Personally, I find being human shameful, in that we keep getting stuck dominated by the ownership class and unable to organize against them. This won’t be the first time, but the ultra-wealthy are so rich it might be the last.
But that isn’t how I originally took it when I first learned of the atrocities committed by Americans or in the name of the US, past and present.
History is messy everywhere. Human civilization has always been exploitative and violent. What we can hope for is to make strides forward in developing morality and creating societies where life, liberty and civil rights are extended to everyone. The enlightenment and its notion of universal inalienable rights was a big step. We Americans just couldn’t get our wealthy cotton lords to give up their livelihood and wealth. Nor could the French give up their petit bourgeoisie.
Since then, the UN has a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for nations to aspire to, but no nation actually recognizes them all or enforces the ones they got. But liberal societies now know what to work towards if ever they can get it going.
Right now, the US is in a world of shit. We’re watching all the progress since the civil war unravel. But some historians are optimistic about it, noting that we’ve had slide-backs like this before, and when the people responded, it allowed the US to ironclad civil rights a bit more. The US is taking a while, but the arc of history really does bend towards universal liberty.
(SCOTUS is an interesting point of focus, as it’s one of the big direct powers that is unraveling our rights year after year. Now that we understand we can’t just leave it there and hope to fix the US, we’re going to have to do something to overhaul the court. I wonder what that will look like.)
Our current mess even features a conspiracy of the ultra wealthy. It’s hard to decide when it started, because different capitalists were pissed off and swore revenge for different reasons. And then there’s the new order of tech bros and Protestant Evangelical ministers that have devoted themselves to white Christian nationalism. They are just grew up with autocratic ideology and have forsaken all notions of charity or compassion. The Disney/Ford era conspirators would be aghast at what the project has become.
But either we’re going to collectively learn we don’t want to be assholes dominated by an incompetent upper class (and they are incompetent – they’re doing nothing to preserve the social contract) and we’re going to collectively overthrow them and vow to do better, or we’re going to ignore the climate crisis until we collectively run out of water, and war, famine, pestilence and drought take most of us.
If that happens, we might go extinct and then it’s up to some other species to evolve big brains and try again. But Homo Erectus went through a rough patch where there were less than ten-thousand of them for millennia. They’d then get better and colonize the world until they were out-competed by more modern cousins. Also HE lasted two million years, to our 250,000. So this just may be a long term pause before we try to civilize again, and maybe by then we will have become less susceptible to fearmongers.
Personally, I find being human shameful, in that we keep getting stuck dominated by the ownership class and unable to organize against them. This won’t be the first time, but the ultra-wealthy are so rich it might be the last.
But that isn’t how I originally took it when I first learned of the atrocities committed by Americans or in the name of the US, past and present.
History is messy everywhere. Human civilization has always been exploitative and violent. What we can hope for is to make strides forward in developing morality and creating societies where life, liberty and civil rights are extended to everyone. The enlightenment and its notion of universal inalienable rights was a big step. We Americans just couldn’t get our wealthy cotton lords to give up their livelihood and wealth. Nor could the French give up their petit bourgeoisie.
Since then, the UN has a Universal Declaration of Human Rights for nations to aspire to, but no nation actually recognizes them all or enforces the ones they got. But liberal societies now know what to work towards if ever they can get it going.
Right now, the US is in a world of shit. We’re watching all the progress since the civil war unravel. But some historians are optimistic about it, noting that we’ve had slide-backs like this before, and when the people responded, it allowed the US to ironclad civil rights a bit more. The US is taking a while, but the arc of history really does bend towards universal liberty.
(SCOTUS is an interesting point of focus, as it’s one of the big direct powers that is unraveling our rights year after year. Now that we understand we can’t just leave it there and hope to fix the US, we’re going to have to do something to overhaul the court. I wonder what that will look like.)
Our current mess even features a conspiracy of the ultra wealthy. It’s hard to decide when it started, because different capitalists were pissed off and swore revenge for different reasons. And then there’s the new order of tech bros and Protestant Evangelical ministers that have devoted themselves to white Christian nationalism. They are just grew up with autocratic ideology and have forsaken all notions of charity or compassion. The Disney/Ford era conspirators would be aghast at what the project has become.
But either we’re going to collectively learn we don’t want to be assholes dominated by an incompetent upper class (and they are incompetent – they’re doing nothing to preserve the social contract) and we’re going to collectively overthrow them and vow to do better, or we’re going to ignore the climate crisis until we collectively run out of water, and war, famine, pestilence and drought take most of us.
If that happens, we might go extinct and then it’s up to some other species to evolve big brains and try again. But Homo Erectus went through a rough patch where there were less than ten-thousand of them for millennia. They’d then get better and colonize the world until they were out-competed by more modern cousins. Also HE lasted two million years, to our 250,000. So this just may be a long term pause before we try to civilize again, and maybe by then we will have become less susceptible to fearmongers.