Stages of culture and choosing battles

In social activism, it's important to be aware of the concept of stages of cultural progress.  Culture evolves in a step-by-step way, and in many cases each successive step lays the foundation for the next one.  At any given point in history, you need to understand what stage your culture is at, and to know which changes are realistically achievable and which are not yet possible.  The former are worth fighting for, the latter are not -- not because they are any less morally imperative, but because energy wasted on an unattainable goal is energy not available to use where it could actually do some good.

For example, during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, it would have served no purpose to fight for the right of gay people to get married.  Western culture at that time was simply not ready for such an innovation.  Homosexuality itself was still illegal in most countries, and attitudes toward it were largely shaped by the Bible.  Gay people had just as much right, in an abstract sense, to marry as they do now, and denying them that right was just as much an injustice as it is now.  But it would have made no sense, at that time, to fight on that issue, when there would have been no chance of winning.

What did make sense at the time was fighting for the right of women to vote.  The culture had reached the point where this was an imaginable reform, and was being seriously debated within Western society. It was achievable, and it was in fact achieved (in 1920 in the US).

I have read that many of the founding fathers of the US, at the time of the country's independence, were morally troubled by slavery, but never seriously considered trying to abolish it because, as a practical matter, doing so was impossible, even unimaginable.  Any such effort would have failed to attract the kind of public support it would need to succeed.  Over time, of course, this changed, and as the 19th century progressed, slavery became more and more controversial until the argument about it came to consume society and politics, with the abolitionist movement becoming a powerful force whose eventual success became so plausible that the slave-owners finally tried to divide the country in order to escape it.  It's not that the objective moral status of slavery, or the horrors it was inflicting on the enslaved, were any different in 1860 than in 1780.  But the attitudes prevalent within mass culture changed.  What had once been unthinkable -- full abolition -- became thinkable and doable decades later.

Even the most profound changes follow the same pattern.  Religion was no less false and absurd in 1500 than it is now, but the kind of anti-religion arguments that bloggers today routinely make would have been met, back then, with shock and horror and incomprehension (and would have made you the victim of some very nasty form of public execution).  The culture had to pass through several successive stages of development for religion to be challenged, debated, put on the defensive, and eventually driven into unmistakable retreat.

(Note too that it is possible for societies to regress.  In the ancient Greco-Roman world, an almost modern disdain for religion was fairly common in the writings of intellectuals.  But later, the destruction of that civilization due to the rise of Christianity led to the dogmatic repression of the Dark Ages.  During the Middle Eastern golden age of roughly 800-1100 CE, again, many of the educated questioned and even mocked the dominant Islamic religion and its taboos, but the hard-line theocratic resurgence of the 12th century destroyed this freedom, an intolerance which has only recently begun to be challenged again in the region.  But I don't think we'll see any more such reversals.  Occasional temporary revivals of repression, such as the 1950s, barely constitute speed bumps by long-term historical standards.  The Trump regime doesn't even qualify as a speed bump.  It was a brief, freakish political event which had no impact on culture at all.)

So it is in our own time too.  The choices of what causes to fight for must be made largely on the basis of what changes the culture is ready to accept, or is becoming ready to accept.  This is why, for example, I pay a lot of attention to issues like drug legalization and meat-eating.  Mass public attitudes about drug laws in the US are clearly at a tipping point -- the madness and injustice of incarceration for private behavior which harms no one but the user is becoming widely recognized.  As for meat-eating, I believe it's at a similar stage as slavery was around, say, 1800.  Most people still unthinkingly accept it as a normal part of life, but a growing number are beginning to realize what a profound moral evil it encompasses.  American culture is not yet at a stage where the total abandonment of meat-eating is possible.  But I believe it's moving in that direction.

It's even possible to speed up the underlying cultural changes that make behavioral and political change attainable.  The most remarkable thing about the success of the gay acceptance movement is the speed with which it happened.  A core religious taboo -- one of the toughest nuts to crack -- was driven from almost universal prevalence to the fringes of society in just a few decades.  There are a number of reasons for this, but as I've written before, I think that a sustained yet subtle campaign within mass entertainment (movies and TV, mostly) to normalize homosexuality played a major role.  This is a tool which was not available until the rise of visual mass media a century or so ago, but it is with us for good now, and the internet has increased its power.

If popular film and TV were to become pervaded with the same kind of subtle but consistent messaging about the cruelty, health effects, and ecological damage caused by meat consumption, it is possible that the necessary cultural shift on that issue could be greatly speeded up, as happened with the issue of homosexual acceptance.  This doesn't seem to be a priority for those who shape such works, however.

What I say here may repel or anger some readers, because it seems to require acceptance of some forms of cruelty and evil which should be fought against.  I deeply understand this reaction.  It is horrifying and maddening to watch, say, people being sent to prison for things that should not be crimes, as (for example) harmless drug users have been for decades.  But I'm a pragmatist -- I believe what's important is to actually get things done, not just strike the right pose.  Each generation faces a range of evils, and must choose which battles to fight -- which battles can be won.  Pressing a cause which the culture is not yet ready to accept may even get you damned as a monster or a lunatic (think of someone actually taking up advocacy of gay marriage in 1900) and destroy your effectiveness in fighting for things where you could have made a real difference.  The battles which one generation cannot fight, the next may fight and win.  But the goal must always be to achieve real change and real improvement.  To do that, we must understand the stage of cultural development in which we find ourselves, and direct our efforts accordingly.