Monthly Archives: February 2015

Are We Moving?

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As A. C. Grayling has points out in “Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern World,” when we trace the course of history over the past five decades from the battle for freedom of thought that began with the Reformation right up to Women’s Suffrage and the still-ongoing Civil Rights Movement, we see that it is not only our physical quality of life that has continued to improve but also — for lack of a better word — our spiritual life has improved. These are the fruits of democracy, and until recent years, the harvest has been steadily more bountiful.

It was not many years ago that working people, particularly former slaves, sharecroppers, and recent immigrants, labored under grueling circumstances and enduring lives of misery. As we drive past such old brick edifices as Fulton Mills (now luxurious lofts), we can only imagine what life was like for the workers who toiled there without air conditioning amid the dangerously whirring pulleys, wheels and belts, or for those who labored with bent backs in farm fields. What misery, we think.

Yet even as we bask in today’s improved working conditions comes the sound of a distant alarm. Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” tells a deeply disturbing tale. As “mom and pop” businesses, often run by neighbors and fellow church-members, give way to massive corporations, Ehrenreich finds that working in the hotel industry, the contract-housekeeping business or even  food service establishments offers little in the way of a satisfactory style of life. Living day-to-day, from paycheck to paycheck, Ehrenreich tells of a life that is just one banana peel away from homelessness. What has happened, we ask, to our forward progress?

We have to ask why the minimum-wage workers put up with these dehumanizing conditions. There are several explanations, and one of these we soon learn is the Supreme Court decision know as Citizens United, a ruling which allows mega-corporations to hurl vast sums of money into the political arena. The very people who ought to be looking out for the rank and file workers are in fact looking out for the CEO.

Let us look next at what this means for our march of progress.

The Pendulum Swings

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A common argument — especially in the wee hours — is whether or not humankind is better off today than in some previous era of the past. The next question is what is meant by “better off”? Certainly technology has changed our lives in many ways, but does that make us better off in a moral or spiritual (for lack of better words) sense?

The futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler observed almost 40 years ago that almost everything that we use in our daily lives had come into being in the previous lifetime. The Tofflers referred this concept as “The 100th Lifetime.” But since the time in which the Tofflers were writing, another lifetime has passed and the advent of the semi-conductor and the digital revolutioin has altered our lives in ways previously unimaginable. Moore’s Law tells us that the rate of the resultant changes will continue, at least for the immediate future, to expand at at an exponential rate.

In years past, historians noted that social philosophy changed pendulum-style — that is, history moves in cycles: The Classical Age gave way to the Renaissance, which in turn gave way to the Medieval Period, which was supplanted by a New Renaissance, which was replaced by a Neo-Classical Era and so on. Neck ties went from wide to narrow and back to wide; hemlines went up and down and back up, and on and on. Still the arc of history seemed — in spite of these fluctuations — to move toward a steady increase in tolerance and individual liberty.

This sanguine view of history, however, has been called into question in recent years. Books such as “Nickel and Dimed” and “The New Jim Crow,” when coupled with the recent dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, have caused may social observers to reevaluate their progressive assumptions on both the political and economic levels.