Do We Never Lose Progress? I Wish Seth Godin Were 100% Right

In his daily blog, Seth Godin wrote today,

The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.

Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:

• Women’s rights in Iran under the Shah or Kabul pre-Taliban versus today
• Rights of Jews, Gypsies, and LGB folks in prewar Germany vs. the Nazi years
• The collapse of Sarajevo’s much-vaunted multiculturalism into massive racism and “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s
• In the here and now, the lack of transparency about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership; if rumors are correct, this treaty would allow corporations in any member country to overturn environmental and safety legislation, ordinances favoring local economies, and a lot of other things that most of us would rather support–and according to the Washington Post, these rumors are very much based in fact

And, sadly, dozens more examples from around the world.

If you think “it can’t happen here,” do some research on Berlin in the 1920s–or read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). Or look at the scary anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts of violence that started showing up regularly in the US starting in the aftermath of 9/11/01 and are still escalating.

Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!