Change is inevitable, Progress not so much

Don’t get me wrong, every bit of change is considered to be progress in the right direction by at least one person somewhere. Whether for you, progress means more equality of rights and opportunities for all or more power for the worthy (no matter how you define worthy), I believe that my title still holds.

As a progressive (as I define it, someone who believes that laws should not care what people look like or believe privately and that institutions should try to level the playing field or at least prevent privileged people from accruing even more advantages over time), I am saddened by the election of Donald Trump (which was conceded a few hours ago as I type these words), especially because of what it means for the Supreme Court…

Why I am not surprised by Trump’s victory

I am saddened, but certainly not shocked. I started worrying that he might become the next US president early on, when (unlike all of Romney’s opponents 4 years prior) he stayed at the top of the polls week after week. I watched in disbelief as the pundits and politicians on the right acted like his nomination was impossible for no discernable reason save wishful thinking.

Then he got the nomination and the wishful thinking merely transferred to the left and center. As pretty much everyone started saying Clinton was the inevitable winner, I felt the intense pull of wishful thinking, the desire to join the hype train… but I remained worried. I watched in disbelief as people seemed to think that Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight giving Trump roughly 1 in 3 chances of winning was the same thing as predicting Clinton’s victory… and when it became clear that the odds had fallen in Trump’s favor, I saw countless comments on FiveThirtyEight accusing them of failure.

Clearly a lot of people have not the faintest idea how probabilities work… but that is not what concerns me the most in this story.

Why I think many people are surprised

I think that part of the reason why so many people believed Clinton’s win was inevitable is because they believe, as Martin Luther King put it, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”.

If you truly believe that, then of course it is impossible for you to imagine the US electing their first black president (twice) and then moving on to a man who said Mexicans are rapists.

Well, the few things I know of History do not lead me to believe that the moral universe bends toward justice.

Fair warning : if you dislike historical examples, then I suggest you skip the next section entirely.

Historical lessons I believe we should take

Democracy was invented in Antiquity, then left for dead for about two millenia.

Salic succession laws were compiled by Clovis around 500, but were not really enforced until 1316 (and at that time there was a female peer of the kingdom, Mahaut d’Artois, so it’s not like no case of female succession has ever presented itself before).

The move from Goryeo Dynasty to the Joseon Dynasty in medieval Korea degraded women’s rights and freedoms to an almost unbelievable extent, quite suddenly.

Europeans who had abolished slavery for centuries (note that serfdom is also pretty bad, but deprives its victims of less rights than slavery) reinstated it when they invaded and colonized other continents.

Napoleon first became the First Consul of the French Republic, then its First Consul for life and then its Emperor. Bye bye res publica.

Britain is the country of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), but also the country who pushed Alan Turing (1912–1954) to suicide because he was gay.

And now for the Godwin point : when the nazis took over Germany, not that long ago in history, they declared a whole lot of people to be worth less than others, based on their faith, ethnicity, sexuality or political beliefs.

Surely, these examples are a tiny fraction of what a history buff could come up with. A fortiori a historian.

What they tell me is that inequality and discrimination are not hiccups on an overall curve that goes from prehistoric times to a future that will inevitably feature a greater equality of opportunities and rights…

Change goes back and forth

What I’ve been told of history and what I have witnessed of our world leads me to believe that every time there is a change, it benefits some and hurts some others. If a group gets a specific right or privilege, they will resent the loss of it, no matter how “right” it might seem to others. It’s only natural that there would be backlash. And it is in human nature to want more than you have, even if you already have more than a lot of people.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder why so many people seem so sure that we can only go forward. Do they think that at some point, we’ll reach full equality and suddenly everyone will realize it’s actually perfect? If so many men and women are right now unhappy because the gap in rights has tightened between men and women, between straight and LGBT and between white people and people of color, even though it is still greatly advantageous to be a white straight man… do you really think that removing all privileges and reaching full equality will suddenly make them “see the light”?

If we progressives really want social justice to become more of a goal and less of a collateral, we need to get off our high horses. Yes, equality is morally right. For us. For the other side, it is an abomination. A denial of the superior worth of some groups over others, in which they believe as strongly as we do in justice for all. For many people, to treat everyone equally is to mistreat everyone, those that did not deserve to be treated so well and those that deserved better. If we want to convince them that their worldview is flawed, just outright declaring that we won and only we can say what is right now is a terrible, dumb and losing strategy.

My takeaway from all this

We should never stop worrying about and fighting for equality. As soon as we declare that the war is over, as soon as we assume that a gain made is set in stone, we pave the way for others to undermine, repeal, recall, subvert and destroy our achievements.

Nothing is safe. No democracy, no women’s right, no LGBT right, no workers’ right, no social program, no institution.

Everything we take for granted might be taken away.

Then again, by the same token, everything we stand against can be changed. No tradition, no custom, no rule, no habit is set in stone.

Progress is not inevitable. Past progress is not set in stone. But I take heart in the fact that the election of Trump is in and of itself a perfect demonstration of the fact that change is inevitable.