first comment gets to the heart of it. Quoting from Grim's 2016 post, the author he was discussing wrote:
“is it not conceivable,” he writes, “that were our societies to expend even a fraction of the energy on forgetting that they now do on remembering ... peace in some of the worst places in the world might actually be a step closer?”
The point seems to have nothing to do with individual memory and everything to do with how societies remember by commemoration, education, etc. I think I agree. The reason many conflicts continue generation after generation is because each generation teaches the next that they should be in conflict due to real or imagined wrongs in the past. I think this is a big part of the Arab-Israeli issue, for example. The point, as I take it, is not that individual Arabs and Israelis should literally forget events, but rather that the societies should de-emphasize events so that they can move past them.
Just my thoughts on that, anyway.
So, Tom, think of it as a thought experiment — like Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance — rather than an invitation to try to literally forget. You can’t really do Rawls’ thing either, but it is worth thinking about to see what insights it provides.
To take your example, imagine that tomorrow everyone in Israel woke up with no memory of how they got there. Without the inherited enmity, wouldn’t it seem strange that some lived in a technologically advanced society with democratic institutions, and the others in armed camps surrounded by hostile police forces? Wouldn’t they obviously begin attempting to resolve this in the interest of fairness (which, for Rawls, is also justice)?
It can’t be done, just because forgetting is impossible. Yet even abstracting away memory, empirically there are facts that suggest that some sort of immortality or injustice exists.
So which part of memory do we need? The one issue that strikes me is that you might misassign blame here without it; Rawls might want to suggest that Israeli society must be at fault, being in the privileged position. In fact they would counter that they’re not at fault, but are acting defensively against a dire threat. Without memory that threat might go away; but given memory, they’re entrapped in a way that the Israelis don’t control. A veil of ignorance, or an imagination of forgetting, can help us see that it is wrong but not how to fix it.
Or try the same experiment the other way: imagine you were a Progressive in 1969, who thought the world had been evolving toward your present moral moment. You thrilled at the high rhetoric of Dr. King, 'judge not by the color of your skin, but the content of your character.' You infer, from the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement, that history has been moving your way.
Put a marker there, and then look at how progressives themselves have moved away from that position and back towards judging people by the color of their skin.
Likewise other progressive projects: Second Wave Feminism, say.
I think the idea that this is a kind of illusion brought on by perspective alone is unavoidable. What to do about that is philosophically interesting.
Well, in the other thread people were taking the forgetting as individuals literally forgetting, so I thought bringing the idea of social forgetting in was useful. Of course, that would probably only work if all sides forgot in that way.
As a thought experiment, it would be interesting, but at the same time, how could one know what was just or fair without knowing the history? Which is what you suggest in your last paragraph, but I don't really understand your penultimate sentence.
Just because the Israelis forget does not make the threat go away, and in fact would magnify the threat because they would suddenly be unaware of the danger they were in. It would only be if both sides forgot that we might see positive effects. (We might not, of course. Seeing the physical evidence and array of forces, even without any memory of the past, it would be rational to conclude they were enemies.)
It is interesting to think of both sides literally forgetting. What would they make of the different situations of Israelis and Palestinians?
I guess if there were no concept of the past, then maybe no one would think to ask why situations that seemed unfair existed. However, if they knew the past existed, they might well come to the conclusion that, although the past was unknown, somehow the current result must be just. It would be as rational to make that assumption as to assume that it wasn't just, I think.
Or are you just concerned with the physical evidence? So, it's clear there is a conflict and thus something must be wrong, but from the physical evidence we can't know what to do about it?
Ah, I see you posted again. I had opened the comments box but then had to leave for an hour. Came back and just went on posting - should have refreshed first. I'll have to come back for your new comment.
I agree with you about the effect of perspective alone. As you and AVI have pointed out, some kind of objective markers, such as crime stats over long periods of time, give better clues.
Also, as you suggested in the 2016 post, moral progress or decline is probably impossible to establish without a consistent set of morals.
This may be as much myth as history but I was taught, of the US federal holiday "Memorial Day", that the particular "memory" at issue to be
"commemorated" was the joint effort of mothers and wives and lovers of both the North and South, both the Unionist and Confederates, marking gravesites and battlefields honoring-- remembering -- the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers ON BOTH SIDES of the US War Between the States. Pretending, perhaps, that the questions of slavery, or abominable tariffs, or federal intrusion into States' 10th Amendment rights or disputes over the legitimacy of a President elected in a four way race by a mere plurality of votes... eh? Leave that to the men. The Women, of both sides, remembered and mourned their sons and husbands and decorated graves without regard to the war's (lost? noble? ) cause.
Memorial Day once was taught as a deliberate attempt to reconcile. Moderns seem to me less willing to allow their ancestors the honesty of their differences.
Tom,
Seeing the physical evidence and array of forces, even without any memory of the past, it would be rational to conclude they were enemies....if they knew the past existed, they might well come to the conclusion that, although the past was unknown, somehow the current result must be just. It would be as rational to make that assumption as to assume that it wasn't just, I think.
I think you're right that it would be rational to for them to assume that they had been enemies. I think it might be irrational to continue to be enemies, however, if no one could think of a reason why they had been.
To J. Melcher's point, to some degree the real healing in the US happened after World Wars I and II. The ones who had been enemies forgave to some degree, and died; their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons found themselves fighting together against those who had other differences. For a while, around the 1950s, they made movies about the Civil War in which a stock character was a former Southerner who had joined the Army after the war and now rode with the cavalry, or something like that (Stagecoach has a variation on the theme). That they were able to come together and get along as friends is imagined backwards to 1867, when the Indian Wars were hot.
That didn't last either. That moral vision of America was gone by the Civil Rights Era, which tore open old wounds for reasons partly praiseworthy and partly base, as human reasons often are.
If they woke one day, with both sides forgetting that they had been enemies and forgetting past wrongs, would they also forget their separate religious, cultural, and political environments that had led to their being enemies in the first place?
It’s a thought experiment; you can run it either way, or both ways and see how they compare.
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