Justice as fairness: we can do better than we are

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

The movement toward deregulation is long in coming and started before Glass-Steagal. The contention is that the regulation limits market growth and stifles personal and corporate wealth. Canada and any other country like it that has greater regulations bad has also had greater social and economic stability and in fact growth. Charting the American-Canadian dollar exchange over the past ten years is an interesting if sad (for citizens of the US) revelation.

I appreciate designers and theorist like Rawls very much, AJ. I like visionaries, and I find the design elements and principles of permaculture, for example, to be a source of hope. I would like to believe there will be a myriad of acts that will tilt the United States toward something more like the simulacrum of democracy. Some of these will involve quiet conversations that reaffirm the best ideas of a democracy. Others will involve legislative and corporate changes. And still others will involve more dramatic and salient acts of civil disobedience.

Every generation has its time and its cause. And while I am sure my parents and older siblings did not understand the fervor with which I protested for Queer rights in the 80s and 90s and protested for a greater awareness of and compassion for AIDS that transcended homophobia and stereotyping, I hoped that they appreciate that my passion and involvement was for good reason. This generation may well be the first generation in some time to not only not have a financially secure future, but there is a good chance they will not live as long as their parents, reversing a standing trend. Do they have a right to be angry? Are they justified in having an emotional response to a parlous future of financial and environmental debt

Beyond the concerns of a generation and its cause, I wonder how quickly can a vision be morphed into reality? And as thousands gather in Oakland tonight and shut down the port, and thousands more gather across the country and world, and while a controlling faction becomes more entrenched in its position, is there time for visions? Is there yet time and momentum to put in play a peaceful shift?

King may be right that the "arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice.' But what of the intersecting arc of human compassion and patience? Do we have it in us to pursue and unflinchingly make manifest visions of harmony, equality and justice? Are we more paradise or purgatory? Can we design ourselves out of our nature? Is the gift of design and vision the nexus and the portal to a greater evolutionary event? Can we be or become our visions?

Now that my brain is functioning again, I can address the things above.

I'm about three hours from finishing up Stephen Pinker's latest book The Better Angels of Our Nature. The core of the book is that as time has passed humans *have* become more compassionate and less violent. Yes, LESS, violent. Consider the following:

1) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone reading this knows someone who was burnt at the stake as a witch. I'm not saying someone in your lineage, I mean someone you've met.

2) No one here has ever been to a live bear-baiting.

3) It is vanishingly improbable that anyone here has ever had to fear being stabbed at the dinner table by someone wielding a steak knife.

4) No great power has shot at any other great power since the end of WW II. I'm not saying that there's been no wars, but no *great power* wars. China and Japan fought multiple wars in the past but haven't fought one in 65 years. France and Germany, England and France, Germany and Russia *all* had periodic bouts of warfare through the 17th, 18th, 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In fact, Europe is now experiencing the longest contiguous peace since, get this, the height of the Roman Empire! WW III never happened, sometimes despite all efforts to make it happen.

5) The number of crimes that could earn one the death penalty in western nations has gone from a whole raft of items to a very few (murder, possibly treason, possibly child rape). And in most European nations you simply can't *get* the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime. A century or two ago, you could get the death penalty for insulting the crown!

6) In the west, marital rape has gone from 'just the way things are' to a criminal offense. Spousal abuse has gone from a punchline on 'The Honeymooners' to something no sit-com would *ever* put in because it is socially unacceptable (again, that doesn't mean it never happens just that when it does, the abuser is not going to find a sympathetic ear when he claims that 'she had it coming').

7) Spanking, in the west, has gone from 'this is how you raise children' to child abuse. If half of what I endured as a child happened to a kid today, that kid would be removed from the home.

8) War has gone from something noble and 'the aspiration of every man and nation' to something repellant to large numbers of people.

So yes, I think that human societies can become more compassionate and peaceful, up to a point. I do not think we can nor do I think we should try, to have any kind of utopia. We *know* what happens when people try to create utopias and we should not trust anyone who suggests we should do so. I do think humans are moving to a stage in our cultural development(s) that violence is increasingly being constrained. The circle of moral concern has expanded to include more and more groups of people.

As far as your paradise or purgatory question, I think neither. But I do think that now is a better time to be alive, for larger numbers of humanity, ever. Even in poor nations the average life expectancy has crossed over the 40 year mark and in rich nations it is pushing up toward 90. At the end of the 18th century the average lifespan was ~37 years. At the end of the 19th it was about 45. At the end of the twentieth it was about 75. We have almost *doubled* the number of years people live on average in about a century and almost trebled it in about two centuries. Literacy, is spreading so fast that we notice illiteracy but not literacy. Two hundred years ago we would take illiteracy for granted and notice literacy. Beyond three hundred years, literacy becomes extremely rare outside of the noble classes. Beyond four hundred years, literacy becomes rare even amongst the nobles. Pick a statistic reflective of human well-being and I'll show you something that, graphed out over a few centuries, is moving in the direction we would want to. Health, equality and well-being are on an upward sloping curve, violence and war are on downward sloping curves. I think that's insanely great, as Steve Jobs would've said.

Cheers
Aj