Punk Kids And Their Blogs

I can't believe I didn't write this post. Partly because it sounds almost exactly like I wrote it, except for the gratuitous Entourage reference. Mostly, however, because I'm pissed at myself for not thinking of it, because, frankly, it's entirely right and mostly brilliant, and I'm jealous.

Bob Wright develops a wonderful theory in his book Non-Zero (by the way, if you have not bought this book you should, and you should read it. Then you should read it again, because it's that good.) that the 'arrow' of human history points almost monotonically in the direction of expansion of the quantity and quality of non-zero sum relationships between people around the world. A large part of this in the last 150 years has been the recognition of all peoples' fundamental humanity, and the implication this has for our foreign policies.

It basically doesn't happen in polite company any longer that one assumes that any people, by dint of their racial makeup, are incapable of any particular good quality that we appreciate about humanity. It is, however, still possible to claim in the most polite of company (Martin Peretz of The New Republic, as a for instance) that people of certain cultures are culturally incapable of processing certain ideals that we might wish them to have. And this is almost certainly not entirely wrong; although I think most cultures are much more similar than they are different, there are certainly still large differences between many of them, which almost certainly influences the speed and efficacy with which certain ideas diffuse throughout the culture.

Anyhow, my point is that it is definitely still allowable to think less of certain cultures, we no longer would allow legal discrimination against them, at least not to people of said culture who were residents of the US. We're not quite there with homosexuals yet, but my thinking on this is that it really represents one of the last barriers to that non-zero growth, because to many peoples' minds, your race is something you are born with and can never escape. Your culture is something you are born into, and can never fully escape. And many people still think of homosexuality as a lifestyle, a choice, and hence something which can still be discriminated against with a reasonably clear conscience, in the same way that we discriminate against people who choose to speed, or don't pay their taxes.

As science continues to reveal the inadequacies of this viewpoint, and also as more and more people are exposed to gays in their daily lives, this will become less and less the case, and discrimination will fade away, in the same way it is slowly doing in the racial realm. Please note that I am not trying to say that racial discrimination has disappeared altogether, that certainly is not the case. But it is the case that, again in polite company, it is pretty much verboten to openly discriminate against someone because of their race and/or gender. And I firmly believe that we'll be in the same place in 30 or 40 years for gays.

For the moment, though, you can't force people who grew up thinking one way to suddenly about-face. Instead, the best you can do is mandate that they not act on their discriminatory feelings by such things as mandating equal rights, including gays as a protected class in hate crimes, etc. etc.