Things Have Changed Incredibly Fast, and We have Forgotten —

The past is long, the present is short
We are living in the dreamtime
And it will all fad away

Your culture is, at most, 70 years old. Maybe less.
Everything you take for granted that makes your life possible, everything without which your life would be completely unrecognizable, perhaps not even livable (for you, anyway) did not exist for the vast majority of people 70+ years ago.

Air conditioning. Electricity. Running water. Grocery stores that carry virtually anything you want, any time you want. Clothes you didn’t make yourself.

The general expectation that your children will survive their first week of life.

The general expectation that you and your loved ones will not be crippled by Polio or killed by dozens of other infectious diseases.

Not spending your days in back-breaking agricultural labor and hoping desperately that it rains this year.

Pants on women. Women with their hair uncovered.

Almost all of your values, as you understand them, like equality and freedom of religion, were not popularly believed a hundred years ago. People who thought whites and blacks were equal were generally regarded as mentally unhinged in the mid-1800s. Freedom of religion was understood to only cover Christian denominations, and Catholics were only sort of considered Christians. Parents had a right to decide whom their children married, in order to protect the purity of their family line–a notion we would now call “eugenics”.

Even in the fifties, many American women did not go out with their hair uncovered–a practice we now condemn as Medieval and barbaric among Muslims.

The Spanish Inquisition did not end until 1834. The last auto-da-fe took place in Mexico in 1850.

Auschwitz was liberated 70 years ago.

America and the rest of the West in 1900 or the mid-1800s would be totally foreign to you.

One of our great flaws is that we have completely forgotten this. We act as though the good times have always been here, they will always be here, and that there’s no possible way we could accidentally destroy them.

We take them for granted.

1. Don’t get too uppity about 70 years of good times. Good times can end. They probably will.

2. If you like the changes that have happened over the course of the past 400 years or so–if you like things like freedom of religion, if you like not torturing confessions out of prisoners, remember that these are NOT essential features of your society and must be carefully protected or else we will lose them.

3. We should not feel shame for our past (which is probably no worse than anyone else’s.) We should feel triumph at everything we have overcome and how much we have improved. Nor should we feel complacent, or try to recreate some mythical version of the past: the world is changing, and so must we.

It’s all or Nothin’

I posit that it is difficult for humans to adequately respond to things that they regard as merely somewhat problematic. Getting just about anything done requires a ton more work than sitting around doing nothing, so people who are motivated to change things are generally people who are convinced that things are really, really bad.

If you don’t think things are really, really bad, you’ll probably end up self-justifying that things are really good, so you don’t need to spend a bunch of time trying to change them, so you can comfortably hang out and relax.

If you do want to change things, you’ll probably have to spend a lot of time convincing yourself that things are truly dire in order to keep up the emotional energy necessary to get the work done.

Either way, you’re probably lying to yourself (or others), but I’m not sure if humans are really capable of saying, “this system is mostly good and mostly beneficial to the people in it, but it has really bad effects on a few people.”

Your opinions about a system are probably going to be particularly skewed one way or another if you have no direct or second-hand experience with that system, because you’re most likely hearing reports from people who care enough to put in the effort to talk about their systems.

Likewise, the people who care the most about political issues tend to have more extreme views; moderates tend not to be terribly vocal.

It makes an impassioned defense of moderatism kind of anomalous.

A good example of this effect is religion. If you’ve ever listened to American atheists talk about religion, you’ve probably gotten the impression that, as far as they’re concerned, religion is super duper evil.

By contrast, if you’ve ever talked to a religious person, you know they tend to think religion is totally awesome.

About 80% of Americans claim to be religious (though in typical me-fashion, I suspect some of them are lying because how could so many people possibly be religious?) We’ll call that 75%, because some people are just going along with the crowd. Since religion is voluntary and most religious people seem to like their religions, we’ll conclude that religion is more or less a positive in 75% of people’s lives.

Only about 40% of people actually attend religious services weekly–we’ll call these our devoted, hard-core believers. These people tend to really love their religion, though even non-attenders can get some sort of comfort out of their beliefs.

It’s difficult to determine exactly what % of Americans believe in particular forms of Christianity, but about 30% profess to be some form of “Evangelical”; Fundamentalists are a much smaller but often overlapping %, probably somewhere between 10 and 25%.

So let’s just stick with “about 75% like their religion, and about 40% have some beliefs that may be really problematic for other people” (after all, it’s not Unitarians and Neo-Pagans people are complaining about.)

For what % of people is religion really problematic? LGBT folks have it hard due to some popular religious beliefs–we can estimate them at 5%, according to the Wikipedia.

People who need or want abortions are another big category. Estimates vary, but let’s go with 1/3 of women being interested in abortion at some point in their lives, with I think 12% citing health reasons. 33 is a pretty big %, but since abortion is currently basically legal, religion is currently more of a potential problem than a real problem for most of these women.

A third category is non-Christians who face discrimination in various aspects of life, and kids/teens who have to put up with super-controlling parents. I have no idea what the stats are on them, but the logic of encounters suggests that the 30% or so of non-Christians are going to have trouble with the 40% or so of problematic-belief-Christians, mediated by non-Christians being concentrated in certain parts of the country, so lets go with 15% of people having significant issues at some point, though these are unlikely to be life-long issues (and some % of these people overlap with the previous two groups.)

So, let’s say 70% like religion; 40% have problematic beliefs; 20% suffer some sort of discrimination in their lives, and about 5% suffer significantly.

In short, most of the time, religion is actually a really positive thing for the vast majority of people, and a really bad thing for a small % of people.

But most people who have an interest in religion don’t say, “Religion is basically good but occasionally bad.” Most people say, either, “Religion is totally awesome,” or “Religion totally sucks.” And that has a lot to do with whether you and your friends are primarily people for whom it is good or bad. The moderate position gets lost.

Are Useless things actually Useful?

One of the things I found striking in the previous article (the one on evangelicals) was the claim that people involved in anti-abortion groups don’t see their activities as political, and claim that most of what they do is religious, like praying about abortion or Bible-reading. That reminded me rather strongly of the depiction of abolitionists in a book (historical fiction) I just read. Most of what abolitionists did probably amounted to little more than talking, praying, singing, and Bible-studying about the evils of slavery. Useless? Or consciousness-raising? Does it require a large army of people who say they agree with you to inspire a small % of people to actually get stuff done? Or does stuff get done by people just gradually changing what they believe, even without anyone doing big, “effective” things?

I recently encountered a petition to Honor the Children of Pakistan (Note: this was written immediately after the massacre of a hundred Pakistani children by the Taliban.)

On its face, the petition seems utterly useless (and possibly slightly insulting to Pakistan.) Signing a petition about how children deserve educations does nothing about the security situation in Pakistan. It’s not like the problem here is that Pakistan just hasn’t bothered to build schools, or cranky parents won’t let their girls go to school, or the kids are too busy sewing soccer balls to go to class, or any other practical impediment to which we can imagine fairly easy solutions, like Americans donating money to build schools or laws that fine parents for not sending their kids to school. The problem is that there’s a war going on, and one side is massacring the other side’s children. And I can’t think of any easy solutions to that, other than building a wall around the Taliban and shooting anyone who comes over, which may not be feasible.

(Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t blame Pakistani parents if they all started homeschoolong.)

Anyway, me signing a petition or not is clearly useless–but in the long run, can it actually be useful?