According to the ancient Greeks, social upheavals are marked by changes in fundamental beliefs. Metanoia was their word for it. People’s understanding of right and wrong is changed and of how the universe works and everything. It’s all changed.

There was an example which hit me between the eyes in a story (George Packer, “Caught in the Crossfire,” New Yorker, 2004-05-17) about an Iraqi doctor during the US war there in the early Aughts. He was showing Packer around his hospital and noted how deserted the virginity-checking floor was. This virginity checking was applied only to women, of course, and according to him its passing was a source of the destruction of his country.

It seems, from a distance, like blaming an assault on the position of tea leaves in a cup. That is the biggest problem with other ways of defining right and wrong. They always seem incomprehensible at best, or insane. And, really, they are incomprehensible by our usual ways of grasping things. You can’t consider them, see whether they fit with known rules, and decide whether they make sense.

They don’t make sense. But you can try to find an explanation that follows its own internal logic based on the bizarre assumptions. That’s never a satisfying process because nothing that contradicts one’s own sense of which end is up can ever feel right. It’s a purely intellectual exercise whose value lies in becoming able to predict how people with those views will feel and behave.

An analogy from the physical world would be the quantum behavior of matter at the smallest scales. It makes no sense in everyday human-scale experience. If you try to tunnel back in time you will merely land on your bottom. And yet quantum interactions are vital to photosynthesis. Without them plants wouldn’t sustain much life on earth and there’d be no humans to even have everyday experiences. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Neither does it mean that it is true. Not every counter-common-sense explanation is valid. The test is whether the explanations work in reality. In the case of quantum mechanics, whether the predictions based on it hold good. Or, in the case of social factors, whether they have the predicted effect on human behavior.

Quantum mechanics checks out. It may be incomprehensible to nearly everyone, but it works.

Virginity tests of women as a means of staving off disaster seem a much iffier idea. There is not noticeably more war and destruction in places that don’t care much about female virginity. If anything, there’s less. But as I tried to understand the Baghdad doctor’s frame of mind, it struck me the internal logic was based on the feeling that sex really was a source of evil. It wasn’t just a story invented to suppress women. He felt it to be literally true. In that case, if you gave up one inch in that fight who knew what demons might be unleashed? Possibly even the Americans.

It’s a fundamentally different way of deciding what is and isn’t good. Different, that is, from my Western concepts of right and wrong. Those, since the days of the Enlightenment in the 1600s and 1700s, rest on an assumption of equality among people. Evil comes from violating that equality, from exploiting or harming others to gain advantage over them.

Obviously, there are all kinds of weeds to get into, definitions to specify, and edge cases to ponder. But having done that, one approximates a set of principles that can be applied equally. And when rules against exploitation and harm are applied, they reduce harm, surprisingly enough. That definition of evil actually helps to prevent problems, so it would seem to be a Good Thing and one to pursue.

Instead, there’s now a movement sweeping the world to try a completely different set of rules. But it’s not articulated as different. People seem to think they’re all operating on the same understanding, but in fact the meanings have changed even while some words, such as justice, are the same.

I first noticed it in the arguments about trans rights where they collided with women’s rights. I didn’t see how that could be a problem. We’d take a careful look, decide how to minimize harm for all parties, and carry on dismantling the patriarchy. Except it didn’t work that way.

The new rules established axes of oppression. White men without any other problems oppress everybody else and are the worst. A close second are white women who have no problems except, presumably, white men. At the other end, who is most oppressed and deserving of the most solidarity varies. Depending on the situation it’s trans people, or blacks, or non-whites, or any member of groups who’d suffered from whites, such as Middle Easterners or Muslims. An individual belonging to more of these classes is therefore more oppressed and it follows that they’re more deserving of respect and solidarity. So, in the trans and women example, trans people as a group are more oppressed than women so accommodation must always flow from women to trans people.

The point, to me, isn’t whether they got the groups right. The point is that they think membership in a group matters. That members of one group are worthy and nonmembers are … less so. Individuals can’t be good in some ways, not-so-good in others. They are tainted or they aren’t. There are plenty of examples of people who expressed wrongthink in something so minor as liking a “bad” tweet who then had a pile-on to prevent their books being published, to prevent venues from hosting their speeches or songs or art. This despite the person, usually a woman, being otherwise staunch in supporting the group.

When worth depends on group membership then worthiness is judged by adequate allegiance or accidents of birth. There can be no universally applicable rules in such a system because the rules depend on which group you belong to. People can’t be treated as equals. It’s like being thrown back to a medieval village where outsiders were wrong and only your own group was good. It’s “my country, right or wrong” all over again.

It’s surprising how fast adopting a medieval mindset has led to medieval politics. Antidemocratic “populism” and autocrats are popping up everywhere. China (Xi), India (Modi), Russia (Putin), USA (Trump). Even in Europe, origin and bastion of Enlightment values, far right authoritarian and fascist parties are gaining followers everywhere. [Update 2024-07-05, post-UK election: then again maybe not everywhere. Farage’s Reform Party had a weak showing. And another update, 2024-07-07: The UK has been joined by the French!] The rule of law is viewed as a quaint luxury by too many, no longer tough enough to handle times with real troubles. Meanwhile, the same serious thinkers carefully avoid noticing that most of the troubles are self-inflicted by ignoring justice. The less justice the more pollution, the more war, more crime, more billionaires. Less justice is very tough, but it’s the problem, not the solution.

So the effects of going back to identity-based value systems are the opposite of harmless. They go beyond harming women or trans people or blacks or Muslims. They’re making space for strongmen to pull everyone back into a vortex of tribalism and war.

Xenophobia has never created peace and prosperity because the harm people do depends on what they do as individuals, not on which group they belong to. This is true even when the group is billionaires. So targeting a group cannot reduce people’s viciousness against each other. Going back to identity-based morality is not an improvement over rules based on equality and fairness formulated to address the harm itself. It would be smarter not to repeat old mistakes, but we’ve fallen into this new+old morality without even articulating it.

The worst effect of deciding evil lurks within given groups is that it has to end in removing the group. The French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions decided the rich were the problem and did what they could to eliminate them. Exploitation and greed somehow persisted anyway. (Current proponents of “eat the rich” take note. “Tax the rich” is another matter.) Jews and women generally have been favorite representatives of moral decay, but there again, no matter how many are burned, inhumanity persists. Rebranding the groups as Zionists or terfs won’t work any better than previous attempts. Although people, being slow learners, are on the path of trying again anyway.

The current changing of the gods has just started. People aren’t demanding the death of witches except out at the extremer edges. There it’s already a regular occurrence to call for the death of women who deviate from transactivist dogma. Or, among some in the Gaza and Palestinian protests, to call for death to “Zionists.” I’m not sure how they plan to accomplish that without another wholesale slaughter of Jews, but despite that they reject accusations of antisemitism. They feel they’re not against Jews. They’re against oppressors. And since, to them, Israelis are white Westerners by definition (itself not true of many Israelis), it follows that they bear group guilt.

Except that group guilt can’t exist. The idea comes from the same place of confusion as corporate personhood. Only individuals can perform actions. Only individuals can be guilty of bad actions. They can argue they were following orders, but it is always individual people who carry them out. Only individuals can save others or kill them.

And that’s the biggest barrier to trying, once again, to live by equal rules. It means we have to admit anyone can do wrong. We can’t wrap ourselves in any group or wave its virtuous flags. It means that every one of us, individually, bears the ability to hurt people and has the duty to do what’s right. That’s no fun.