I saw this on social media over the the last week or so – a quote from Martin Luther King…:<\/p>\n
\n\n\n\n“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
…followed by a list of moral advances that’d seem to prove the proposition:<\/p>\n
\n\n\n1776: Do we really need a king?
\n1863: Should people own slaves?
\n1954: Should schools be desegregated?
\n1967: Can a state legally prohibit interracial marriage?
\n2017: Is taxation theft?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe guy who wrote the post – who I think would fairly describe himself as an anarcho-libertarian – \u00a0meant well.\u00a0 <\/span>So did the guy who made the original quote, Martin Luther King.<\/p>\n
But can there be a more toxic, wishful, pollyannaish platitude than this one?<\/p>\n
Kevin Williamson reframed it well – the moral arc of the universe bends inexorably toward tyranny and barbarism.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Look st the list of moral advances of the past 241years.\u00a0 <\/span>through the good graces of pushback against *that* moral arc, often at huge risk (like the signers of the Declaration of Independence); the king and slavery were removed with an exceptional amount of bloodshed; desegregation was neither bloodless nor inevitable. \u00a0 The fact that some struggles don’t require bloodshed show that our society\u00a0can,\u00a0<\/em>often, work out issues without going to war.<\/p>\n
Not sure that aphorism recognizes what an anomaly modern Western civilization is. \u00a0 Definitely sure people who casually use the saying don’t know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw this on social media over the the last week or so – a quote from Martin Luther King…: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” …followed by a list of moral advances that’d seem to prove the proposition: 1776: Do we really need a king? 1863: Should […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[289],"class_list":["post-63707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-western-civilization","tag-kevin-williamson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63707"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63740,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63707\/revisions\/63740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}