"That's Just The Way It Is" Metaphysics, Status Quo Bias, and Idealism

There’s a term that gets tossed around a lot when discussing how the future should be, one that I feel is severely misunderstood. The term I am referring to is “idealism,” or “idealist.” I have been called an idealist on more than a handful of occasions, and it irks me in a way that can be hard to put into words. I care about the future, and I hope that the future will be better than not only the past, but the present as well. I believe that, if enough people care to put in the hard work and effort needed, the future can be molded and shaped in amazing ways. It is for the extensions I make of this belief that I have so often been called an idealist, and I am always left with a simple burning question: Why is having hope in the future idealism?

There is, I find, a strong bias towards the status quo that so often manifests as a borderline nihilistic belief that the world cannot be improved. Bias towards the status quo is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to the modern era. Human beings are creatures of habit and familiarity at heart. We can often be made uncomfortable by excessive change. Humans love minor changes here and there, but there can often be an inherent discomfort with radical shifts from the norm. Just because that discomfort is natural, however, does not mean we should listen to it. The heart of the naturalistic fallacy is that what is natural is not inherently good. Change can be very good, even if it makes us uncomfortable. From the perspective of pretty much any moral analysis, change that benefits everyone has more positive utility than any discomfort has negative utility. This is only further driven home by the fact that the discomfort will fade as the unfamiliar becomes, over the course of time, familiar.

Now, I realize I have been quite vague so far as to exactly what kind of change I advocate for that so often gets me labeled as an idealist. This is not without justification. I made the deliberate decision to do this long preamble to try and get you in the right headspace for discussion of these topics. I want you to be open minded, and to think about social constructs that you may not have given much consideration in the past because they are so ingrained into our culture and everyday life. So, with your mind hopefully opened up to new ideas, I would like to discuss the prospect of abolishing the social constructs of gender and race.

Wow, that sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Well, if you, like me, are versed in sociological discussion, that may not be the case. Students of sociology, philosophy, or other social sciences may, in fact, be quite familiar with the arguments of gender or race abolition. They mostly sound crazy to the average person because “abolish” is a very strong word, and being quite frank, the idea of abolishing race or gender does, on the face of it, sound quite absurd. I mean, gender and race are innate qualities. What, are we going to get rid of skin color? Hack off everybody’s genitals to create a sexless society? I acknowledge that, to the average person, abolition of a construct like race seems like complete and utter nonsense, and that’s why I’m writing this. You see, these concepts don’t have to be so hard to understand. They can actually be relatively easy to understand, so long as you’re willing to do a couple thought experiments.

The first and potentially biggest hurdle for people to understand gender and race abolition is, as I previously mentioned, the belief that concepts like gender and race are innate, objective facts of life. This belief is not something I will ridicule anyone for, as it is the mainstream opinion and a quite understandable belief to hold. I mean, I can see the color of someone’s skin, just like I can see how someone expresses their gender. These are objective markers that can be observed or potentially measured, so our intuition tells us. Intuition can be flawed, though, and it can be quite valuable to question our intuition, and to follow it to its logical endpoint. 

The simplest argument against the objectivity of gender is the existence of trans people. The fact that one can change their gender identity already reveals a massive chink in the armor of gender’s objectivity. Our modern understanding of gender points to it being little more than expression. Gender is not a dit or a dah, but rather a spectrum of expression and identity. Femininity and masculinity are two axes upon which a majority of people identify, but they are not the only ones. Nonbinary identities exist as well, as do xenogenders and their neopronouns. Like them or not, their existence lays bare the fact that gender is no more innate or objective than our fashion choices. 

Now hold on, you may object, gender might be nothing more than a social construct, but sex is objective! We measure it with chromosomes! This is a very good point, one that will require some thought experimentation to work through. I could bring up the existence of intersex people, but you would be quick to point out that variances in chromosomes only disprove the sex binary, not the objectivity of sex. Similarly with race, even if skin color has increasingly less to do with ethnicity as time goes on, that does not change the fact that skin color can be objectively determined. If we want to understand how gender abolition relates to the objectivity of sex, and how race abolition relates to the objectivity of skin color then we’ll have to dive into theoretical territory. 

