The Moral Arc of the Universe is Bullshit

It bends toward go fuck yourself

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This quote was popularized in a speech by civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was based on a sermon delivered by unitarian minister and slavery abolitionist Theodore Parker in the middle of the 19th century. The sermon was later published in 1853. The relevant part read:

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Except that’s bullshit. Anyone who hasn’t been asleep the last decade hasn’t seen any bending toward justice, but rather breaking down into tyranny and injustice. On November 5, 2024, we believed decency and democracy might prevail in America. Instead, we woke up the next day to a horrific what-the-fucking-fuck, with Republican fascism taking all three houses.

Just how long is this moral arc supposed to be? When is it going to bend toward justice? Fucking when?

I’m working on a new book titled Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots: A History of Humanity. If you’re wondering why I haven’t been posting many free stories of late, it’s not writer’s block. It’s because I’ve been up to my ass in alligators writing this new book after doing three years of research on it. On thing I’ve learned is that avarice, misogyny, zealotry, and hatred are all genetically encoded into our species. They persist because they were selected for, and they were selected for because they all provided a survival benefit.

“Nobody’s perfect” is both axiom and biological fact. Millions of years of evolution have produced you, a flawed mass of a hundred trillion cells that nonetheless works. Were we to anthropomorphize the evolutionary process as Mother Nature, we’d call her a cold-hearted bitch. Her primary concern is your ability to breed; quantity comes first, allowing her to select for “quality” via ruthless tests of survival. Evolution did not just create our modern meat sacks, but our psychology. Traits that offer a competitive advantage in our hostile environments tend to persist. The way we behave is also a product of evolution, and this includes a tendency toward acquisitiveness, patriarchy, mythologizing, and violence. Criticisms of “evolutionary psychology” are legion, much of it warranted. Modern women like shiny jewelry because their gathering ancestors sought colorful berries? Get the fuck out of here. And yet, the discipline is not completely full of shit.

Food insecurity plagued our species from its earliest days, encoding into our psychology a desire to horde and setting the stage for a society of the greedy. Once we settled into societies that could generate a surplus of food, avarice quickly ran rampant.

Although hunter-gatherer bands were more egalitarian compared to most of the human history that followed, true matriarchies never existed. Hunter-gatherers were still largely patrilineal. You know how sometimes you’ll see a Dodge Ram Planetkiller XL whip past on the highway, a Confederate flag whipping from the back, and the dude behind the wheel looks like he dropped out of middle school to pursue a career in competitive cousin fucking? Hunter-gatherers knew that inbreeding was bad, so they often negotiated marriages with other bands. Most of the time, it was the woman who left her family behind to go live with the man’s band. She would lose her connection to her people, her support structure, to enter the equivalent of a foreign land as a stranger. It was women who were exchanged like currency, not the men. The equality that existed was largely due to women having a critical role in feeding the band. Women were hunters too because if they didn’t, the band starved. Everyone did everything in order to survive. But still, hunter-gather bands sometimes went to war with each other over scarce resources. One of those resources was women. It was men who killed men in other bands to kidnap their women as sex slaves, not the other way around. Thomas Hobbes referred to such a state of nature as “Nasty, brutish, and short.” Conversely, Jean-Jacques Rousseau romanticized the hunter-gather lifestyle. They were both wrong. Reality was somewhere in the middle. Part of that reality was that over many thousands of years of human evolution, men held at least some sway over women. This became rapidly exacerbated with the switch to agriculture when women were allocated the role of brood mares because sedentism and the availability of porridge allowed for early weaning of children from breastfeeding.

There has never been a human society that lacked religion. We could not have grown beyond the band level without it, because it acted as a cohesive force for larger groups. Shared myths worked not just as unifiers, but to keep people in line. The invention of punitive gods was an important development in controlling the masses and forcing people to behave a certain way, to acquiesce, to accept their lot and do what their leaders told them to. Peoples unified with a singular purpose under a strong ruler were able to eliminate those who were not. Conservative thinking prevailed because for most of history we were on the edge of survival, with little wiggle room for adopting alternative methods of doing things. In this case, “We’ve always done it that way” was how a band survived. Natural selection had struck yet again.

