The Zeitgeist Has a Direction, and Communication Is What Drives It

Look at the moral assumptions of any society over a span of a few centuries and you see something that is hard to explain away: they move, and they move in one direction. Toward regarding strangers as people. Toward treating a life as valuable regardless of whose it is. Toward the idea that there are things you may not do to a person no matter who you are. We call this bundle human rights when we want to sound legal and decency when we do not, and it has been advancing for a long time.

I want to make a claim about why, and a prediction that follows from it.

The Pattern

The trend is not a matter of opinion. Slavery was universal and is now unthinkable. Torture was a normal instrument of justice and is now something states deny doing even while they do it. Public execution was entertainment. Women were property in most legal codes. Children were labour. The stranger, the foreigner, the member of the other tribe, had no standing at all.

None of these has been abolished everywhere. All of them have moved from the default to the exception, and the exceptions now have to justify themselves in a way the defaults never did. The burden of proof has shifted, and that shift is the zeitgeist moving.

The Cause

Explanations for this usually reach for ideas: the Enlightenment, a religion, a philosopher, a declaration. I think ideas are downstream. The upstream cause is communication.

Consider what it takes to treat a stranger as less than a person. You have to not know them. You have to be able to believe things about them that contact would disprove: that they do not feel as you do, that they are content with their condition, that their god has consigned them to it. Every one of these beliefs is stable in isolation and fragile on contact.

Now trace the history of contact. Trade routes, then printing, then the newspaper, then the telegraph, the railway, radio, television, and finally a network that puts a person in another country a message away. Each step made it harder to hold a false belief about people you had never met, because it made meeting them cheaper.

The zeitgeist moves toward respect because respect is what happens when you know someone, and communication is the technology of knowing someone. The philosophers who articulated the change were describing something contact had already made possible. Their books travelled on the same roads.

Why This Is Not Naive

I hold this view alongside a generally bleak opinion of human nature and of the systems we live under, and I do not think the two conflict.

The claim is not that people are getting kinder. It is that a specific class of cruelty, the cruelty that depends on not knowing its victim, is losing the ignorance it depends on. People remain as capable of cruelty as ever toward those they can still manage not to know, and the machinery of the modern state is very good at keeping victims out of sight. The trend operates where contact operates and nowhere else.

Nor is the claim that the movement is smooth. It is not. There are reversals, and some of them are long. A generation can be taught to unlearn its neighbours, and there are regimes whose entire method is to do exactly that. But every such regime has to fight the communication technology of its era to do it, and the technology keeps getting harder to fight. The reversals get more expensive each time.

The Prediction

If the cause is communication, and communication keeps increasing, then the movement will not stop. That is the prediction, and it is falsifiable: a sustained, global reversal in the standing of the stranger, coinciding with expanding contact, would refute it.

I would go further. The direction of the movement is toward exactly the political arrangement I keep returning to on this blog. A population that can see one another, argue with one another, and know what one another wants, is a population for whom being governed by a distant few makes steadily less sense. The same technology that made the stranger a person makes the ruler a stranger, in the specific sense that you can now see how little he resembles what he claims to be.

Political change is the last step of a process that starts with people finding out about each other. I have written that political change is a culmination rather than a starting point. This is the engine behind that culmination: the slow, uneven, unstoppable increase in how much we know about people who are not us.

What Follows for How to Act

If this is right, the most valuable thing anyone can do for the moral state of the world is not to preach. It is to connect. Open the channel, lower the cost of contact, make it harder to not know.

The preaching will follow. It always has.