The Arc of the Moral Universe

Hi everyone,

I've found myself so much more irritable, emotional, and ill-at-ease as the election draws forebodingly nearer.  Despite dramatically reducing my consumption of the news and how much I'm even talking about it in recent months, even when it isn't in my conscious awareness it is a hulking omnipresence.

Honestly, we've lived through too much in the past decade or so.  From the nauseating and terrifying results of the 2016 election, to the endless indignities, abuses, and outrages of the years of Trump's presidency, to the unimaginable surreality, fear, and isolation of a years-long pandemic, to a now year-old US-funded social media-streamed genocide, all mercilessly back to back to back, it's too much.  It feels like we're all entitled to a bloodcurdling, lung-emptying existential scream no one has made space for.  It feels like that scream would never end if it ever started.

I used to be so comforted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement about the arc of the moral universe.  It articulated my worldview for years, encapsulating my optimism and willingness to engage in ongoing, persistent struggle.

The trouble is, I was so naive about how long that struggle would take.  I thought Obama's election in 2008 and 2012 would naturally lead to the immediate election of our first woman President, that liberal political leadership would become more or less the norm in this country, and that steady progress would continue for the rest of my lifetime and beyond--with considerable labor, but also with heartening consistency.  It was so encouraging, so inspiring to imagine I would get to see the elegant unspooling of the moral universe toward a justice that would shine its light on everyone.  It seemed like such an easy roadmap to follow, just a gentle slope climbing ever upward.

In retrospect, I realize I almost felt a sense of unwitting entitlement to things just continuing in what seemed like a logical, relatively orderly direction.

At first, I saw the outcome of the 2016 election as an albeit gigantic bump in the road, or perhaps like the messiness and agony of childbirth; something beautiful and new coming into the world often necessitates pain, effort, strength, and a period of recovery.  I thought a bunch of dinosaurs were throwing one last racist, sexist, ableist, xenophobic temper tantrum before finally succumbing to their powerless irrelevancy, after which we could return to our steady progression toward a better world, perhaps further strengthened and emboldened because of what we'd just endured.

As time went on, however, it got harder and harder to hold onto my original assumptions about the world and the future.  The more horrific bullshit Trump did, and the more impunity with which he did that horrific bullshit--the more court cases and impeachments he evaded essentially scot-free, the more judges he appointed, the more people he got killed with his unconscionable anti-science nonsense, the more ugliness he said and did and thereby empowered his followers to say and do--the more my belief that the world was moving toward something better shriveled.  

By the time his followers faced hardly any commensurate consequences for launching an attempted coup and Trump himself fully evaded accountability for overtly attempting to upend American democracy, not to mention as people lost federal protection for abortion rights and the bloodthirsty war against trans people continued to escalate unabated despite having a Democrat for a President, I'd numbly accepted defeat.  Maybe pessimists are right: maybe history simply repeats itself, over and over, until the end of time.  Maybe what looks like "progress" is just a fleeting, ephemeral period of relief, an eye in the unending storm of inherently self-destructive human cruelty.  Maybe the moral universe isn't traveling on an arc at all, but instead it's simply stuck in place, spinning in a circle we're doomed to always be rotating around.

I don't want this to be the truth.  I don't really know how to make sense of living in a world in which that's the truth.  I certainly don't understand how to parent--like, big picture parent--in a world that's just going to get worse for my children and everyone around them.  I don't know how to square the deep joy I get from caring for my children and my home with the despair I feel for the world around us.  The dissonance feels impossible to resolve.  It's miserable.

In trying to work through all this, I've had conversations with people I trust, I've sought guidance through the words of thought leaders I respect, and I've done a lot of thinking.  I don't want to sacrifice my innate optimism for people and the world at large.  I don't want to give up on my belief in people's inherent goodness.  I also refuse to blind myself to the realities of what horrors people are capable of inflicting on others, and the evil that people perpetrate because they think no one will care or intervene.  I refuse to choose the narrow view of my little, happy life to the exclusion of the rest of the world, primarily because that is simply wrong and selfish, but also because one of the things I love most about humanity is our interdependence, and something that harms my neighbor will one day harm me, too.  There has to be a way to hold all these truths at once without becoming paralyzed by despair or denial.

Through all of this, I've come to the conclusion that neither of those two preceding worldviews are accurate, and neither of them are wrong.  Instead, I think we're on a circular path, but moving through space in a slow yet inexorable course toward justice.  There are still going to be periods where things get worse, but that doesn't determine our overall trajectory.  The journey is more circuitous than I wish it was, yet the destination remains the same.

Key in consolidating this view for me was a recent metaphor using the Shepard tone discussed in one of my favorite podcasts (around minute 6 of this episode, if you're curious to hear it for yourself).  The host used this tone to illustrate the reality that there are things that are getting better and worse all the time.  The getting-better and the getting-worse are always there, a part of the overall song of our world.  What comes through the loudest is what you focus on.

The message I hear in that metaphor is to recognize the combined realities of our world, and to choose your focus intentionally depending on what the moment requires.  If you find yourself lapsing into despair, as I very often have in the past few years, then focusing on the good in the world could bring you back from the brink.  If you instead lull yourself into an inaccurate sense of comfort and passivity, then focusing on where your energy and attention is still needed and taking action is necessary to avoid complicity in the cruelty and oppression that still exists in the world.

All that to say, I've found it's heartbreakingly easy to lose sight of the arc of the moral universe, because it's so very long.  Yet I believe Dr. King was, ultimately, right: it bends, ceaselessly, toward the light.  Because it has to.  Because we can make it so.

So that brings us to today, two days before the next election.  I don't pretend to be able to predict the outcome.  A lot of bad things may still happen.  But we've got each other and a future to fight for.  To reference another leader for justice, we must mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living.  At the end of the day, there's simply no other choice.

{Heart}