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Jake Peterson's avatar

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

-Jefferson, "Letter to Roger C. Weightman" (June 24, 1826)

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-roger-c-weightman/

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another thought-provoking, Bill. After reading this, I reviewed a couple of your related past posts:

-The golden age https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-golden-age

-What did Hegel know? https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/what-did-hegel-know

In terms of our global society trending towards more freedom, I don't think that there's much doubt that that's the case. Once people are given a glimpse of the life that democracy can bring them, then tend to crave it (ex. Cuba, Hong Kong, Ukraine, etc.). In terms of a "recent retreat of democracy," I don't feel like that's the case. Yes, a lot of people in the United States are upset about economic conditions, recent SCOTUS rulings, etc., but that seems to be people (either a majority or minority) complaining that things aren't going exactly the way that they want them to, which is always how it is. In general (at least from my perspective in the United States), the quality of life continues to improve. Yes, there are unfavorable SCOTUS rulings, and economic conditions could be better, but life is better (generally) than it has been in the past. In 1927 (when 3/4 of my grandparents were alive), the Court ruled in favor of Virginia's eugenics laws in Buck v. Bell, and then Black Tuesday occurred in 1929, signaling the start of the Great Depression (even though it wasn't the cause). While we deal with challenges in our day, they aren't as bad as what our grandparents dealt with in the past. Overall, life (standard of living, life expectancy, medical care, etc.) is improving, and globally, it's trending toward freedom. But as you described with Hegel, for us to appreciate it more fully, maybe we need to look more at the grand scale: focus more on the forest as a whole than on the individual trees.

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MJR's avatar

Patterns in history are always interesting to look at in the abstract. I especially enjoyed Jacques Barzun's idea of the flow from decadence back to primitivism. While I think he oversimplified some aspects of the Reformation transition, his book is a wonderful read to cram in 500 years of history and why/how things happened from an intellectual standpoint.

Hegel's ideas, like many Enlightenment thinkers, twist themselves into an intellectual pretzel to find some other pattern of life other than our history of God's salvation. It is such an interesting rebellion from the Church thinking into something of their creation. "Man at the center of the drama," as one theologian criticized it. The main players of the Enlightenment like Hegel still are quite influential, but your "also rans" produced some very absurd works that continually age worse every decade.

Hegel's freedom theory is interesting, as it reflects the inevitability of the West's revulsion of slavery and ultimate abolition. Whether reading Somerset or the Jay Treaty, it is clear (in retrospect, of course) that slavery and Western thought would conflict in the long run. That being said, as others have mentioned, what is this measurement of amorphous "freedom." When it is defined by whatever we like, or even worse, whatever our elected leaders give us, then creating some sort of "Hegel-o-meter of freedom" measures nothing particular of substance.

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