Are you on the right side of history?

On staying humble in our moral conviction, given what historical assholes we probably all are.

I spent last week on holiday in beautiful Rarotonga, with one of my closest friends. We had one of those luscious weeks that you usually dream of with a beach holiday, but then ruin by doing lots of activities or trying to be productive. No productive activities for us! We leaned all the way in to self indulgence, spending the vast majority of our time napping, reading, swimming, or drinking cocktails by the pool. Glorious.

I also managed to churn through 6 books (!!), which you’ll hear all about in this week’s Friday Flurry.

The night we got there, though, I hadn’t quite turned off the existential dread and, on surveying the idyllic scene before me, I started thinking about the absurdity and moral repugnance of taking tropical holidays as we stare down the threat of climate extinction.

I imagined having a conversation with my great grandchildren, 50 years from now, where I had to explain this behaviour.

“Yes, we knew what was coming. Yes, we flew there on holiday. Yes, on a plane. Yes, the spoons were made of plastic. Look, it was a different time, OK?”

I imagined their faces, the expressions of abject horror, as I explained our theoretical awareness of rising sea levels, extreme rainfall and increasingly frequent tropical cyclones. Their disbelief, as I described the funny coincidence that New Zealand experienced a tsunami warning while I was there. I imagined how guilty I would feel, trying to explain to this ambivalence and inaction to future generations.

I suppose every generation has their own version of this - whether it’s environmental degradation, beating kids, gender discrimination, or slavery - and it’s a interesting exercise to ponder what we accept now, that will go down in history as morally bankrupt (my prediction: eating animals isn’t going to age well.)

I’m a woman that spends more time than I’d care to admit on a bit of a high horse. I’m on the socially progressive end of the spectrum, railing against class privilege, racism and transphobia - but in my own household, with a band of socially aware teenagers around, I feel like a Boomer at times. My moral indignance, which seems radical in the workplace, is already dating poorly.

In What We Owe The Future, Will MacAskill makes a compelling case for AI wariness, on the grounds of ‘values lock-in’. He argues that we’re at a tipping point, where we might unwittingly lock in our current values for a long time into machine learning algorithms, and that we should be very careful about doing that unless we’re confident that today’s ideas will age well. Which of course, they won’t, will they?

Our values and moral codes are so malleable, contingent, and contextual, that we should assume we still have a lot of things wrong. We’re astonishingly myopic when it comes to the future, and our inability to take action on things like fossil fuel depletion and pandemic preparedness (despite just having one) continues to show how short-sighted we are. Even when we know, we suck at taking action.

These kinds of realisations are useful for a sanctimonious human like me, serving as a bit of a perspective adjustment. We’re all wrong, we’re all on the wrong side of history for something, and yet, we’re all doing our best. We might as well try and be nice to each other in the interim I suppose.

Til next week,

A

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