Progress
For all of our pretensions to dispassionate intellect, when all is said and done, it is all emotion.
Feeling without understanding is humanity at its most destructive.
Feeling with understanding is always what has saved and improved us.
Hearts and minds are forever fallible, complicated things.
But they are all we got.
At least until we have screwed things up, enough, that we turn back to them to find better answers.
In the end, that is what has always moved us forward. It is not power or religion or ideology or any other narrower view of humanity.
It is love and understanding.
Power, religion, ideology, and all the rest can be exercised with love and understanding. Or they can be exercised on behalf of hate, vengeance, greed, envy, wrath, ignorance, and every other ugly impulse that has ever inhabited the human soul. Power, rules, law. None of these have ever been exercised for good or decency or understanding or progress alone. They have always been neutral weapons used for our basest impulses as much as our finest. Law institutionalized slavery, as much as it liberated slaves. Law murdered six million Jews, as much as it convicted their killers. Law crucified great men like Jesus of Nazareth, as much it convicted murderers like Barabus. Law, like money, like intelligence, like morality, like all the rest is and will always be used to advance inhumanity as much as humanity. All of these and every other human creation are subject to our abuse and manipulation as much as to our better angels.
And always will be. Until we commit ourselves, each of us, genuinely, to a better path.
That is why liberal values make for stronger individuals and societies. Because everything else is the illusion that power has made us better than we really are.
Freedom, better than its alternatives, offers us the honest opportunity to be better for real and not as a matter of looking better to others who are not really better either.
And that, and none of the counterfeits, is how we make progress.
