Radically Moderate Thoughts on the 4th Dimension

It's the best time to be alive and there's still work to do...

I had a weird interaction with a student last week. Its weirdness was compounded by the regularity with which it seems to happen these days. The small group I was working with was discussing political/social cycles and one female student bemoaned the loss of progress on gender equity, saying “but now we’re back to where we started! We’ve lost everything we’ve fought for.” The comment was so odd that I had to take a step back and force myself to take this student seriously. Because she is, in fact, a thoughtful student and was, in fact, quite serious.

I assume she was talking about the recent decision on Roe, but because I was so caught off guard I just asked her “do you really think we’re back to 1900? Or 1000?” A female college student arguing to a female full professor - both standing in front of a class of mixed gender students, including quite a few gender diverse folks - that all progress on gender equity has been lost seems absolutely bonkers.

What struck me most though was not that this was a weird argument, but that I’m hearing it more and more. My students seem to think that in terms of race relations, gender equity, economic wellbeing, and a whole host of other targets that we might as well be back in the 1950’s or 1850s. My more progressive students seem to think we’re living in some mashup of the Handmaid’s Tale and a corporate dictatorship. My more conservative students seem to think we’re living in a modern Sodom and Gomorrah, but they aren’t as vocal about it (most of the time). Both sets think that living in 2023 is a pretty bad thing, all things considered.

It’s not hard to see how they got here. Some of it is a lack of historical awareness; Without knowing much about the past, they don’t have a yardstick to judge current progress. Meanwhile, the 24/7 news cycle fuels their negativity bias, as does much of the political landscape. My liberal colleagues hype the dangers of the patriarchy, capitalism, and neoliberalism, while my few conservative colleagues emphasize the downfall of Western civilization. There are very few voices in my students’ lives - if any - who try to place our current and complicated world into a broader context. We need to re-locate ourselves on our 4D moral landscape before we can even start to assess how we’re doing and where we need to go from here.

Relative Injustice

But it’s precisely this context that students are missing. They understand the concept of injustice and can recognize it when they see it, but they can’t assess magnitude or impact or make comparisons between how the scope of injustice has changed over time or what that might mean for their own moral, social, and political landscape. They have no frame of reference for justice or injustice, for progress or regression, because they spend most of their time looking up - at some ideologically pegged ideal that cannot and has never existed - and spend very little time looking around them.

The problem my students seem to have is that they don’t really see justice as a complex landscape with a past, present, and future, but instead as some kind of Platonic form. They’re thinking about justice ideologically, not relative to the real world in which we all actually live. This means that anything that falls short of their vision of justice is injustice, even if what we have now is eons better than anything that came before and is, in fact, pretty damn good in the grand scheme of things.

I like the work of the political philosopher David Schmidtz in this context. He argues that justice is very much like a map and different people will draw that map differently, based on their own preferences and goals. But this doesn’t mean the map is purely subjective. A map is judged by its usefulness in allowing people to navigate the world. If my map departs too significantly from reality, I won’t be able to use it as a tool to help me (or anyone else) navigate. But the major part of Schmidtz’s argument that’s relevant for our purposes is that while my students look upward to the peaks of human experience as justice, the justice that really matters for most of us is the pits: the holes that people fall into or are born into that prevent them from doing the most basic kinds of things that humans want to do. And it’s these pits that we’ve slowly worked to eradicate over time. They still exist, of course. And their existence should be a call to action.

But surely we can do some basic surveying of our moral and political landscape and recognize that some holes are deeper than - and therefore worse - than others. And surely we can recognize that simply because one source of injustice exists, we can still be grateful that others have been done away with.

Cautious Optimism and Deep Gratitude

This process is part of a balance between toxic gratitude and exhausting cynicism. The radical moderate will navigate his or her own moral and political landscape as a cheerful but critical optimist - alert to ways to make the world better, but not swallowed up by injustice.

As a human living in 2023, we can be grateful for what we have without falling into any kind of toxicity. We’re living in one of the best times to be alive that has ever existed. As a woman, a professor, a mother, an author, a world traveler, I look back with gratitude at my own life and think with real reverence of the sacrifices of the many women who came before me. Many women of the past 10,000 years lived achingly tragic lives, but their suffering built - however a tiny part - a piece of the ladder that helped all of us out of the hole we might have otherwise been born into. And I am deeply grateful that many of the sacrifices those women were called on to make - including all the mothers who lost their lives bringing children into the world or who watched their own children suffer and die - are not sacrifices we are often called on to make today.

With that gratitude, of course, should come the recognition that there’s still much work to do. As my students recognize, some people have much much much greater challenges than they do. Some people really are living in metaphorical pits and one of our jobs is to do what we can to help those people out. When we do backslide - when sinkholes open in our moral and political landscape - as is in Red states whose draconian abortion bans have placed women’s lives back in jeopardy in completely avoidable ways - we can assess that backsliding from a better place than we could have in 1950 or 1850 or 1050.

But if we look at the world and don’t recognize that most people face significantly fewer structural barriers to flourishing in 2023 than they ever have before - that, by and large, the most vulnerable among us are better off now than they would have been in 1950 or 1850 or 1000BC - we lose the ability to assess, honestly and seriously, what works and what doesn’t for human flourishing. And not knowing what works is a dangerous thing. As political philosophers have pointed out, not knowing what works causes famine and suffering. It’s more important now than ever before not to let our ideological commitments get in the way of actually helping people live better lives. And that starts with a much better map of our moral and political landscape than my students are working with.

As always, let me know what you think! Leave me a comment, share, and subscribe!