Can we be certain of our moral superiority?
We all feel some sense of moral superiority. We all have looked back at the past and questioned how anybody could think in such bigoted ways about another group of people. It still angers many of us to this day. Yet, can we truly say that we have any right to judge those of the past for their bigotries? After all, like us, they too felt that they held a moral high-ground.
Just look at Rudyard Kipling's ode to United States colonization, "The White Man's Burden," in which he argues that it is the white man's sacred duty as the "best ye breed" to "take up the White Man's Burden" and civilize the "half devil and half child" natives of the Philippines. This was not a poem written by a man who believed that imperialism was an evil venture that should be taken up anyway. He, and many like him, viewed it as beneficial to all of the indigenous peoples of the world.
It was looking at this poem that caused me to realize something profound. How can we say that we truly have the moral high-ground, that we've somehow evolved beyond the bigotry of our forefathers, when they didn't even recognize their own bigotries? Perhaps we do not recognize our own. We may hold opinions that, 20 years from now, our children will be embarrassed that we express out loud.
Who knows? Perhaps otherkin will become accepted for who they are inside and our children will welcome them with open arms. Our children may acknowledge those who identify with other genders that not even the younger, more progressive generation accept.
Perhaps when we're old, "cishet" will be this generation's n-word, a word that makes our children humiliated to even be related to us. Our children may be genuinely baffled about how anybody could think "reverse racism" doesn't exist. Some of these are things that I believe are acceptable ideas, but I do not know how the next generation, or the next two generations, will view these ideas. Can we even know our own prejudices?
Yet, we all act as though we have reached a pinnacle of progression. People like Fox News' Eric Bolling say things like "Is there racism? I don't think there's racism." People use "cis scum" seriously and pejoratively. United States representative Louie Gohmert literally said that a woman's place is at home, not in a science lab. These people likely all see themselves as morally upstanding members of their community. They likely see their actions as morally justified and see their opinions as morally sound.
Yet, many of us would completely disagree with this notion. Why is that? It's because we happen to have a different set of values than them. Who's to say, however, that your progressive thoughts are the best progressive thoughts? Who's to say that we don't still have a long, long way to go?
