On Moral Fashions

For a long period in human history, the world generally persecuted and publicly condemned homosexuals. Homosexuality was deemed evil; homophobia was normal. However, today, being openly gay is now staunchly defended. Simply visit New York City, Tokyo, Paris, San Paulo, etc. and you will see.

From persecution to pride. Clearly, the way society judges same-sex relations has transformed. It used to be a heresy to support homosexuality. Today, overt homophobia is essentially political suicide in many public forums.

What was once conventional is now extremely unpopular.

That’s interesting because if morality is defined by the extent to which an action is right or wrong and if homosexuality is a moral issue[1], then homosexuality must be good or evil. If it’s good, then many people today act more morally than many people in the past.

The implication here is profound. Are people today more moral? Because I stand against slavery and sexism, does that mean I am a better person than a slave owner and chauvinist?

Specificity is key. Regarding certain behaviors, I do act more morally. To me, condoning homophobia, slavery, and sexism is not acceptable. However, I know I was not born an angel or a saint. Had I lived in a different time, it is possible—if not likely—that I could have supported something which would disgust the present me. Likewise, a me born in a different time would likely be disgusted with the me today.

Unless a person does something unfathomably horrendous, trying to compare “goodness” across people is very challenging. The times in which we are born, and the conditions therein mold us. This does not mean that morality is relative, that good and evil always depend on context. Rather, I am relative; my moral beliefs and actions depend on context.

This is not an essay that excuses past evils, and this is not an essay about what is right and wrong. You can decide the morality of any issue for yourself—in fact, you must. This is an essay about “moral fashions”.[2]

What are Moral Fashions?

Typically referring to clothing, fashion describes what is trending and popular. At one end of the spectrum, things are fashionable and at the other, unstylish and often antiquated.

When I was in middle school in the early 2010s, skinny jeans were fashionable. But today, the style has dramatically shifted in the United States. Now, baggy jeans are hot, and people generally think skinny jeans are unfashionable. I can’t remember the last time I saw a beautiful young woman wearing skinny jeans. And trust me, I've been looking!

The peculiar thing about fashion is that it's nearly imperceptible; what looks good seems rather obvious, especially in the present. Essayist Paul Graham explains the subtlety of fashion well.

“Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it”.

As something becomes more popular, it usually becomes more normal. And normal things blend in and become less noticeable. Paradoxically, more people doing something makes that something less visible, sometimes invisible. Few people in the early 2010s wondered whether skinny jeans were tacky. And why would they? At the time, skinny jeans were perfectly stylish—nearly everyone else wore them.

Now consider morality: whether beliefs and actions are right or wrong. You probably have a good idea of what is good or evil—to you. Look at Table 1 below. Do you agree with its classifications?

Table 1

You probably did. Now refer to Table 2. Do you still agree?

Table 2

Not as straightforward, right? Table 2 lists currently debated topics. But at one point in time, the items listed in Table 1were highly contentious.

Moral fashions describe the popularity of moral beliefs, like how fashion describes the popularity of dress. Moral beliefs are morally fashionable or morally unfashionable. For example, in many rich Western countries today, homosexuality is morally fashionable. In noun form, it is a moral fashion.

Understandably, people are reluctant to change their moral posture. Oftentimes we don’t think anything needs to change at all. Thus, ethical beliefs are sticky, and moral fashions often change over generations, sometimes millennia. It took thousands of years for women to have equal rights as men, two thousand years for gay people to love openly (again), and hundreds of years for Black Americans to use the same public facilities as Whites.

Every period has its moral fashions. Some people lived alongside institutional slavery as casually as we lived alongside skinny jeans. While rebuking past peoples as barbarians is easy, it is also myopic. At some point in the future, our descendants will—and perhaps should—look down in contempt at the twenty-first century.

There’s no such thing as a perfectly moral person or period. Utopia is not for humankind. But that’s great news. It means we can always improve.

Yet most alarmingly, the current age is blighted with a pessimistic nihilism, a moral fashion marked by fatalism. It has infected many younger members of society, like my very own Generation Z (sometimes called the “Doomers”). These pessimists claim our history is shameful, our present pitiful, and our future forsaken. They say our government is irredeemably corrupt, capitalism is too broken, and religion is only a lie. Most dangerously, they’re misanthropic; they fundamentally believe humans are evil beyond reproach.

I lament and reject this eternal pessimism. I instead accept moral fashions: the acknowledgment of conformity, groupthink and mob mentality, the contextualization of history, the recognition of evil, and the appreciation of progress—and its fragility.

