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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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"Progress" is very much not a linear spectrum. It is more like a tree of decisions which society navigates. Was the criminalization of drugs progress? Is their decriminalization progress? Who should get locked up for which sex acts? How do we balance fundamental rights against each other? In what ways should developing countries become more like Western societies? Should the US intervene to prevent atrocities or not? How do we balance rights between children/youths and their parents? Should adults be required to wear seat belts? Fossil fuels drove the engine that abolished serfdom, industrialization seems a requirement for any non-terrible society. How do we balance that against not exacerbating climate change? How much should we care about biodiversity?

Of course, there are some big milestones of progress which can be put in something like a linear order. Slavery bad. State discrimination by gender or skin color bad. Rape bad (even when in marriage). Locking up adults for consensual sex acts generally bad (but views differ in case of prostitution). Hurting kids bad (in most cases). Hurting non-human animals bad.

But this is not something you can fit a straight line through and extrapolate: "In 2200, people will think we were monsters because we killed plants" does not sound right.

I mostly agree. Progress is only linear in retrospect and in the minds of the people pushing for it. There is not actually some great moral lodestar that history inevitably pushes us closer to, what counts as progress is mostly about what the powerful say it is. As you point out it is not possible to provide a total ordering of policies according to progress, but I do think that the general direction of progress is fairly clear from within any given political reference frame (except those reference frames that don't even have the notion).