There Is No Moral Arc to the Universe

God is not on anyone's side

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:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. 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 half dozen years hasn’t seen any bending toward justice, but rather breaking down into tyranny and injustice. June 24th, 2022, was a victory for the forces of evil.

And the fuckers aren’t done.

Justice is uneven. It is uneven because it’s not the universe doing the work; the universe doesn’t give a shit about us. The moral arc is solely under human control, which makes improvements in our collective well-being far from inevitable.

Content warning for this next paragraph. I’m about to repeat some hateful shit I witnessed in my teens.

In the 1980s, plenty of people saw AIDS as punishment for being gay. There were “jokes” that the acronym stood for “Anally Injected Death Sentence” and “Adios, Ignorant Dick Sucker.” I remember a guy with a hat that was a play on the old insecticide ad campaign of “Raid: Kills Bugs Dead.” But this hat said, “AIDS: Kills F*gs Dead.” He wore it around my high school, and many people laughed, and he wasn’t told to remove it by either students or the administration. People who stood up to such bigotry often became targets themselves.          

During this era, governmental policies toward the AIDS epidemic could be summed up as “Let them die.”

But things changed. Hell, they had already changed. Twenty years before AIDS the situation was even worse. The hostility was such that gay people had to keep their love secret or be fired from their jobs, arrested by police, beaten, or killed. It still sucked a lot in the ‘80s, but it was a reduced level of sucking. Attitudes changed because people made us see a different version of right vs. wrong. Then in 2005, gay marriage was legalized in Canada, and the U.S. followed suit a decade later. And yet transgender people, of which there are approximately 80 million in the world, continue to be marginalized, referred to as mentally ill, told they don’t exist, and are heavily discriminated against both socially and legally.

And while the work of Dr. King did much to advance civil rights for Black people in the United States, forcing the government to do their jobs by actually upholding the laws of the land, in more recent decades there have been significant steps backward in a country built on the myth of white supremacy. Schools are more segregated now than they were 40 years ago, the gap in wealth between Black and white has risen dramatically, and infant mortality remains much higher for Black people. Add to this a woman’s right to bodily autonomy being systematically eliminated, and a startling rise in antisemitism across the political spectrum, and it paints a worrisome picture for where society is headed.

The loss of Roe is painful, and it’s getting a lot of attention because it affects white people. It pales in comparison to the history of bodily violation of the BIPOC community in the U.S. But now that it’s white folks having their rights trampled, suddenly it matters a lot more. If I’m not being clear, this paragraph is intended to be a shameful analysis of American society.

The needle can move either way, forward or back. The moral arc bends toward justice only if we are committed to bending it. As someone whose profession is the study of history, I can say that there is no evidence of God or the universe doing the square root of fuck all to improve our lot. It only happens when enough of us fight to make it so.

Alas, Earth is infected with a virulent strain of fact-resistant humans.

I believe in the possibility of a Star Trek future, but if we’re not careful, we might end up with Mad Max. The world is not fair, and it’s often not fair for colossally stupid reasons. The various hierarchies in society that place certain groups above others have no logical or biological basis. Rather, they are a perpetuation of random chance events supported by myth creation. An example is the vicious circle of how racial hierarchies persist in modern America. The random events that led to this were threefold: European conquerors of the western hemisphere wanted to enslave people to work their plantations, and Africa was closest, so it was the least expensive option for their human trafficking. Second, Africa already had a slavery-trade for exporting to the east, so it was easier for them to buy enslaved people from an existing market. Finally, American plantations were plagued with malaria and yellow fever, and enslaved African had some immunity, so it was a fiscally responsible choice for protecting the slavers’ “assets.”

There is more. People didn’t want to enslave others simply for economic reasons of cheap labor. The slavers needed to believe in their own piety, and therefore created both religious and scientific myths to justify their atrocities. These myths persisted long after the abolition of slavery, resulting in discriminatory laws, poverty, lack of access to education, and cultural prejudices. If allowed to, discrimination gets worse over time, not better. Money goes to those who already have it, and poverty begets poverty. The victims of history stay victims, and the privileged continue to reap privilege.