Conformity, Solomon Asch & Your New Wardrobe

By today’s standards, I would have been considered homophobic when I was a middle schooler. Growing up as a more conservative Christian, I often heard and publicly quoted Leviticus 18:22 (ESV): you shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Of course, I was prejudiced partly due to ignorance; I had never spoken to a gay person before. Though, I think the primary reason I said and did mean things was because I simply wanted to “fit in”—with my household and church. It was not a burning hate that drove me, but a visceral fear of not belonging. Because fitting in was of principal importance, my principles fit to what others found important. So, I wore the moral fashion of my local church.

Like clothing trends, moral fashions play on two fundamental human conditions: the love of belonging and the fear of missing out (FOMO). Most people strive for the approval, respect, and love of their peers and fear ostracization and isolation. Therefore, people will conform to belong.[3]

Psychologists call conformity due to FOMO normative influence. The famous Solomon Asch experiments which aimed to investigate how social pressures influence our conformity to group norms demonstrate this concept well.

For a “vision test”, eight participants sit in a semi-circle facing a large screen displaying four lines of differing lengths. The lines are labeled “Target”, “A”, “B”, and “C” and have their bottoms aligned so the participants can easily compare their lengths. The experimenters ask each participant one by one which line they suppose is the same length as the “target” line.

The twist: seven of the participants, the “actors”, are in cahoots with the experimenters. The “real” participant is always the last to answer in each round.

Each real participant undergoes 18 rounds. In 12 of them, dubbed the “critical trials”, the actors all provide the same incorrect answer. The experimenters tested 50 people.

At first, all actors respond correctly and unsurprisingly, the real participant answers correctly too. However, once all actors answer incorrectly, the real participant—under visible confusion—adapts his answer to the incorrect answer given by the actors.

On average, about 33% of the real participants conformed to the majority view in the critical trials. About 75% of participants answered at least one critical trial incorrectly. 25% never conformed. In the control group where there were no actors (i.e., only the real participant), the participant virtually always answered correctly.

After the experiment, the psychologists asked participants why they had answered incorrectly. Most said they, in fact, did not believe their answer was right, but they did not want to look strange and stupid.

Unlike the Solomon Asch experiments in which conformity is inconsequential, conformity in real life ranges from what type of jeans you wear to the morals you espouse. But while pant width is harmless, a set of values is not. The difference is that “fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good”[4]. Additionally, outside the laboratory, most people are not actors. Most people in the majority group actually believe they are right.

Like all social experiments, the Solomon Asch trials are subject to some bias and simplification. For example, all the participants were male students from Swarthmore College (sampling bias). Furthermore, in real life, decisions are not as easy as comparing line length. At best in the social sciences, experiments are illustrative and rarely, if ever, predictive. However, Solomon Asch helps us recognize conformity. Furthermore, the subsequent research it inspired is insightful.

First, repeated tests have demonstrated that the larger the majority group, the more likely people will conform to its beliefs, but only up to a point[5].

Second, conformity dramatically decreases when there is at least one other dissenter and when participants can answer privately (e.g., with written responses). Recall that when there were seven actors against one, participants answered incorrectly 33% of the time on average. When experimenters allowed one actor to answer correctly, participants were right 95% of the time. If you belong to a “silent minority or majority”, find at least one ally; don’t be alone[6]. And if you want to find your friends, publicly shout the dissent.[7]

Lastly, some interviews with participants demonstrated what psychologists call informational influence: a type of conformity where individuals believe others are better informed. In later versions of the Solomon Asch trials, experimenters exclusively tested engineering, math, and chemistry students. Interestingly, a staggeringly low percentage (0.25%) of the critical trials resulted in incorrect answers. The hard science majors knew they had superior knowledge and more critically, they didn’t let the majority group dissuade them. So, one way to avoid the trappings of peer pressure is to have sufficiently strong personal convictions, in your information and in yourself. However, to be consistently better informed, high confidence is not enough. Those who are better informed try to understand diverse worldviews—especially the opposing ones—no matter how popular or how poorly represented they are.

We would all like to believe that we are independent thinkers. While this may be an aspiration, it's not always achievable in practice. I prefer being respected and loved—particularly from my niche of people. Gradually, and faintly, I may conform. I may behave in ways that, in time, may be revealed as immoral. I may wear a moral fashion. Sometimes, I won’t even know I’m wearing it. And sometimes, I may know that I am.

If you don’t pick your own style, then someone else will likely pick yours. And while mimetic behavior may keep you alive, it won’t make you authentic. The goal is to vet your inventory of morals, and “revamp your wardrobe”, so to speak. When you stand in front of the mirror, don’t ask, disappointedly, why did I even buy this?

Contextualizing History, Not Forgiving It.

You may have already noticed: your grandparents or parents are (sort of) racist.

My grandma doesn’t like Japanese people—many East and Southeast Asian people of a certain age don’t either. She associates Japan with the ruthless imperial empire: the one that raped Nanking, occupied Korea, and forced thousands of Korean women into sex work. The Japan I know is the one with Pokémon cards.

