Time's Arrow

During this, the week of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, I would like to talk about something that I have been feeling thankful for. It is that the world is getting better.

Now that seems like a rather shocking – or at least very naïve – thing to believe, given the many terrible things and disturbing trends occurring in the world today, and I am the first to admit that I run the great risk of having this read by someone at some distant future time, wondering what could have possibly made me believe it. If so, this would not be the first time that great optimism for the future would be shown to have been unwarranted in the worst possible way.

When I was young – perhaps still a child – my mother bought a book on world history for me from a rummage sale. The book was very old, with a tattered cover, and sat on my shelf for years, unread, though I kept it with me through the years, promising myself that I would get to it someday. When I finally did get around to reading it, and reached the final chapter (this was about sixteen years ago), I was intrigued by some statements by the author which represented his appraisal of the destiny of the world in the coming decades. “Throughout the last century,” it says, “the sentiment of the brotherhood of man has been greatly deepened and strengthened. This new moral sentiment constitutes a force which is working irresistibly in the interest of a world union based on international amity and good will.

“It is most significant,” the passage continues, “that at the same time these movements towards world unity have characterized progress in the political and moral realms, wonderful discoveries and inventions in the physical domain – the steam railway, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, and a hundred others – have brought the isolated nations close alongside one another and have made easily possible, in truth made necessary, the formation of the world union.”

This passage – and the book that contained it – was published in 1906.

What a sad irony that within a decade of this book’s printing, the advanced nations of the world descended into the bloodiest and most devastating war in the history of civilization, and that this was followed by an even more devastating war in the very next generation. Alongside these wars, atrocities and mass murders were committed upon millions of persons by their own governments, including in nations that had been considered among the most enlightened and civilized in the world. And by the end of the century, weapons of war had been developed capable of destroying the entire planet, with the growing danger that fanatics just crazy enough to use them might someday acquire access to them.

But we must not be too quick to judge the faulty vision of that writer in 1906: after all, many events in the century preceding that book had occurred which would inspire one to optimism, including the universal abolishment of slavery, the growth of woman’s suffrage movements, and a dizzying array of new inventions and technologies that had been unimaginable just a hundred years earlier, such as the telephone, the horseless carriage, the electric light bulb, the phonograph, and the heavier-than-air flying machine. The growing “brotherhood of man”, in addition to manifesting itself in temperance movements and other social welfare initiatives, was also evidenced by the growth of international trade, linking the advanced economies of the world so tightly that it seemed that a war of any kind would be so self-destructive as to not be warranted for any reason.

Given the blood-stained record of the twentieth century in retrospect, can we really afford to be optimistic, or bold enough to say that things, in general, have gotten better? I believe that we can.

I believe this, because in the midst of all of the calamities, tragedies, and outrages of our civilization, there seem to be real marks of forward progress, and not just in the area of scientific invention and technological advancement. The history of blacks in the U.S. exemplifies this very well. Many if not most of them lived as slaves in the early decades of the country’s history, until the institution was abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, after the Civil War. But freedom did not bring equal treatment under the law. Voting rights were routinely denied to blacks in many states. In the two World Wars, units of American black soldiers were segregated from white soldiers, and the U.S. armed forces were not integrated until 1948. Black soldiers in these wars justifiably might have wondered what they were fighting for, since many of their relatives back home were being excluded from a decent education, banned from certain establishments, and forced to drink from separate drinking fountains and to use separate bathrooms. Civil rights would finally come after decades of domestic struggle, and in 1989, Americans would see General Colin Powell rise to become the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two decades after that, America elected its first black President.

I have seen other, dramatic signs of progress and change within my lifetime. I remember a story that my mother told me of how, when she was a child, living in a suburb of Chicago, she used to walk past a country club which had a prominent sign that read “No Jews or dogs allowed”. Such a thing would be unthinkable today. I remember, too, in my own childhood, living in a culture that believed that women were incapable of working in many of the professional occupations held by men. A popular riddle exemplified these prejudices: A man and his child are in an automobile accident; the man dies, and the child, alive but seriously injured, is rushed to the hospital. The attending doctor in the emergency room that evening takes one look at the victim and says, “I can’t operate on this child – he’s my son.” Very few persons back then were capable of arriving at the solution to this riddle, which seems so obvious today: that the doctor was the child’s mother. And I remember the racial and ethnic derogatory words that were so casually and regularly used by persons of all ages – words which are now rarely heard, if ever at all.

Similar tales could be told in Europe, and Asia, and Latin America: of the growth of liberality, and breaking down of old barriers based upon gender, racial, and ethnic prejudices. And it does seem that these developments are just the latest in what has been a long and sometimes halting progression which has been a central feature of the story of human civilization. But the progression has had disturbing undercurrents.

