This weekend I had the privilege to visit Central High in Little Rock with Liberty Girl, the school that – as she points out in the previous post – 51 years ago today was an international focal point for racial justice. Two ideas quickly stood out in my mind as I watched video clips of angry white mobs screaming at and attacking innocent blacks:
First, what the Little Rock 9 and their advocates battled back then far exceeds anything that we’re dealing with today, both in terms of justice and courage. Second, our morality has rapidly advanced in a short time.
1. REVOLUTION: It takes a lot of balls to fight for liberty: to go up against the teachers unions, to battle powerful developers that want to bulldoze our homes, to stay out of the Oklahoma prison system…. Yet our fights occur for the most part from the comfort of our computers. And kids today are getting at least some education, the victims of eminent domain usually get a lot of money and the Oklahoma outlaw still rests soundly at night in his Virginia home.
Consider how outrageous it is to forbid an entire race of people from doing something as simple as share a water fountain or classroom with a white kid. Think about how much courage it would take to be one of the Little Rock 9, to risk your life walking through a crazed, violent mob to go to school and then be constantly in fear every time you set foot in the hallway.
2. EVOLUTION: I find it utterly shocking to watch the video above and realize that it took place just a few decades ago. Racism and prejudice still exist in our country, as evidenced by the force of current immigration debates and anti-Middle East views. But we’re eons away from segregation.
The Governor of Arkansas in 1957 opposed racial integration and called on whites from across the state to gather at Central High, creating the infamous Central High mobs. He spoke publicly in favor of segregation and yet was voted in a Time magazine poll as one of the most admirable men in America. Today, no sane person could speak like that in public and no politician could get elected on such a blatantly racist ground.
More importantly, far fewer people in the United States harbor such racist sentiments. Fittingly, the presidential favorite at this very moment is black.
How did this drastic moral evolution come about? It’s a question worth asking and devoting serious thought. As advocates of justice, liberty and equality, we seek to change our neighbors’ minds. We fight for nothing short of a societal revolution to advance today’s moral standards.
Steven Pinker gives us a clue where morality comes from in his article The Moral Instinct:
The five moral spheres [harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity] are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
The racist whites in Little Rock where driven by instinctual hatred that was fueled by culture. Liberty Girl ridicules white people in her post – and rightly so – but these white people deserve credit for consciously fighting to change their racist ways.
Racism is a type of group loyalty that exists in all people in all cultures, but many cultures haven’t purged it as well as others. Saudia Arabia, Sudan and China are not nearly as tolerant of other cultures compared to, say, the United States.
ZEITGEIST NOT RELIGION: If morality is a product of evolution and conscious cultural adjustments, then few people get their morality from the source most often credited: religion. This is self-evident because our holy books, unlike our morality, are unchanging; further, they are filled with stories condoning genocide, slavery, rape, brutality, violence and oppression. We cherry pick pieces from these ancient texts that sound good as judged by today’s moral standards and we tend ignore the stuff that offends us.
Indeed, our morality comes in spite of our religion, not because of it. Religion has been a barrier to the greatest moral advancements: the abolition of slavery, female suffrage and equality, racial and homosexual equality, freedom of speech, thought and association.
In Little Rock this weekend we drove past a crowd of religious people. One kid, probably about 10 years old, held a large sign that said, “God hates fags.”
Why is that sign offensive? It’s not in some cultures, and wasn’t at one point in our own. Moral shifts come from many places, including grassroots awareness campaigns, court rulings and cultural leaders like Martin Luther King. This is important because we can help create those shifts through carefully crafted litigation, cultural icons and campaigns.
Is there any doubt that the Supreme Court order to integrate Central High was an essential aspect of our recently improved moral shift toward racial equality?
Liberty Girl and I had dinner this week with a prominent libertarian thinker who wears a necklace with three As attached. They stand for Aristotle, Anarchy and Atheism. Perhaps you consider these ideas too extreme, but at least acknowledge this: To advance liberty and progress morally, we must think clearly and logically. We must resist superstitions and instinctual convictions that lack justice, reason and evidence.
It is in the spirit of actively promoting new ideas and thinking about them clearly that social progress is possible. This is the sole means that marches civilization forward.
Liberty Is For Me 