In our current situation, I can't help focusing on your answers around polarization and multiculturalism. Mistrust of those who we believe have different moral cultures may be the defining issue of our time, especially because it is so often now a domestic as well as an international phenomenon, and political-tribal in origin rather than ethnic- or religious-tribal.
Introspectively, for example, I observe that it is hard to understand how anyone who shares my moral culture could possibly support Trump in 2024. And the more I hypothesize that Trump supporters must have a very different moral culture from mine, the worse I feel about sharing a polity with them. On the other hand, it seems to me that much of where the social justice left has gone wrong is in trying to dictate that all decent people must affirm fealty to moral culture norms that (a) most people still don't in fact believe in, and (b) almost nobody believed in ten or twenty years ago. Resentment of this sudden high-handedness is probably one of the significant contributors to Trump's support.
Devolution, as you suggest in your polarization answer, is a promising path in part because it helps populations with different moral cultures coexist. But there are always limits to how far our contending moral cultures will allow us to let that devolution happen. Abortion is the classic present-day example, slavery the classic past one.
One of the reasons I love Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is that she grapples very deeply with these limits. In her future world there are Hives that have *almost* complete autonomy to set their own rules-- except that there is a short list of globally-binding Black Laws that all Hives must agree on to be regarded as legitimate. The contents and history of those Black Laws, and the difficulty of interpreting edge cases and agreeing on what does or does not break them, drive much of the conflict in the books, as well they should.
The most optimistic spin I can put on the present situation is that perhaps it will spur us to be more explicit, and more deliberative, about exactly what our moral culture norms are and why, and what it means in practice to support them. That could make it easier both to integrate people into plausible consensus moral cultures, and easier to "agree to disagree" as much as possible in order to drive polarization-reducing devolution. But there'll be a lot of very dangerous conflict before we get there. I am reminded of Jacques Barzun's emphasis, in his history _From Dawn to Decadence_, on how religious toleration arose less from deliberate moral progress and more from the exhausted stalemate of the Thirty Years' War.
In our current situation, I can't help focusing on your answers around polarization and multiculturalism. Mistrust of those who we believe have different moral cultures may be the defining issue of our time, especially because it is so often now a domestic as well as an international phenomenon, and political-tribal in origin rather than ethnic- or religious-tribal.
Introspectively, for example, I observe that it is hard to understand how anyone who shares my moral culture could possibly support Trump in 2024. And the more I hypothesize that Trump supporters must have a very different moral culture from mine, the worse I feel about sharing a polity with them. On the other hand, it seems to me that much of where the social justice left has gone wrong is in trying to dictate that all decent people must affirm fealty to moral culture norms that (a) most people still don't in fact believe in, and (b) almost nobody believed in ten or twenty years ago. Resentment of this sudden high-handedness is probably one of the significant contributors to Trump's support.
Devolution, as you suggest in your polarization answer, is a promising path in part because it helps populations with different moral cultures coexist. But there are always limits to how far our contending moral cultures will allow us to let that devolution happen. Abortion is the classic present-day example, slavery the classic past one.
One of the reasons I love Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is that she grapples very deeply with these limits. In her future world there are Hives that have *almost* complete autonomy to set their own rules-- except that there is a short list of globally-binding Black Laws that all Hives must agree on to be regarded as legitimate. The contents and history of those Black Laws, and the difficulty of interpreting edge cases and agreeing on what does or does not break them, drive much of the conflict in the books, as well they should.
The most optimistic spin I can put on the present situation is that perhaps it will spur us to be more explicit, and more deliberative, about exactly what our moral culture norms are and why, and what it means in practice to support them. That could make it easier both to integrate people into plausible consensus moral cultures, and easier to "agree to disagree" as much as possible in order to drive polarization-reducing devolution. But there'll be a lot of very dangerous conflict before we get there. I am reminded of Jacques Barzun's emphasis, in his history _From Dawn to Decadence_, on how religious toleration arose less from deliberate moral progress and more from the exhausted stalemate of the Thirty Years' War.