One undercurrent is that not all of the gains are necessarily permanent ones: there is always the risk of a retrogression. I remember well a striking example of this back in 2001. A news program recounted the shameful treatment of Japanese-Americans after the U.S. entry into World War II, as many families at that time were resettled into detainment camps. The program condemned this policy, of course, and its narrator wondered how such a thing had ever been possible, even by a government and citizenry shocked and terrified by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The conclusion seemed to be that the persons of that generation were simply more bigoted and prone to racial paranoia than we are now, in this more enlightened age. And then, a short time after this documentary aired, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11. Panic ensued, radical airport security measures were introduced, and when it was revealed that racial profiling was now being used in security screenings, with particular attention being paid to persons who appeared to be of Arab descent, the policy was roundly applauded by a frightened and insecure populace.

Another undercurrent is that, alongside the gains of progress, there is a countervailing, dangerous trend that increasingly threatens to undermine all of these gains. Schools are no longer segregated, but now many have metal detectors at their entrances, to protect the students from being knifed or shot. The Chicago of the nineteenth century was one in which members of any particular white immigrant ethnic group – German, Polish, Irish, and Italian – dare not venture into a neighborhood belonging to one of their rival ethnics, for fear of being beaten up or killed. Now, anyone can venture into any neighborhood of downtown Chicago or its adjacent suburbs without any fear of reprisal, and the only ethnic markers, if they exist at all, are the food and drink specialties exhibited in the neighborhood restaurants and pubs. The ethnic differences - both personal and geographic - have blurred beyond distinction, and a typical native Chicagoan numbers among his ancestors representatives of several ethnic groups. And yet, today, a little further south, among the poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods of the Chicago suburbs, murders due to gangland violence – with even children numbered among the victims – are at epidemic proportions. The Prohibition-era gangs of Chicago and other large cities are a thing of the past, but modern gangs deal in drugs that are much more dangerous and addictive than alcohol. Every mark of progress seems to be accompanied by an underlying countercurrent of violence and barbarism.

The evolution of Halloween as it is celebrated in the U.S. provides a very telling example of this strange phenomenon of forward and backward movements occurring together. According to folk history, the celebration of the holiday had its roots in a sort of ritualized extortion practiced by marginally delinquent youths upon potential adult victims, as the youths threatened vandalism to their property unless the youths were given some sort of reward, as exemplified in the demand: “Trick or treat”. But this evolved into the harmless holiday ritual – the one that I remember in my own youth – of groups of children going from door to door in store-bought costumes, knocking on the doors of neighbors, and getting little treats of candy from the amused homeowners – most of whom had their own children also roaming the neighborhoods in costume. Today, the ritual survives, but hardly any children now roam the neighborhood without their parents in tow, standing nervously nearby, terrified that if their children were left to do this unaccompanied, the children could be abducted or otherwise molested by adult predators.

It is a strange paradox, that as the world – or at least the more civilized nations of the world – seems to become progressively more enlightened, it also becomes progressively more dangerous, to the same degree. Slavery – at least state-sanctioned slavery – is universally abolished, but human trafficking is now a world-wide epidemic. And while democracy seems to be on the rise, so, it seems, is extremism among larger and more increasingly armed groups of people, fueled by religious fanaticism, anger at perceived slights or injuries suffered at the hands of others, or simply the desire to subvert the regional balance of power by any means necessary. Our modern economies are capable of providing more things to more people more efficiently than ever before in the history of our civilization, but the gulf between rich and poor is growing menacingly large. Technology continues to produce dazzling new miracles on many fronts, but with industrial and technological progress has come negative environmental consequences that risk the sustainability of the world’s entire ecosystem.

It would be Pollyannaish to downplay these negative undercurrents which pervade the march of civilization, or to not acknowledge the fact that a severe economic crisis, terrorist act, large-scale war, or effective demagogue playing upon lingering resentments and prejudices could send the edifices of our civilization crashing down, at least for a time. We have fallen down many times over the centuries, and every nation has chapters within its own history that represent shameful episodes that it must contend with: episodes that it would like to blot out of its collective memory, but knows that, to truly continue on any kind of forward march to progress, it must never blot out. And yet, in the face of all of this, it seems that after every time we pick ourselves up, we are a little better, and a little wiser, and there is an enduring, permanent improvement to our collective ethos that we retain. It is this that leaves me feeling grateful, and hopeful – that no matter how dangerous the challenges we face in the future, we have a better, broader, more resilient character that will enable us to deal with them more effectively, and more wisely, than those before us were ever capable of doing.