Is there an “arc of history”?

In the immediate aftermath of the Dodds decision overturning Roe v. Wade — context supplied for those of you reading this post months or years in my future — there has been a lot of venting online about the interruption of progress and the breaking of the “arc of history.” Here’s but one example of many:

Trust me when I say there have been many similarly anguished tweets over the last few days.

The idea that history has a direction is wildly popular, and pops up all over the place. It is implied in the term “progressive” to describe a class of political opinions that support public policies that, in theory, would improve conditions for most people. Of course, the actual opinions and policies deemed “progressive” have changed in the last century or so, but the notion that guided social change constitutes “progress” and that progress is historically foreordained has been popular in this country since the purpose of American government was reconceived in the late 19th century.

See also, for example, the famous quotation of Martin Luthor King, Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

University of Texas historian H.W. Brands touched on the question in his latest Substack, “Does history have a direction?”, looking particularly at Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s view that it did. Hegel’s philosophical descendant, Karl Marx, manifestly believed that history progressed on a scientifically predictable arc. That Marx appears to have been wrong about the destination of that progression — the revolution of the proletariat — does not mean that he was wrong in believing that history has a direction.

I am not so learned that I will argue with such men as Hegel and Marx, but I wonder whether history has any independent “arc of justice” or cognizable moral direction. The Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide were all very recent by the clock of history. All resulted in body counts that would have astonished, say, medieval kings. They certainly weren’t “progress,” or at least I hope they weren’t.

My suspicion — and I am very open to argument — is that we believe there is a moral arc of justice in our history for at least two reasons, both of which warp our perception.

The first is that we conflate the effects of technological and material progress with moral progress, when it may simply be the case that technological and material progress enables and even dictates changes that seem like moral improvements. The printing press enabled widespread literacy by driving down the cost of books by more than 99%. Widespread literacy massively improved the level of knowledge in the general population, and that meant that many more people were publishing their deep thoughts. That unleashed a flood of new ideas, some of which, like representative government, the rule of law, and opposition to slavery, were palpable moral improvements. In other words, if you pump out a lot of new ideas, some of them are bound to be good ones.

Technology made possible lots of other things that seem like moral improvements. Huge increases in the productivity of agriculture made calories inexpensive almost everywhere. That meant that billions of people around the world had time in their day to do things other than scratch up their next meal. Public health innovations created still more free time by extending lives, almost doubling the span of human life. The mechanization of production shortened work weeks, and liberated still more people to create. The mechanization of transportation made it possible for people to leave places they found oppressive or limiting in some way and go to other places they preferred. All of these developments and more tremendously expanded humanity’s aggregate life of the mind — whether scientific, philosophical, spiritual, or artistic — almost by default. It is certainly possible to conflate that expansion — at least the good parts — with moral progress. But were they in fact one and the same?

Greater literacy, wealth, and mobility, all borne of technological innovation, certainly led to new anxieties — xenophobia would now be on a global scale, for example — but in general exposing people to the wider world seemed to “improve” morality. As people learned about others they inevitably became more concerned with matters outside of their own families, neighborhoods, and cities. Often that concern was salutary – many people became more tolerant of other cultures, started to care about the environment and the fate of the planet, and broadly became less violent – but not always. Sometimes new ideas led to national delusion, war, and murder on a scale never before seen. The horrors of the 20th century — the generation of our grandparents and great-grandparents — were so unspeakable that they seem to impeach the idea that the arc of humanity’s history bends in a particular moral direction.

Second, we assess moral (as opposed to material) “progress” against our own morality, which runs the great risk of confirmation bias. Some matters would seem to be clear. The huge reduction in involuntary servitude around the world (another gain for which technological progress should get a good bit of credit) is unassailable moral progress. But not everything is so obvious. Is the decline of interest in religion a measure of progress, or of civilizational decay? Is the right to abortion moral progress because it gives women control over their reproduction, or moral reversion because it cheapens human life? Are no-fault divorce and the widespread acceptance of out-of-wedlock births “progress” because they are liberating, or markers of social decline because of their adverse impact on the next generation? History is yet to render its judgment. In a future generation some or all of these might be viewed as big mistakes. However, if today you believe these are all improvements, at least on a net basis, you might perceive that history “progresses” simply because you like where it has landed, at least for the time being, on a few random questions. But maybe you are just confirming your own bias.

Release the hounds!