Imagine, if you would, an alternate dimension Earth that we will call “Beta Earth.” Beta Earth is in almost every way exactly the same as the world we live in; Alpha Earth. Where Beta Earth differs, however, is that your weight influences your social status. On Beta Earth, being fat is a sign of power and wealth. The wealthiest people on Beta Earth will participate in heavy overeating so that they can maintain large, fat bodies, in order to flaunt their wealth. To be skinny is an indicator of your social strata. Laborers are skinny, people who have to do hard manual work are skinny, and people who cannot make enough money to participate in overeating are skinny. If you are fat, you’re more respected, will have an easier time making and keeping friendships, and are going to have a much easier time getting easy jobs, jobs with high salaries that require little more than paperwork. Fat people are much more favorable in elections than their skinny counterparts, which means that the people making decisions about the way the world works are disproportionately fat.

On Beta Earth, skinny people find it much harder to become wealthy. It isn’t impossible for skinny people to be wealthy, but even if a skinny person does hit a lucky streak and manages to make a name for themselves, they are often ostracized. The fat wealthy people don’t want to be associated with a skinny, and so they forbid skinny people from attending their parties and events. Similarly, the skinny labor class views wealthy skinnies as “weight traitors,” and will ridicule them as such. The life of a wealthy skinny, though certainly more comfortable than that of a laborer skinny, still contains a great deal of hardship on account of their weight. Because of this, skinnies who become wealthy rarely stay skinny for long. If they wish to maintain any social clout, it’s imperative that they gain as much weight as possible. 

If you were to somehow visit Beta Earth, and saw this odd stratification by weight, you would almost certainly point out to the people of Beta Earth how nonsensical these classifications are. You would tell them that weight doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t influence any social standing. After all, we don’t have this kind of stratification by weight on Alpha Earth. The people of Beta Earth, in response, would tell you that you’re wrong, and it is in fact Alpha Earth that is weird. I mean, you can see weight. You can easily distinguish between fat and skinny, and you can measure somebody’s weight. Weight is an innate, objective property.

So, what makes Beta Earth’s view on weight any different from our understanding of skin color or sex? You might argue that this comparison is flawed on the basis that weight can change. As I explicitly stated in my hypothetical, people can gain weight by overeating, and conversely you can lose weight by eating healthier. Sure, that’s a fine argument, but does the ability to change a property make it any less arbitrary? You may not be able to change your race, but does that make it any more objective than weight? 

I understand that you may have doubts, though, so let’s consider a more objective property. Imagine a third Earth, that we will call Gamma Earth. Gamma Earth, just like Beta Earth, is nearly identical to Alpha Earth, except they define social stratification around the natural color of your hair. Red hair is the rarest hair color, and on Gamma Earth, those born with red hair are conferred a great amount of social benefits. They’re much more attractive and desirable, get better education, are typically put in places of power, et cetera et cetera you get the gist by now. Black hair is seen as a common trait, and people with black hair are typically serfs and laborers. Brown haired people are just above dark haired people in the social hierarchy, and blond people are just above them. On Gamma Earth, your hair color defines nearly everything about your life. 

Upon visiting Gamma Earth, you might ask one of the inhabitants why they don’t simply dye their hair to fit with a higher social strata. The representative from Gamma Earth would promptly tell you that your hair color will be known long before you are actually capable of dyeing your hair. Furthermore, hair dyeing is strictly forbidden, and people caught trying to change their hair color face a litany of legal and social repercussions. On Gamma Earth, hair dye can only be bought on the black market, and even if you can manage to get consistent access to hair dye for the rest of your life, all the people who knew you before you dyed your hair will already know what strata you belong in. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that your hair color is logged on all legal documentation, meaning that even if your peers are fooled, the government won’t be. Just like race and gender, the color of your hair depends on genetics that you cannot control. On Alpha Earth, prior to legislation allowing the legal change of gender, you couldn’t change your gender in any way the government would recognize, even if your peers did recognize it, just like hair color on Gamma Earth. Now I ask you, what makes Gamma Earth’s perception of hair color any different from our understanding of race and sex? 