Doesn’t that just piss you off? Speaking of shit that should make you angry, check out what this fundamentalist fucknut wrote on Twitter to his almost one million followers:

That should really piss you off. It should make you want to take action. God isn’t on our side. God and the universe and the motherfucking Easter Bunny aren’t on anyone’s side. You can’t sit back and hope for shit to improve. The gloves have to come off. We gotta fight.

How? Well, there are numerous ways. Voting is always an important one. And yes, sometimes you must hold your nose and vote for mediocre instead of good or great because mediocre is the only one that can win against someone like that dayglo taint stain former guy. There was one thing about the moral arc quote that was accurate, and that is that the fucker is long.

My master’s thesis was on rebellion and the quest for social revolution. I learned that revolution—any revolution—rarely ends well. Throughout history, when a rebellion is successful in seizing power, they inevitably become just as bad as their former oppressors. That’s why people flee from Cuba rather than toward it. Hitting an all-inclusive for a week of mojitos and melanoma doesn’t count.

It’s going to take a long time to undo the damage the far-right fucknuts have done. It will take a lifetime of effort to make the world better. That effort can take myriad forms. Protests can be done in person and online. Voting, including strategically, is critical, but so is helping spread the word of what is right to get others on board in the fight.

If you have a voice, you can make a difference. You can share your own thoughts, but also be certain to listen to others most affected, and endeavor to amplify them.

I’m going to conclude with the June 5 entry of my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down to give you an idea of how powerful just one voice can be, and how it can help change the world for the better.

June 5, 1851
Social media rants about injustice toward Black people is accomplishing the square root of fuck all. I should have put that in quotes because that is not my opinion. Alas, it is held by many a brainless fuckpuddle who would seek to silence you. Yet there is ample evidence the fuckpuddles are wrong, including the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a 40-week serial in the abolitionist publication The National Era beginning June 5, 1851.

It’s a story of a white farmer’s decision to sell two of those he enslaved to pay his debts. One enslaved is a middle-aged man named Uncle Tom, who has a wife and children. The other is Harry, the only surviving child of the farmer’s maid, Eliza. It was about families being ripped apart, humans sold like consumer goods because a farmer needed the money, and the heartache that ensued. Telling that story changed history.

Considering the glacial pace of evolution via natural selection, we homo sapiens plowed our way to top of the food chain with lightning speed, and we were able to do that because we’re fucking smart. We rule the planet. I mean, we’ve been total dicks about it and I’m not saying humanity is awesome, but there is no question our massive brainpower is what made us dominant. We used that brainpower to communicate and to organize, to share common beliefs and values and goals. Might often makes “right,” and ideas can generate a mighty following. Such was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writings.

The series was so popular the Era got complaints if the next installment hadn’t appeared in the latest issue. It was published as a novel in 1852 and sold 300,000 copies its first year in the U.S., and 200,000 in the UK. Selling that many copies of a book in 1852 qualifies as “a metric shit-ton.”

Stowe, a white woman, had a Christian savior complex and failed to present Black people as humans worthy of the same rights as their white counterparts, but she did get an important message across: Chattel slavery is wrong. Of course the pro-slavery shitnuggets blew their poop so hard their outhouses overflowed. They called the book fake news. The next year Stowe was all, “References, motherfuckers!” with the publication of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a nonfiction book citing numerous real-life equivalents to people in the novel. It too became a bestseller.

The stories reached people. It made them rethink the plots of their own lives and the society they were a part of, supplying rocket fuel to the abolitionist movement. The readings were so influential that in 1862, a year into the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln met with Stowe and is believed to have said, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

Keep ranting. And be ready to reference a motherfucker.

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