There are levels of racism. And my grandma suffers from a relatively minor case of prejudice. While prejudice is evil, grandma is not, and she wasn’t born disliking Japanese people. Her beliefs were formed by a reality that no longer exists today. That doesn’t excuse her prejudice, but it does contextualize it.

Homo sapiens, anatomically speaking, are virtually the same today as we were 200,000 years ago. Our biology changes at a much slower pace than our societies. Consider how in less than 100 years, developments in medicine virtually eliminated base human obstacles: infant mortality, maternal mortality, and disease (pox, polio, etc.). While our biology and base desires remain the same, reality and each new generation’s mental model of it changes rapidly, especially in modernity.

Consider these common questions: if you lived in 1930s Germany or Colonial America, would you have been a Nazi or a slave owner (or bystander), respectively?

People will readily respond no. I would never do that, one would shout. And to some extent, this person is right. This person—the present him—would likely never do that. But if he truly plays out this hypothetical, then he must consider that he does not retain his current life’s upbringing, experiences, and contemporaries. Indeed, he would be born again in poverty-stricken Germany where he needs a wagonful of cash to buy a loaf of bread. Or he would be born in the Antebellum South where one out of four families owned at least one slave, on average.

To a person who has been inculcated with contemporary justice, it’s easy to stand up to a purported injustice. But when this person is stripped of modern influences, will he still act with modern ethics? It's possible. He may turn out to be the same; however, the result is highly opaque. And so, the honest and humble answer is “I don’t know”, notwithstanding how inconceivable this uncertainty may feel[8].

Instead of asking what you would have done in the past, the better question is what do you do today that is overt, risky, and counter to public opinion?

Every generation has its own moral fashions. The issue is that we are generally tunnel-visioned to our present selves and our contemporary morality, the questions of good and evil relevant to our own period. But contemporary morality is but a sliver compared to all that of all human history. Further, contemporary morality would not make sense for ancient people, in the same way contemporary morality will not make sense to future people. We are blind to history, the dynamic texture of reality and the differing mental models used to understand it. Hence, we are blind to moral fashions.

We must simultaneously recognize and prevent past atrocities and avoid the illusion of innate moral superiority. Human nature does not change. Humans change aspects of nature. Much of what we call progress is in thanks to select people and communities that have had the courage to end moral fashions and start new ones.

Don’t be an ingrate and a hypocrite. Contemporary morality has its own gaping holes. If you call someone a monster, someone in the future will call you one too.

The Future’s Past is Today’s Present

Given slavery is morally unfashionable today, we feel great disdain for the slave traders and bystanders of the past. Yet to many ancient Greeks, Romans, and Colonial Americans, slavery was fashionable. It is typically with hindsight and over generations that we observe changes in moral fashions. We tend to see retrospectively, not prospectively.

So now, let’s look to the future instead. After all, the future’s past is today’s present. What will our grandchildren say about the twenty-first century? By speculating about times ahead, perhaps we can reveal today’s moral fashions, those to which we are most blind.

…

There is no denying that I am a fossil fuel addict, and you are too. Like every other century of human history, the twenty-first operates in an energy-constrained world. There is tangible scarcity, a finite supply of oil, natural gas, and coal. Nations and companies fiercely compete for these resources; some have even started wars for them. Every facet of modern life requires energy; it’s simply how work is done. So, we drill for oil, gather natural gas, and mine for coal, upending the earth’s ecological systems. We then combust these resources, further disrupting the environment. Yet, what is humanity’s alternative? People need energy.

What if—and this may not be an “if” in the near future—we had functionally infinite energy? Nuclear fusion seems to be the most likely candidate, either with the sun or a man-made reactor. Consider a fundamental economic concept: if supply increases proportionally more than demand, price will decrease. Now, what happens if the supply becomes infinite? So long as demand doesn’t accelerate as fast as supply, then the price will decrease. In this case, price will likely approach zero. Voilà, free energy. And if via nuclear fusion, clean energy.

Given energy is an input cost of anything, then free energy should reduce the cost of everything: compute, shipping, aviation, manufacturing, etc. What would this world of functionally infinite, free, and clean energy look like compared to our restrained one?

The people of this energy-rich world may look back at the twenty-first century with great disgust. They will say, “Jordan knew fossil fuels were poisoning the air, polluting the oceans, and leading to severe health complications. Yet he did very little to change his ways”. Perhaps they will label me a “resourcist” or an “energist”. And perhaps they will have a point—I am addicted to dirty energy after all. While not an excuse for my actions, the fact remains: I don’t live with infinitely clean energy.