What about bigotry? It began with favoring kin. If I can do something nice for you and the cost isn’t too high, and we’re biologically related, it makes evolutionary sense to be a total bro to my bro. When you help your relatives, you are helping your own genes survive. We evolved to be able to recognize, both biologically and socially, close blood relations to assist in this process. Herein lies the rub. At this point in their evolution, hunter-gatherers didn’t have a wide range, and it’s a certainty they never encountered people who they could think of as a different race, or even having markedly different skin colors. It is entirely possible that our ingrained penchant for distrust of those who look and behave differently evolved due to favoring those who we are related to as a strategy of genetic survival.

So, yeah. We kinda suck. It’s in our genes. But wait! Malevolent traits may be genetically encoded, but they do not represent the entirety of our DNA. Cooperation, compassion, and altruism have also been selected for. The eighteenth-century English historian and politician Edward Gibbon referred to history as “little more than a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” But we are more than that. Our history is also a chronicle of courage and kindness, love and acceptance, determination and triumph. Perhaps we are not irrevocably and irredeemably fucked as a species.

Increased intelligence has proven an adaptive trait for our species. Equally important is that the ability to learn has improved from one generation to the next. Will we sail the stars toward a utopian Star Trek future, or struggle to eke out our final days on an impoverished Road Warrior expressway to oblivion? It depends on how well we learn from recent mistakes.

Right now, it seems like the arc of the moral universe bends toward “go fuck yourself.” While it’s true that greed, sexism, religious zealotry, and bigotry are all genetically encoded, the most recent U.S. election wasn’t a spontaneous turn toward these baser instincts. It was manufactured. The tremendous growth of right-wing media is largely to blame. Most of the nation now ignores legacy media, which has at least a semblance of factuality, and instead feeds off a steady diet of fascist messaging from Fox News, Newsmax, Christian radio, Twitter, and Joe Rogan.

In 1973, only 45 of the world’s countries qualified as “free.” By the end of the millennium, however, that number had grown to about 120. Liberal democracy had become the default, with more than 60% of states following such a form of government. It wasn’t just political change, but social, with greater access to education and reductions in inequality. Alas, late in the 90s there began a democratic reversal. Gains made in reducing authoritarian rule were pushed back against, and around the world freedom has declined markedly.

So, that sucked.

Fox News and its ilk is, in significant part, are to blame. It began broadcasting in 1996, and the internet followed with an explosion of factually challenged fascist ideology presenting liberals as baby-eating elitist pedophiles, and conservatives as pure, good, and honest folk who love God and country and represent the only hope for humanity.

Right-wing media is a product that sells like no other. They did it for the money, and they fucked over much of humanity in the process.

What’s about to happen in the United States is something that most people don’t want, including those who voted for it. They are in for a brutal reality check. Will it make a difference? Who knows? People do NOT like to discover they’ve been duped, and will often double down on their dumbfuckery rather than own up to their sunk costs.

What can liberals do? Right-wing media has a stranglehold, and those who vote liberal generally don’t fall so easily for propaganda and bullshit. Those who vote conservative are far less informed on the facts. Except a lot of liberals believed Harris was going to win right up until she didn’t. That’s because we didn’t understand the sway that right-wing media has in tapping into those four genetically programmed traits that comprise the title of my next book, Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots.

How do we convince such people that their interests instead lie in compassion, cooperation, tolerance, and altruism? I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know.

But, as previously mentioned, I do know that intelligence and an ability to learn have been selected for in our species. And so, I have hope that people smarter than I will learn how to combat the forces of evil that continue to gain strength, to corrupt those who might otherwise be decent humans. For the rest of us, all we can do is resist. Endeavoring to appeal to the better nature of those who oppress is futile. Those with power are loath to relinquish it. Throughout history, rights and freedoms have not been granted by benevolent leaders wishing to “do the right thing.” They have been seized by those willing to fight for them, unwilling to be cowed into subservience. Will justice, freedom, and equality eventually prevail? The universe is not sentient, and therefore lacks any ability to give a shit. A better future only happens when people like you fight for it.

Unlike the quote I opened with, I will close with a quote I do believe is true. It was written by Dr. Suess, from The Lorax: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Another thing I know is that my sweary history books make great gifts. So, endeavor to educate those you care about by getting them both copies of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN. And don’t forget to: