I love your optimism, which is shared by Steven Pinker. However, while science and technology have undoubtedly progressed and made lives longer and better in many ways since the Scientific Revolution in the 16th Century, I don't see that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. When I look at anthropogenic deaths. they increased steadily and peaked in the 20th Century: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kznk5
It is also hard to see Fukuyama's "End of History," which he predicted due to the victory of liberal democracies. There are over a million Uyghurs in Xi's concentration camps. In addition to China, authoritarian regimes are flourishing in Russia, Turkey, Syria, Burma, N.Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan. Liberal democracy is also threatened in the West: notably, Brazil and Hungary, and let us not forget January 6.
Quick thoughts from someone who has given this zero thought until today:
1) Doesn't this analysis pick up larger conflicts over smaller, local conflicts? And wouldn't smaller, local conflicts be more prominent the further back we go in history? For example, while pre-Columbian Native American societies may not have had large scale wars over vast territories, they had non-stop smaller skirmishes between various tribes over resources, land, or even "mourning wars". Not to mention the rampant human sacrifice in South American pre-Columbian societies being excluded. I assume similar events missing across the globe (i.e., how many anthropogenic deaths were tied to Vikings, Feudal Japan, etc which don't appear to be accounted for)
I haven't done the math, but it could be the sum-of-the-parts for smaller conflicts may rival large scale - the latter of which we have much better record keeping and evidence for.
2) Column J, where we find "Deaths per million per year" I assume includes estimates for all of these pre-Columbian cultures and other places which had small-scale war are included in the denominator, which if I am right would under-represent the ratio as the numerator is lower than it probably should be.
3) Might a better measure be "odds of dying from murder" as a function of time? It's an extremely messy calculation and hinges on hundreds of assumptions, but I suspect if we had ways of knowing that with certainty the curve would be very favorable across all cohorts - even in places such as Syria, Columbia, Afghanistan which the odds are magnitudes higher than the US, Sweden, or Japan, historically I suspect the former group has better odds today than 50, 100, 500 years ago.
You are quite right. I compiled it because Steven Picker didn't look at this in his charts in "Enlightenment Now." I was just looking for a rough estimate, particularly focusing on the modern era. I drew only from the sources listed, which gave ranges, but I took a middle number. I also didn't list deaths below one million, and I only focused on events, so you are right that if murder was widespread, non-genocidal, and population was very low, as in the B.C.E. past, there are underestimates. But it is hard to ignore the murderous 20th Century. The unavoidable conclusion is that the horrors humans inflict on one another, the best measure of our lack of morality, has not abated.
Human nature has not changed. We continue to be as murderous (towards out-groups) as we always were, and as altruistic (towards in-groups) as we always were. Life-saving technology has improved, but life-destroying technology has improved too. The hope that Dr. King, drawing on Judeo-Christian ideals, so eloquently expressed is that we must learn to include all of humankind in our in-group.
Moral improvement has come from secular sources? Both Parker and King were Christian preachers. I just quoted King today on another comments board: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”
Religious institutions in the past several centuries, particularly the Spanish missionaries in North America, were brutal oppressors. But it was Christian individuals, in the case of the abolitionists and SCLC, who moved the moral development of the US forward.
With the 20 th century being the bloodiest in history, I am hard pressed to agree that The Enlightenment changed the arc toward justice. Communism, nazism, and now cynics with power, none of whom are religious, wreak havoc on innocent people with their desire to control. Good religion serves a good purpose
But like everything else, needs oversite to prevent fanaticism
Well done, AGAIN. I see much in your view that is congruent to a logical analysis of human cultural history. I have read all your books and the three I have found most influential on and supportive to my thinking are, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc and Why People Believe Weird Things. I think that this essay and the three books are important in describing and understanding the progress made by humans in the development of moral constructs. I also think that a more prescriptive view and understanding , like Dan Dennett’s (Breaking The Spell) and Sam Harris’ (The End of Faith) is necessary to a way forward for human moral progress. It could be said that one of the most distinctive elements of human adaptive behavior, over the course of evolution, is the making and use of tools. From this perspective moral constructs would be considered a developed tool(s) rather than, as is most commonly argued, being based on or developed as “beliefs.” Like Sam Harris, I favor a Scientific Methodology for determining the best understandings of how different moral principals could be formed free from reliance on beliefs or suppositions not falsifiable by accessible and verifiable evidence in sharable data and experiences. This, I think, would be a more realistic way forward for successful human social progress.
Beautiful essay, Michael. Thank you for lending your voice to honor the legacy of Dr. King and to highlight his tremendous contributions to our society. I do believe that our ethical progress must continue if we are to survive as a species. The plateaus that we've reached are backsliding.
My reflection is that there are big distinctions that have been watered down in our collective discourse to practical imperception, for example, 1) the difference between virtue-signaling and moral courage, 2) the difference between promoting ideas we've been told without question and actual problem-solving which necessitates free inquiry and rigorous questioning, and 3) the difference between saying the "right thing" to fit in to a socially or politically-acceptable moral matrix and the difficult work of developing character by building a relationship with one's own conscience.
Seeing them lined up, these distinctions are unified by a single modern ideal: individualism.
On the one hand, there's a value for the individual, their autonomy, their personal conscience, what it means for them personally to demonstrate moral courage, and the freedom to ask questions and seek understanding.
On the other hand, the individual is subordinate to the group, "right and wrong" are dictated by the prevailing group orthodoxy, dissent is silenced, and questions are not only discouraged, but often met with punitive consequence.
Individualism is the cornerstone of all the freedoms we cherish.
Holy cow. I love that someone feels this way and wish I could share your optimism. This morning when reflecting on MLK, my honest thought was “If he were alive today, he’d be horrified and depressed.”
In the big picture yes, the world has become a better place to live in the last couple thousand years. That’s good. And in particular, mid-century America was a prosperous, hopeful, advancing place.
But in my short (post-MLK) lifetime, America has been falling apart. It’s been progressively harder for people to get the basics we were raised to expect were within the reach of anyone who tried hard: decent wages, decent education, a home, a secure retirement. Globally a few billionaires control most of the world’s resources and it’s unlikely anything will reverse that trend toward greater inequality.
Instead of greater harmony (racial, political, or otherwise), we have greater division than I’ve ever seen, with people increasingly getting their information from niche “news” sources that agree with what they want to hear. Formerly sensible people believe people who disagree with them are monsters, demons, evildoers.
American “democracy” has fallen so low that the famous Princeton study (Gilens and Page, 2014) concluded we were no longer a democracy but an oligarchy and in fact that the wishes of the people are not taken into consideration, at all, by our elected officials. Zero effect.
Exhibit A might be that during a pandemic, and despite about 70% of Americans in favor of it, we still can’t get health care for all, which most of the rest of the world has enjoyed for decades. As a result we’ve had more death per capita than most other places. But the billionaires have done quite well.
But it’s not just the pandemic. We spent 20 years after 9/11 pissing away our nation’s resources and destroying what remained of our international reputation to pursue wars for profit.
Now during the current global disaster, instead of being honest about the most likely source of the virus (ie, a lab leak of a modified virus) our leaders have actively participated in covering this up, and therefore no one is engaged in serious conversations that need to be had about ending the type of gain-of-function research that has killed about 5.5 million people in the last couple years and which, if a worse virus gets out next time (and lab accidents are quite common) could easily end human life on the planet.
These are dark times for humanity. I doubt we have much time left. I hope the octopuses do a much better job than we did.
It's interesting you mention "people increasingly getting their information from niche “news” sources that agree with what they want to hear" while simultaneously pointing out that the lab leak which may-or-may-not have been the result of GoF research is the most likely source, which I only learned about through "niche news sources" as there was zero coverage on CNN, NYT, WaPo initially (and still is a striking disinterestedness in pursuing what actually happened). I agree with that at this point, Occam's Razor leans to lab leak of a virus modified through GoF research.
Also I am afraid your point about 9/11 "We spent 20 years after 9/11 pissing away our nation’s resources and destroying what remained of our international reputation to pursue wars for profit." may indicate where we are headed for the next decade or two - "War on Viruses" could be our new "War on __________________" (communism, drugs, terror). We have gotten essentially zero ROI for the 6 trillion we already printed, and it seems this will be embedded in our policy and bureaucracy regardless of who is in Washington for quite some time.
Yes. I agree. My comment about niche news is definitely not an endorsement of the most likely alternative (CNN et al.). The CNN viewers are still treating the lab leak idea as if it’s crazy-pants, and those folks are completely uninformed about the genome and how insanely unlikely a natural origin has become (the improbability of a furin cleavage site, that big insert, arising as a perfect set of inserted mutations, with no disruption to the genome around it, is just astronomically high, like rolling a 6 ten times in a row. It doesn’t sound THAT unlikely to Joe Blow until someone does the math for him and he realizes it would take on average about 15 years rolling dice nonstop to do it) and especially in the context of other information, and with no “smoking bat” or any data to support zoonosis.
It was more an indictment of outlets like Fox and MSNBC where accusations, insults, opinions, and manipulative & hyperemotional language, and telling people what they want to hear (you’re good and right and sensible; those other people are just b-a-d) pass for news, with predictable results.
Yes. A real “War on Viruses” (meaning kill everything we’ve developed, and shut down almost every lab, with the remaining labs in very remote regions with strict protocols, not in cities of 11 million people) would be welcome, but if it’s like our other faux wars — a way to siphon money to your cronies and rob the American people, not so great.
The potential for humankind to be wiped out within the next 50-100 years is pretty darn high. In 2014 when the Cambridge Working Group called for a moratorium on GoF research, citing its incredible dangers, they claimed biosafety incidents were frighteningly common. "Such incidents have been accelerating and have been occurring on average over twice a week with regulated pathogens in academic and government labs across the country." Just as these scientists feared, the world has now been polluted with a novel, partly engineered virus (possibly two) that has caused millions of people to die and has negatively affected every person on the planet. All we need is an engineered Nipah or MERS coming out of a sloppy lab in China (and state department cables did mention their sloppy safety practices) and it all ends. This is hardly a dip in the curve. This is a critical moment, and almost no one is even paying attention, much less taking action.
I disagree. It is another dip in the upward curve. There are two major enabling factors, i.e. evolution and social learning, which will continue to push the curve upward. Big and complex brains will be favored by evolution and we will learn from the mistakes we make.
I love your optimism, which is shared by Steven Pinker. However, while science and technology have undoubtedly progressed and made lives longer and better in many ways since the Scientific Revolution in the 16th Century, I don't see that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. When I look at anthropogenic deaths. they increased steadily and peaked in the 20th Century: https://tinyurl.com/2p8kznk5
It is also hard to see Fukuyama's "End of History," which he predicted due to the victory of liberal democracies. There are over a million Uyghurs in Xi's concentration camps. In addition to China, authoritarian regimes are flourishing in Russia, Turkey, Syria, Burma, N.Korea, Iran, Venezuela and Afghanistan. Liberal democracy is also threatened in the West: notably, Brazil and Hungary, and let us not forget January 6.
Fascinating spreadsheet, is that your work?
Quick thoughts from someone who has given this zero thought until today:
1) Doesn't this analysis pick up larger conflicts over smaller, local conflicts? And wouldn't smaller, local conflicts be more prominent the further back we go in history? For example, while pre-Columbian Native American societies may not have had large scale wars over vast territories, they had non-stop smaller skirmishes between various tribes over resources, land, or even "mourning wars". Not to mention the rampant human sacrifice in South American pre-Columbian societies being excluded. I assume similar events missing across the globe (i.e., how many anthropogenic deaths were tied to Vikings, Feudal Japan, etc which don't appear to be accounted for)
I haven't done the math, but it could be the sum-of-the-parts for smaller conflicts may rival large scale - the latter of which we have much better record keeping and evidence for.
2) Column J, where we find "Deaths per million per year" I assume includes estimates for all of these pre-Columbian cultures and other places which had small-scale war are included in the denominator, which if I am right would under-represent the ratio as the numerator is lower than it probably should be.
