We Cannot Go Back: Morally Evolving In the 21st Century

Written by Sage Setty.

On March 31st, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. stated in his ‘Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution’ speech given at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., that ‘We [the American people] shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ Five days later, he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not the first person to espouse revolutionarily optimistic rhetoric about the course of human development. Nor was he the first person to be killed for attempting to reform the status quo—in his case a segregated America—to realize a more progressive and egalitarian future. However, MLK reasserted this idea that human progress is positively linear at an essential moment for the twentieth century, with 1968 being the year that authoritarianism and political regression around the world—from America to France to the Soviet Union—was being collectively opposed through particularist grassroots movements like MLK’s Poor Peoples Campaign and countercultural associations like Situationists International. And many of the activists and political ideologues associated with these movements—including essential mid-century writers like Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, and Frantz Fanon—were forecasting an opposing conclusion to MLK. While he argued that ‘justice’ was the guiding ideology of human progress, others were stating that society was more much concretely influenced by capitalistic consumerism, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and imperialism. This dissonance between the twentieth-century revolutionary optimist and radical nihilist begs the question: has human society’s evolution from the state of nature followed a positive arc, or is that just an aphoristic opiate fed to the masses to make them blind to the true character of contemporary civilization? Let us discuss.

In contemporary contexts, the notion of positively linear human development has been supported through various metrics—unprecedented global wealth measured through GDP per capita, technological advancements like interplanetary travel, centennial life expectancies, the eradication of historically deadly diseases, or even as amorphous a concept as the improved status of women in society. Fair enough. Indeed, it is true that humans live longer than they did a century ago, that the economies of today eclipse those of the twentieth century, that plague is no longer a viable threat to humanity, and that man’s footprint is imprinted on the dusted surface of the moon. Yet, these are sweeping measurements—universalist averages—of a very different story. Because one man going to the moon, even twelve men, is not the same thing as mankind reaching the moon—no matter how much JFK in 1969 would have had his constituents believe this fantasy. In the same way that while the average life expectancy of a man or woman in the UK has risen approximately 11 years since 1945, life expectancies in Gaza have fallen 11.5 years since October 7, 2023. These averages, as appealing as they make the ‘human narrative’ appear, are not representative of reality. And, they do not account for new threats to human existence like climate change—fuelled by the industrial and technological evolutions which boost GDP growth. Or, increased vulnerability to pandemics—again, facilitated by this same globalization that supports the narrative of advancement. On a global scale, our society is becoming more vulnerable to exogenous factors like environmental decline and disease. It is not so simple a story as either positively linear or absolutely doomed. While humans are not en masse subjected to the nasty, brutal, and short conditions of the state of nature—we have not entirely escaped it —and our modernized practices of excessive fossil fuel consumption, media consumption, material consumption, etc. may be luring us back to that brutal past. 

The solution to this damned prophecy is conflict. If the arc of humanity is being steered by those who do not mind condemning the masses to a nasty future—as headlines about rising sea levels and child-labour sweatshops and mass defunding of health and education programs would suggest—then we the collective must seize that goddamn wheel. Yet, we hit a dead-end. This leads us to a second issue. The same issue that Marcuse, Friedan, and Debord were grappling with in 1968. Guy Debord called it the spectacle. It is essentially the desensitizing and anaesthetizing effect that modernity, technologically streamlined and dopamine maximized, compels upon its enjoyers. The most apt imaginative comparison is from the Disney animated film WALL-E. We, are the lethargic passengers of the spaceship Axiom. All the little robots that brush the passengers’ teeth and play them videos and raise their children, keeping them happy and distracted, are the creature-comforts of modernity we enjoy on a daily basis—the things that keep life expectancy and the GDP steadily increasing. The robot steering wheel—in Herbert Marcuse’s Marxist conception—would be the capitalistic bourgeoise class. It is this ruling class that keeps the masses lethargically satisfied, fed until stuffed and shuttled around on floating beds; given pills and consumptive avenues of release whenever they feel any sort of hesitancy about the course of their lives or of humankind. And yes, life can be arduous even under these conditions. But, in this context, the struggle of sitting up from a supine position to reach your extra-large soda is incomparable to the struggle of getting up off the bed, waddling to the top floor, and ripping out the steering wheel. The metaphor is getting clunky. But, essentially, ease in 1968 is today’s opiate of the masses. And this ease stands in direct contrast with the conflict that Marx and Fanon and de Beauvoir and Marcuse and all these brilliant radical thinkers say is absolutely necessary for humanity to genuinely transform its systemically unequal conditions.

History is conflict. Progress is conflict. The positive arc towards justice is still conflict. In his teleological treatise The One Dimensional Man, Marcuse defined twentieth century society through the conflict between progressive forces and the forces that suppress them. It is through enduring, and often violent, progressivism that positive change occurs. And Debord argues that the Spectacle—the Clockwork Orange images and cloying serotonin of consumption and apolitical ignorance—keeps the individual from becoming a collective, and thus from collectively engaging in progress. In Marcuse’s words, we are enveloped by ‘a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom,’ which ‘prevails in advanced industrial civilization; a token of technical progress.’ We are not free. We are lavishing in unfreedom. Those graphics which illustrate the course of human evolution should really look like ape; homo erectus; homo sapien; person hunched over their phone locked in to a two-hour Instagram reels session, munching on McDonalds they ordered through UberEats.

I can present no remedy to this issue. Yet, I point out the fact that society is not, in fact, developing in a positively linear fashion in the hopes that you, the reader, may come to the same conclusion and maybe even try to do something about it. And that means making difficult, conscious, educated decisions. It implies breaking from the Marcusean model of passivity. Places to start are—curbing your consumption, shopping more sustainably, reading more and educating yourself, following boycott procedures. These sorts of habits, while they have increasingly permeated popular media, are concerningly viewed as rather fringe and even maybe radical. When in reality—critical consumptive practices, protestation against authoritarianism and oppression, boycotting, sit-ins, marches, and all the other forms of political action are deep-baked in our societies. In 1968, these practices weren’t viewed as optional. They were seen as essential to shaping a more humanistic society. The preceding 50 years may have seen people conditioned even more into passivity. But, it is never too late to stand up, take the wheel, and steer it in a legitimately positive direction. The collective doesn’t follow an arc; we make it.