Alternatively, would this future world tolerate homelessness, one of the most pitiful banes of the modern age? Regardless of your politics, a world with functionally infinite energy would be one step closer to ending this plight: distributing energy and compute to every adult to lease or use, building more housing, providing universal basic income, or powering (compassionate) robocops to clean the streets.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles and New York City and in both places, homelessness is rampant, repulsing, and deeply tragic. Every day, millions of “normal” people walk past and pretend to ignore the modern pariahs. It’s madness and yet this madness persists—I walk past them too. I know homelessness is wrong, or at least not right; I’ve always known. And yet, I tolerate it. I wear this moral fashion.

Am I to blame for the persistence of homelessness? Partly. But the problem of homelessness is too big, too systemic for any one person to solve. Is it reasonable that I should dedicate my life to trying to solve an intractable problem (from the perspective of the individual)? Am I morally contemptible if I don’t try?

I don’t think so. However, that is not to say homelessness is an unsolvable problem. If individuals could collectively agree to divert attention and resources to the issue, it's very possible it could be solved. But the “invisible hand” pulls us away from this scenario. Perhaps solving homelessness right now is just too expensive or inconvenient.[9]

As hard as it is for us to understand, or even empathize with people who tolerated slavery, the people of the future may have just a hard time empathizing and understanding our modern moral fashions. Further, many future denouncements will occur on issues that contemporaries like us have not (and cannot have) even encountered yet. I can’t even give you an example!

I find that people are generally starved of imagination and hungry for hope. And while a speculative future is little more than a dream, someone may invent it.

Fashion is Fun—and Good

When I walk the busy streets of New York City, I love seeing the diverse fashion, the many forms of self-expression. Although I find skinny jeans unattractive now, I’m still happy to see an occasional pair. It would be far worse if everyone wore only baggy jeans.

A uniform world is a boring place—in fact, I fear it. A country that perpetually wears only gray T-shirts and cargo pants hardly has fashion. All people will never always agree. Thus, if society has only one perpetual fashion, then it is because society is living under the tyranny of one fashion authority.

Moral fashions are no different. What you believe to be moral will differ from what I believe. If we are not allowed to freely express our beliefs, it is because we are living under one moral tyranny. So, although moral fashions reveal our inclination to conform (sometimes knowingly and other times not), our condemnation of the past, and our blindness to the present and future, they are indicators of progress. And while progress is never guaranteed, we have shown throughout history that we are capable of righting our wrongs, insofar as our courage, wisdom, and humility allow.

I fear that our relatively open society is becoming more closed. Across the world, some groups are erasing history and “divisive” opinions. They are altering the language of books and tearing down monuments. And while technologies like the internet have fostered diverse opinions, some powerful entities have weaponized the internet to censor or manipulate information. Censorship is from an old playbook. Every totalitarian state has suppressed its people: how they think, what they wear, and how they act. But it is the interaction between every individual’s bias that prevents society from having only one bias. Yet, we seem to be dangerously approaching one moral fashion.

Therefore, our goal is not to eliminate moral fashions, but to adopt its framework as a way to view the past faithfully, the present humbly, and the future hopefully. And so, dress yourself in your own moral fashion. It’s more fun and beautiful anyway.

Many thanks to my friends Andrew Wang and Parham Rouzbahani for reading earlier drafts.

Footnotes

[1] Note, one could claim homosexuality is amoral, not even broaching the subject of good or evil.

[2] As far as I know, the term “moral fashion” was coined by Paul Graham, which he briefly mentioned in his essay What You Can’t Say.

[3] Atypical behavior is generally too large of a risk if one’s goal is to lie low, survive, and reproduce. The average person will fare better in these respects if he is, well, average. This dynamic is accentuated in isolated or tightly knit communities, in which ostracization and public shaming are real and somewhat inescapable risks. On the other hand, in internet and online communities, given there are billions of people, one can almost always find a like-minded group.

[4] Another quote from Paul Graham’s What You Can’t Say.

[5] For the Solomon Asch type experiments, the peak number ranges from 3-5 people. Importantly, this implies that conformity is a non-linear function of group size. I suspect moral fashions may spread almost identically to how viruses or bacterial infections proliferate, with logistic growth: exponential like until some limit.

[6] However, it’s equally dangerous to be in an echo chamber: alone with people who only agree with you

[7] When and where appropriate of course. This is not a good rule if the consequence is death—and you would prefer silent life over emphatic death.

[8] The technical claim here is that our lives are path-dependent, that past events affect the probability of future actions (i.e., each element of reality and its sequence matters). Further, your inability to conceive of something is not evidence against something’s existence or its possibility to exist. It is only evidence that something for you is unimaginable, perhaps unintelligible. For example, for a slave-owning plantation owner, it would be inconceivable that a Black man would become the president of the United States. Before WWII broke out, even heads of state thought a war was inconceivable—WWI was thought to be the “war to end all wars”.  

[9] Granted many homeless people don't want help or are too mentally ill to admit they need it.