Are people actually more morally enlightened now than they were in the past?

[All Along The Watchtower]

I am posing this question because of the routine "he/she/they were a product of their times" explanation (excuse?) for say, racism, sexism, etc. at whatever point in History.

Leaving aside the blatantly obvious fact that everyone is a product of their times (ourselves included), so this tells us nothing...on what grounds do we, in our own temporal historical existence, believe ourselves to be superior to our ancestors on a moral level? Judge not lest ye be judged yourself. Both our ancestors and our descendants could condemn us for all kinds of modern horrors.

I'll give one provocative but illustrative example: at the height of Liberal/"Progressive" Western Modernity (the late 19th-early 20th century), highly educated, sophisticated elites were congratulating themselves for evolving beyond old-fashioned, retrograde religious anti-Semitism - in favor, of course, of biologically-based anti-Semitism, scientific racism, eugenics. I'm confident you all know the rest of the story.

Is this not the ultimate conceit, total hubris, the sheer gall of believing that we can escape from History and human nature? The philosophers, theologians, and scholars of old would have had a dark chuckle about the World Wars, the nuclear age, man-made climate catastrophe, the sheer incompe-malice of governments around the world when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic - not to mention, all of the social media and entertainment technologies that are atomizing us and melting our brains. We are base reactive reactionaries who posses the most destructive of advanced technologies. There's your modern "progress."

Anyway, enough of my pontificating. Let's discuss the question in the thread title.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Our most worrisome trend is in the tendency of human behavior to become more computer-like as our reliance on computer technology becomes more total.

The universal everywhere seems to be advancing at the expense of the particular, and humans everywhere are losing their grip on vernacular structures of socialization, production, political control, and wisdom.

One risk implicit in this trend is of sliding into a techno-bureaucratic totalitarianism, a polity in which everyone feels helpless to do anything aside from the rule-bound pursuit of individual pleasure.

Another problem is the growing divide between those whose lives are lived mostly "above the API" (i.e. you spend your time telling computers what to do) and those whose lives are lived mostly "below the API" (i.e. you are constantly taking orders from a computer). Uber drivers are an obvious example of the latter, but even professions that involve a great deal of training and that historically enjoyed a wide degree of independence are caught up on this side of the divide.

Traditionally high-status, high-autonomy groups that are now mostly below-the-API include doctors, teachers, and cops. Quite a lot of the tumult in health care, education, and law enforcement makes more sense if you view those trends in terms of a collapse in professional authority begotten from the greatly increased control that management has taken in these sectors, enabled by its unprecedented capabilities for monitoring and quantification.

This Machine Kills (Humanity as we know it)

[All Along The Watchtower]

Averroes, your post reminds me of something I remember reading about the professionalization of business management/executives in the form of more executives graduating from business schools and management becoming a career unto itself, as opposed to being the consequence of years of promotion from within the same company. This trend was posited as beginning in the mid-20th century but has long since become the norm. The article, which I cannot find at the moment, was about the business management side of  neoliberalism but it strikes me that the logic of professional, highly credentialed mercenaries becoming managers, administrators, and executives has become hegemonic over all aspects of American life.

I mean, look at political campaigns. It used to be that there was maybe one Machiavellian strategist, a couple of classic machine hacks, and maybe one or two consultants from Madison Avenue or wherever if your campaign was a Big Deal (more importantly, campaign managers often had a preexisting relationship with the candidate, for better and/or worse).  Now political campaigns are careers—no, professions—unto themselves, and the people who don’t end up rich from such a career can be plausibly called “losers.” And of course, that’s not even getting into how the so-called “permanent campaign” has cannibalized everything from professional expertise in Congress to the daily schedules of the President of the United States. As for the media’s relationship to all of this…don’t get me started.

I’m sure you have thoughts on this!

[All Along The Watchtower]

I mean slavery has been abolished, women vote and we don't torture gays. At least in most western countries and we criticise those where this is not the case. This isn't some philosophical exercise; there's practical reasons to answer, in many cases, yes.

I'm talking about human nature, not policies. All of the above good things could easily go away.