3) Might a better measure be "odds of dying from murder" as a function of time? It's an extremely messy calculation and hinges on hundreds of assumptions, but I suspect if we had ways of knowing that with certainty the curve would be very favorable across all cohorts - even in places such as Syria, Columbia, Afghanistan which the odds are magnitudes higher than the US, Sweden, or Japan, historically I suspect the former group has better odds today than 50, 100, 500 years ago.
Anyway, very interesting spreadsheet!
You are quite right. I compiled it because Steven Picker didn't look at this in his charts in "Enlightenment Now." I was just looking for a rough estimate, particularly focusing on the modern era. I drew only from the sources listed, which gave ranges, but I took a middle number. I also didn't list deaths below one million, and I only focused on events, so you are right that if murder was widespread, non-genocidal, and population was very low, as in the B.C.E. past, there are underestimates. But it is hard to ignore the murderous 20th Century. The unavoidable conclusion is that the horrors humans inflict on one another, the best measure of our lack of morality, has not abated.
Human nature has not changed. We continue to be as murderous (towards out-groups) as we always were, and as altruistic (towards in-groups) as we always were. Life-saving technology has improved, but life-destroying technology has improved too. The hope that Dr. King, drawing on Judeo-Christian ideals, so eloquently expressed is that we must learn to include all of humankind in our in-group.
Moral improvement has come from secular sources? Both Parker and King were Christian preachers. I just quoted King today on another comments board: “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”
Religious institutions in the past several centuries, particularly the Spanish missionaries in North America, were brutal oppressors. But it was Christian individuals, in the case of the abolitionists and SCLC, who moved the moral development of the US forward.
With the 20 th century being the bloodiest in history, I am hard pressed to agree that The Enlightenment changed the arc toward justice. Communism, nazism, and now cynics with power, none of whom are religious, wreak havoc on innocent people with their desire to control. Good religion serves a good purpose
But like everything else, needs oversite to prevent fanaticism
Mr. Shermer,
Well done, AGAIN. I see much in your view that is congruent to a logical analysis of human cultural history. I have read all your books and the three I have found most influential on and supportive to my thinking are, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc and Why People Believe Weird Things. I think that this essay and the three books are important in describing and understanding the progress made by humans in the development of moral constructs. I also think that a more prescriptive view and understanding , like Dan Dennett’s (Breaking The Spell) and Sam Harris’ (The End of Faith) is necessary to a way forward for human moral progress. It could be said that one of the most distinctive elements of human adaptive behavior, over the course of evolution, is the making and use of tools. From this perspective moral constructs would be considered a developed tool(s) rather than, as is most commonly argued, being based on or developed as “beliefs.” Like Sam Harris, I favor a Scientific Methodology for determining the best understandings of how different moral principals could be formed free from reliance on beliefs or suppositions not falsifiable by accessible and verifiable evidence in sharable data and experiences. This, I think, would be a more realistic way forward for successful human social progress.
I like people who think and write well. Excellent.
Beautiful essay, Michael. Thank you for lending your voice to honor the legacy of Dr. King and to highlight his tremendous contributions to our society. I do believe that our ethical progress must continue if we are to survive as a species. The plateaus that we've reached are backsliding.
My reflection is that there are big distinctions that have been watered down in our collective discourse to practical imperception, for example, 1) the difference between virtue-signaling and moral courage, 2) the difference between promoting ideas we've been told without question and actual problem-solving which necessitates free inquiry and rigorous questioning, and 3) the difference between saying the "right thing" to fit in to a socially or politically-acceptable moral matrix and the difficult work of developing character by building a relationship with one's own conscience.
Seeing them lined up, these distinctions are unified by a single modern ideal: individualism.
On the one hand, there's a value for the individual, their autonomy, their personal conscience, what it means for them personally to demonstrate moral courage, and the freedom to ask questions and seek understanding.
On the other hand, the individual is subordinate to the group, "right and wrong" are dictated by the prevailing group orthodoxy, dissent is silenced, and questions are not only discouraged, but often met with punitive consequence.
Individualism is the cornerstone of all the freedoms we cherish.
Holy cow. I love that someone feels this way and wish I could share your optimism. This morning when reflecting on MLK, my honest thought was “If he were alive today, he’d be horrified and depressed.”