This brings an end to our theoretical discussions of alternate Earths, and I hope it has helped you understand that these social constructs, even if they are measured with objective characteristics, are still entirely subjective properties. The color of our hair and the weight of our bodies are just as much objective descriptors of ourselves as the color of our skin or the gender we are assigned at birth, yet we for some reason do not confer upon them the same social value. Now, I’m sure you’re still doubting the possibility of abolishing these social constructs. An important nuance in the discussion of these hypothetical Earths is that they are hypothetical. We can admit that these social constructs are arbitrary and don’t matter, but we can’t just get rid of them. It would be a fruitless endeavor to convince the inhabitants of these alternate Earths to get rid of their unique social constructs. Similarly, we can’t get rid of constructs like race in our world because, like it or not, they are deeply ingrained into our societies and cultures, and cannot simply be imagined out of existence the same way we imagined them into existence. My argument falls flat on its face because, obviously, Beta and Gamma Earth don’t actually exist. In the words of Vsauce Michael, “or, do they?” 

You see, Beta Earth does exist. Well, not today, but it did exist at one point in our history. In medieval Europe, your weight was seen as a sign of social status, especially in Britain and France. If you were fat, you were almost certainly a member of the aristocracy, for only the aristocrats could afford the amount of food needed to be overweight. Being fat in these times was a mark of power, a clear display of your lordship over others. Just as described in my hypothetical, aristocrats would frequently and deliberately overeat, stuffing their faces with as much food as they could manage in an attempt to be the fattest member of the aristocracy. Aristocrats who, for fear of their health, refused to participate in this overeating were looked down on at best and deliberately ostracized from their social circles at worst. To be fat was to display that you didn’t need to work because your servants did all the work for you, and to deny the power being fat showed for fear of something so trivial as your health was to be seen as weak and cowardly.

Now ain’t that a twist? Well, I hate to confuse you, but this is actually a double twist. If you were led to believe, by my prompting about medieval Europe and their view of weight, that the description of Beta Earth was based on real events, then you have been sadly deceived. That paragraph was pretty much just a lie. While it was true that aristocrats tended to be heavier than serfs, it did not have the weight *ba dum tss* of social clout that I led you to believe it did. However, if you believed that story, then you already thoroughly understand how our views on social constructs can change over time.

How about another example? A real one, this time. I promise you that I will not deceive you again. Race as we understand it has changed a lot through history. While we in the modern day understand race as being tied to the color of your skin, this is a relatively modern understanding of the concept. In the times of the Roman Empire, for example, race was understood almost entirely as revolving around where you were born. Race, back then, was much closer to what we understand today as ethnicity. The Romans would have seen people from Britain as being an entirely different race, despite the fact that, today, we would consider both Romans and Britons to be white. Consider the fact that Saint Augustine was almost certainly black, having been born in Egypt, but was still considered Roman because they did not have the same conceptions of race that we do today. Our modern conception of race is just that: modern. It has only been the dominant understanding for a few hundred years.

Even in much more recent history, you don’t have to go much further than a hundred years into the past to see similar understandings of race. For most of American and British history, Irish people were not considered white, even if their skin color was literally white. They were seen as a lesser race than the natural born citizens of those countries. “Irish need not apply” was a sentence plastered over help wanted signs even after the end of the second World War. Irish people were seen as a separate, lesser race, to Americans and Britons, very similar to how people of color were separate and lesser. While the Irish did not see quite as much scorn as African Americans did at the time, the discrimination existed nonetheless. 

As I mentioned, that sentiment of Hibernophobia, as it was called, existed in America into the 1950s. While that sentiment does still exist in England, it has morphed into revolving around nationalism instead of racism. In less than a century or two, our understanding of race has shifted so much that Irish people are considered white, because we now view race as being your skin tone. Need more examples? Look no further than Nazi Germany. The ideology of Nazism claimed that Germans were of a higher race, literally chosen by god as being the rightful inheritors of the Earth. Every other race, including non-German whites, were lesser to the German and were viewed as morally and genetically inferior. That understanding of race does not exist anymore, at least not on a global scale.

Do you see how social constructs can change? Our understanding of different concepts, even if they have been held for centuries, or even millennia, can be changed drastically in relatively brief periods of time. Even if the abolition of race won’t happen in any of our lifetimes, it is entirely possible for it to happen in the future. Just as we, today, view old understandings of race as backwards and uninformed, so too may people centuries in the future view our current understanding of race as total nonsense. Why, then, is advocacy for race or gender abolition considered to be pie-in-the-sky idealism?

