02 January 2019

Today, morality is suddenly much less framed by ongoing survival challenges.

For most of humanity’s existence, might-is-right co-existed with survival challenges to shape community ideals around morality and social cohesion and hierarchies.

Humans had always been like other creatures in favouring their kin.

The rise of the modern nation state was largely about favouring merit-based, impersonal bureaucracies over kinship based structures.

The motivation to get this right was largely about might-is-right in the sense that “war made the state and the state made war”.

Better government led to better supplied troops and better choices for generals.

Political science advanced along with advances in many other scientific fields.

Today’s constitutional democracies combine many innovations. Might-is-right had to give way to majority rule but majority rule needed many safeguards – including protecting the rights of minorities. Checks and balances, separate branches of government, etc.

Advances in political representation have corresponded with equally profound increases in wealth and prosperity. None of these advances have been steady or the least bit globally uniform.

The emergence of “social justice warriors” corresponds with little public appreciation of the extent or the pace of humanity’s broad shifts.

Half of the human population was always seen as inferior mostly because women have always been inferior at hand-to-hand combat. This hasn’t changed, what has changed is that hand-to-hand combat has declined from being of central importance to being largely irrelevant. The extent to which women have advanced in the past three generations is far more extraordinary than is generally appreciated.

Variations in prosperity among regions was generally modest until about ten generations ago when the West developed scientific advantages which quickly led to military and economic advantages.

Within the past two generations, more than half the world’s people have achieved or begun to achieve great progress in closing the science and economic gaps. This was greatly facilitated by political and legal structures which sharply reduced the incentives to try to forcefully gain advantages. The advantages of trade are very powerful thus the incentives need to be funneled toward broad progress through the ability to resolve disputes peacefully. Much progress has ensued. More must follow.

The next steps which need to be taken require a deep understanding of the human condition. Materialism is mostly a recent phenomenon. Capitalism and productivity enhancing machines helped stoke it but capitalism and materialism are very different animals.

Materialism might be in decline. Capitalism is evolving.

Less than a half-dozen generations ago, the role of famines on society was far-reaching. Famine has been largely eliminated, with much progress over the past two generations.

Poverty has been devastated or is in rapid retreat in all other regions.

To equate poverty as a point along a materialism spectrum is to miss a great deal of what constitutes the human condition. When people are extremely poor and starved of opportunities, their conditions largely imprison them. Progress from poverty to lower-middle class is where the lion’s share of emancipation happens.

Thus focusing on income inequality in a nation where the majority of the population is properly poor is to showcase a disregard for the path humanity has traveled and for what is central to the human condition: the freedom for people to pursue their aspirations. The world today has been greatly shaped by people who grew up in lower-middle class households. Having half of a nation’s population reside in a state of entrenched poverty is to dismiss the importance of economic freedom while imprudently testing the foundations of political freedom.

The gains from poverty to lower-middle class are vastly greater than those from middle-class to upper-middle. Who is more likely to commit suicide, the madam or the maid? It is not the domestic worker. The first order of economic business of the 1994 transitioning SA, was to create a small number of black elites. Conversely, the next twenty-five years is on track to keeping a majority of the population in poverty.

We don’t need to be philosophers to grasp the nettle of the human condition. Yet some sense of what the the influential thinkers was on about is helpful. It is also helpful to have the humility to appreciate the how ethereal today’s social constructs are.