What Is Civilization? What Is Progress? (Roe vs. Wade)

This week the Supreme Court rolled back an important human right: the right for women to unequivocally control their own bodies, the right to never have to give birth against their will.

To me and many others, it felt like a huge step backwards. So what does that mean, to move backwards, culturally and socially?

It’s a trap to view civilization and culture in terms of linear progress. Human history and pre-history includes thousands of diverse cultures, each contributing unique and valuable ways of speaking, thinking, moving, preparing food, celebrating, crafting, etc. Many cultures and civilizations have fallen or disappeared that were more civilized, by many measures (quality of life, cooperativeness, personal freedoms) than any human system of living that exists today.

But it’s also a trap to not acknowledge that some ways of living are more civilized than others. Civil rights–the degree to which at all members of a society have equal freedoms and protections under the law–is a worthy metric. So is nonviolent conflict resolution, the degree to which we can coexist and mediate our disagreements without stabbing or shooting each other.

This morning I watched a video on YouTube about a pride of lions, six brothers, that came to dominate a large swatch of territory in South Africa. They did so by hunting buffalo, slaying their rival males, killing the cubs of those rival males, and impregnating the females. As the lions aged, they died, one by one, mostly from gruesome injuries inflicted by prides of younger, stronger lions.

Totally natural behavior, for lions.

Human civilization, at its core, is an attempt to move away from this “natural” way of living, to introduce more safety and security, to create and distribute wealth and abundance, to create and enforce the social constructs we call “rights”: the ability to go through life with certain entitlements (food, shelter, relative safety, freedom, access to education, access to healthcare, etc.).

But there will always be people who feel that we are too civilized. People who feel that the strong should dominate the weak, and that only some privileged members of a society should be afforded full rights (the right to vote, the right to healthcare, the right to not be murdered by police).

So while human civilization, in its broadest sense, is a tree with a million branches, a marvel of sociocultural evolutionary complexity, there are also linear metrics by which we can and should judge progress. Technology and science can help us pursue more civilized ways of living by increasing our understanding of the world and making us more powerful and wealthy, but the important metrics are ethical ones. How are we helping and protecting each other? How are we collectively improving our lives?

When we choose love, when we choose acceptance, when we choose equal rights under the law, when we create and implement greater human rights, we move civilization forward.

We progress.