Idealism has a very long and complicated history in philosophy, but the common parlance usage of the term “idealism” rarely refers to the actual philosophy of idealism. Instead, idealism is often used as a term of derision against beliefs that are considered unrealistic or unattainable. When an idea is labeled as idealist, it’s because that idea is supposedly ignoring material conditions, and, in reality, could not possibly come to fruition. 

This is where I start developing some friction with the way the word is used. As I have just spent over two thousand words explaining, the abolition of social constructs is not only entirely plausible, but isn’t even an unheard of happening in human history. Our understandings of race and gender are withering away, slowly becoming more abstract as people question what these constructs even are, and if they contribute anything at all to the human experience. Does the existence of race as a social construct make our lives better? Are we, as a species, better off by enforcing a rigid understanding of that which divides us? Think about it; could racism on a societal scale exist if we did not have an understanding of race? Going back to the example of hair color, we don’t have any societal problems of discrimination by hair color. Maybe an individual would view one hair color as more or less attractive than another, but we don’t see gingers being forced into ghettos through redlining or having their right to vote jeopardized.

Societal racism exists because we feel the need to measure and categorize race at all. If the color of our skin was viewed the same way as the color of our hair, then it would be reduced to nothing more than aesthetic, appearance, and vibes. The same applies with sexism. If we didn’t give gender or sex the social weight that we do, then sexism wouldn’t be the societal problem that it is. Neither of these necessitate denying biology or erasing culture, either. A white person from Michigan and a white person from New York will, culturally, be very distinct from one another, regardless of the color of their skin. Race may have influenced culture in the past, but it is not at all inherently tied to it. A white Mexican is no less Mexican than a brown Mexican, the same way that a black Briton is no less British than a white Briton. Culture is tied to where you live, the context you are born in, and the people you live around, not what color your skin is.

So, what’s the case for race abolition? Abolishing the construct of race doesn’t delete culture, so we don’t lose anything valuable, and by abolishing race, societal racism is at best completely erased and at worst significantly weakened. Gender abolition has an even stronger case, since culture isn’t typically understood to be tied to gender as strongly as race is. If the abolition of these constructs has so many benefits and so few downsides, why then do people so strongly deride it?

The answer is simple: bias towards the status quo. We all live in the world that currently exists, and that world is what feels most comfortable to us. It is an unavoidable cycle that each generation views themselves as the greatest generation, the one that does the best in history, while every generation that came before were doddering old fools dragging their heels, and every generation after are crazy uppity youngsters that won’t just let things lie. So many people have a chronic inability to look to the future and see how it can be made better. The people who deride hope for the future as “idealism” so often think of themselves as just being realistic, as understanding the world for what it is, when in reality, they are just pessimists. Radical change for the better just isn’t realistic, they believe. They’re implicitly saying that it’s much better to just accept how the world is and live with it, but don’t understand the consequences of that mindset. 

Slavery didn’t end overnight. The fight to end slavery has been an ongoing struggle for thousands of years, and still isn’t over. Though we may not have the same chattel slavery associated with the Atlantic slave trade, slavery still exists in a lot of the world, a lot more than you would think. There are, in terms of raw numbers, more slaves on Earth at this moment than any other time in history. Maybe I’m being presumptuous, but surely we would all agree that the world would be better off if we didn’t have any slavery? Well, you’re not going to get that world if everybody throws up their arms and says “welp, that’s just the way it is!”

The problem inherent in a lot of people’s mindset about change is that we fail to think of the world as existing outside of our little bubble. We all live for a mere blink of a moment in the world’s history, yet we fail to consider how the world will be when that blink is over, what might happen after we die. It is an unfortunately common mindset that what happens after we die doesn’t matter because we won’t live to see it. This thought process is not only incredibly selfish, but is outright dangerous and destructive. Think of how many oil barons, sitting on mountains of gold and watching as the climate worsens as a direct result of their actions, refuse to do anything to stop or even slow the effects of climate change. Why do they do that? Some of them may, genuinely, believe that climate change isn’t real, but a vast majority of them are well educated people who know fully well what it is they’re doing. Why, then, do they do nothing to stop climate change? Because they know they either aren’t going to live long enough to experience its worst effects or are wealthy enough that it won’t matter regardless. 

