Society Never Advances

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration [improvement]."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance"

It has taken me nearly two decades, (and passing the 50-year mark, I suspect) to digest this passage. But now it is suddenly very clear to me.

I often write or read others' writings about why certain defects still remain in society. An obvious example is the family of topics related to social justice. Other examples include the contrasting state of health care among civilized countries or how animals are treated. Among other camps, some wish we could still raise free-range children or stop regulating ourselves to death until it is nearly impossible to start and run a small business or make s simple home improvement without paying an army of accountants and lawyert to navigate the process. I sincerely doubt there is anyone left in America who doesn't wonder, "Why does our political process seem so polarized and broken?"

Emerson had the answer. Society, as a whole, does not improve. Some of us can march and suffer until the Civil Rights Act gets signed into law, but doing so does not transform society. It shifts the power of the force of law from favoring one element of society to favoring another, but it has no power to change hearts or minds. We should act a little less surprised when, decades later, elements of society who have hated and resented the legislation begin to find ways to undermine it (such as the relaxing of federal oversight on elections in the South and the weakening of Title IX protections for LGBT students at universities).
When our country has a serious economic downturn, the kind that ends careers and breaks up families, such as the one we experienced in 2008, it turns out that many of our citizens look for a scapegoat. This is an old story that has repeated itself throughout history and even now repeats itself in Britain, Poland, Brazil, and the Philippines. A strong leader comes forward, promising a return to the glory days by getting rid of the undesirable elements of society that were allowed to exists and flourish under prior "weak" regimes. No country (as we have come to discover) is immune to this siren call. But how can such a thing happen "in 2016" or "in 2018" or "in 2019"? [as if the magic of a calandar year can SHAZAM! cure all ills!]

The answer lies in the words Emerson wrote. You know those greedy Baby Boomer bastards who run the Fortune 500, Washington DC, college admission boards, and everything else we are supposted to imagine are corrupt institutions? They were the ones listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. They were the ones protesting the immoral Vietnam conflict. They were the ones who held Woodstock, who started Earth Day, and who started the mass recycling efforts. How could a single generation go from all of that to what we all complain about today?

"Society never advances." It turns out you come to care for different things once you have babies to feed and a roof to pay for. It turns out you care a little less about other things as well. We'd like to imagine (wouldn't we?) that this all comes down to good and evil. But these tropes do not exist and never have. Good people, doing the best they can, simply lose the capacity to raise or maintain high ideals as time goes by and they find themselves the surprise caretakers of the functions and institutions they claimed to hate, but for which no workable, sustainable alternatives have yet  been presented. So, they roll up their sleeves and keep them going. The alternative would be to try to dismantle and re-assemble the jumbo-jet while it is still flying at 35,000 feet over the ocean.
Every few centuries somebody does do such a thing, but it is never pretty. Did you ever stop to ask yourself what became of the friends and neighbors of Colonial Americans, who supported the King's army, after the end of the Revolutionary War?