I think today’s individual moral standards are based on one supreme moral statement – that the individual is the supreme arbitrator of every moral issue. For that individual, of course. I think the roots go back thousands of years, of course, but the recent flowering, if you can call it that, has a lot to do with, among other things, the expansion of ‘human rights’, with vast numbers being added to the earlier ‘freedom from’ ones.

Of course, ‘no man is an island’, and a morality based on the primacy of the individual’s rights isn’t easily adapted to constructing a society or even a family. I had a debate recently with people who claimed that some variation of the Golden Rule would serve as a non-religious basis for morality, but alone it won’t, if only because the way I want to be treated might actually not be the way others want to be treated. It might not even be the way I should be treated, for my ultimate benefit.

And that brings me to one of the more infuriating aspects of modern society. The people who are the most adamant about the rights of the individual often seem to be extremely reluctant to allow other individuals the same rights of self-determination. It’s not enough that they can choose to commit suicide without social or legal stigma; they must change the laws that protect others, who might not agree with them, from being manipulated or forced into suicide. I could go down a laundry list of contentious social issues – the more contentious it is, the more likely that the people arguing loudest for the rights of the individual to self-determination will want the force of law behind their views on the matter.

I could go on to the way in which a lot of philosophizing and study of society in our individualistic culture focusses on groups, and their interactions, rather than on individuals. To dig up an idea from another discussion, it’s like the difference between social workers and community development workers. Social workers, originally, anyway, worked to help individuals. Now, we also have workers devoted to helping entire communities – which sounds nice, I suppose, but there’s a profound and indigestible split in a society that on the one hand has a conviction that every individual should have and live by a very personal and individual moral code, and on the other that individuals are only important as members of groups, and it’s the power relationships among the groups that we really have to work at.

I’ve also come to the conviction over the last few years that to be truly human, we can’t be entirely individualistic. We have to look outwards from ourselves towards others. We can’t do that if we’re busy trying to remake the laws to reflect our personal morality, or looking at another individual and seeing only a member of a group.

Fukuyama thinks government has about reached the Praxitiles point–that nothing works as well for the strength of the state or the well-being of its citizenry as the fairly narrow range–considering all the possibilities–between about Sweden as the most intrusive, and Singapore as the least regulated. He does not say all nations must or shall adopt governments within that range, but that if they don’t it will be for other reasons than the strength f the nation or the material well-being of the citizenry. In a century or so, we may know whether or not he is right.

But a lot of what Jane covers as “progress as we understand it” is not how “we” understand it at all–it’s moral progress of the liberal/progressive sort, which argues not for a constant moral standard, but a changing one, continually redefined by The People. (Understand The People in this sense are a cadre of “intellectuals” you could put in a decent auditorium.)
It is one thing to have a moral standard–say Matthew 12: 29 & 30–and need centuries to work out the implications. It is a very different thing to say, as Matthew Arnold Does, that “some day we will be more moral than Jesus” and establish one’s own standard for morality–with, of course, the implication that the next person may adopt an entirely different moral standard.
It is this sense of progress which lets the dedicated progressive go from believing that it is wrong to treat people differently according to their race in 1967, to saying it is right to do so in 1969, or which lets the APA go from treating a patient for being homosexual to treating a patient for being ashamed of being homosexual in a matter of weeks. Jane is quite right to say that neither Aristotle nor Augustine would be much impressed by this notion of progress. She is somewhat misleading to say “we” believe in it.
In the words of Sammy Goldwyn, include me out.