The mindset that what happens outside of our lifetime or won’t affect us in our lifetimes doesn’t matter is an inherently destructive thought process, and does nothing but justify inaction in the face of injustice. It is the epitome of a thought terminating cliché. We’re all going to die someday, but when we die, the world isn’t going to just poof out of existence. Our children will inherit the world we give them, just as our grandchildren will inherit it from our children. The world goes on past our lifetimes, and to belittle advocacy for a better world after we die as “idealism” does nothing but encourage apathy. Generations of abolitionists fought and died for the cause of ending slavery long before the end of the American Civil War. The notion of abolition didn’t pop into people’s heads right at the 1800s, it was brought about by centuries of advocacy and fighting. 

An abolitionist born in 1764, the same year the Declaration of Independence was written, would not live to see the total end of slavery in America in 1865. Would you then tell that abolitionist that abolition of slavery was “idealist” nonsense? No, of course you wouldn’t. The same way you wouldn’t tell an abolitionist in the 1600s that abolition is idealism. Why? Because we live in a world where the abolition of American slavery already happened, and therefore cannot be idealism. That benefit of hindsight, though, wasn’t something they had. Throughout history, people who advocated ending slavery were, similarly, called idealists, even though ending slavery was an entirely achievable goal. 

Obviously the abolition of social constructs like gender aren’t as severe of problems as the abolition of slavery, but I’m sure you understand the point I’m making. Change can be discomforting, and it’s understandable to be a skeptic about radical change, but being a skeptic isn’t defined by saying “that can’t happen ever because it won’t happen in my lifetime.” Skepticism is about asking questions, about learning before making a decision. Is it fair to call something “idealist” because you don’t think it will happen in your lifetime? No, not at all. If you want to see what an actual idealist ideology is, look at anarcho-capitalism, an ideology so blinded by unquestioning faith, ignorance of material conditions, and lack of introspection that it crumbles at the slightest hint of criticism, yet people believe in it anyways. These are people that believe the proletariat will benefit from the enrichment and totalitarian rule of the bourgeoisie, despite all material conditions pointing to the contrary. These are people who think that a system of feudalism will work perfectly fine, as long as you slap a new name on it and make the feudal lords capitalists instead of kings. That is idealism.

Bias towards the status quo is a very common occurrence, and we are all affected by it. Each and every one of us have biases, and we are influenced by them in ways we may not immediately understand. We cannot erase our biases, but we can be conscious of them, and try to form our understandings of the world in spite of them. Don’t let your comfort in the status quo blind you to how things could be someday. Even if you don’t live long enough to see a good change, does that make the change any less good? Nothing frustrates me more than spending time researching a certain topic, spending hours considering a concept, and making an argument about how the future can be made better, only to be called an idealist by someone who has done literally no thinking about the topic.

I’d like to make a simple request of you. Take some time to consider what you define as “idealism.” Are you calling people’s beliefs idealist because they ignore material conditions, or is it just an excuse to not challenge your preconceived notions about the world? If you’re a bit unsure, then maybe take the time to listen to someone’s arguments before putting a name on them. I ask you to be open minded, and willing to learn about new ideas, even if you are skeptical of them. 

I have advocated for a lot of radical ideas, beliefs that would necessitate drastic shifts from the norm, and nine times out of ten, the counter arguments I get aren’t even critiques of my beliefs themselves. Instead, people usually throw around terms like “idealism” and say that my ideas aren’t possible because of “human nature.” I ask you this: why do you think human nature is set in stone? Do you think human nature has remained unchanged for the past six thousand years? It flatly isn’t. Human nature is a very nebulous term, and definitions of it shift between cultures, civilizations, and even individual people. Does human nature prevent radical change from the norm, or are you so used to what you consider normal that you assume human nature is this fixed, unchanging idea? You know how I define human nature? I think human nature is a desire to build social bonds. Humans are not defined by traits like greed, lust, or selfish desire. These aren’t traits written into our DNA at birth. They are, rather, traits that are encouraged in a society where selfish people are rewarded for being selfish. If you change society, you change human nature. Humans are defined by the people around us, the cultures and societies that we are born into, and the entirety of human history has been the story of how society and culture changes.

Is it so hard to believe that human nature can change? If it is, I implore you to ask yourself why. The next time you say “that’s just the way it is,” ask yourself if that’s really true. Ask yourself if you’re conflating what is with what should be.