In the big picture yes, the world has become a better place to live in the last couple thousand years. That’s good. And in particular, mid-century America was a prosperous, hopeful, advancing place.
But in my short (post-MLK) lifetime, America has been falling apart. It’s been progressively harder for people to get the basics we were raised to expect were within the reach of anyone who tried hard: decent wages, decent education, a home, a secure retirement. Globally a few billionaires control most of the world’s resources and it’s unlikely anything will reverse that trend toward greater inequality.
Instead of greater harmony (racial, political, or otherwise), we have greater division than I’ve ever seen, with people increasingly getting their information from niche “news” sources that agree with what they want to hear. Formerly sensible people believe people who disagree with them are monsters, demons, evildoers.
American “democracy” has fallen so low that the famous Princeton study (Gilens and Page, 2014) concluded we were no longer a democracy but an oligarchy and in fact that the wishes of the people are not taken into consideration, at all, by our elected officials. Zero effect.
Exhibit A might be that during a pandemic, and despite about 70% of Americans in favor of it, we still can’t get health care for all, which most of the rest of the world has enjoyed for decades. As a result we’ve had more death per capita than most other places. But the billionaires have done quite well.
But it’s not just the pandemic. We spent 20 years after 9/11 pissing away our nation’s resources and destroying what remained of our international reputation to pursue wars for profit.
Now during the current global disaster, instead of being honest about the most likely source of the virus (ie, a lab leak of a modified virus) our leaders have actively participated in covering this up, and therefore no one is engaged in serious conversations that need to be had about ending the type of gain-of-function research that has killed about 5.5 million people in the last couple years and which, if a worse virus gets out next time (and lab accidents are quite common) could easily end human life on the planet.
These are dark times for humanity. I doubt we have much time left. I hope the octopuses do a much better job than we did.
It's interesting you mention "people increasingly getting their information from niche “news” sources that agree with what they want to hear" while simultaneously pointing out that the lab leak which may-or-may-not have been the result of GoF research is the most likely source, which I only learned about through "niche news sources" as there was zero coverage on CNN, NYT, WaPo initially (and still is a striking disinterestedness in pursuing what actually happened). I agree with that at this point, Occam's Razor leans to lab leak of a virus modified through GoF research.
Also I am afraid your point about 9/11 "We spent 20 years after 9/11 pissing away our nation’s resources and destroying what remained of our international reputation to pursue wars for profit." may indicate where we are headed for the next decade or two - "War on Viruses" could be our new "War on __________________" (communism, drugs, terror). We have gotten essentially zero ROI for the 6 trillion we already printed, and it seems this will be embedded in our policy and bureaucracy regardless of who is in Washington for quite some time.
Yes. I agree. My comment about niche news is definitely not an endorsement of the most likely alternative (CNN et al.). The CNN viewers are still treating the lab leak idea as if it’s crazy-pants, and those folks are completely uninformed about the genome and how insanely unlikely a natural origin has become (the improbability of a furin cleavage site, that big insert, arising as a perfect set of inserted mutations, with no disruption to the genome around it, is just astronomically high, like rolling a 6 ten times in a row. It doesn’t sound THAT unlikely to Joe Blow until someone does the math for him and he realizes it would take on average about 15 years rolling dice nonstop to do it) and especially in the context of other information, and with no “smoking bat” or any data to support zoonosis.
It was more an indictment of outlets like Fox and MSNBC where accusations, insults, opinions, and manipulative & hyperemotional language, and telling people what they want to hear (you’re good and right and sensible; those other people are just b-a-d) pass for news, with predictable results.
Yes. A real “War on Viruses” (meaning kill everything we’ve developed, and shut down almost every lab, with the remaining labs in very remote regions with strict protocols, not in cities of 11 million people) would be welcome, but if it’s like our other faux wars — a way to siphon money to your cronies and rob the American people, not so great.
You are just looking a dip in the curve, but overall it is still trending upward. We still have work to do.
The potential for humankind to be wiped out within the next 50-100 years is pretty darn high. In 2014 when the Cambridge Working Group called for a moratorium on GoF research, citing its incredible dangers, they claimed biosafety incidents were frighteningly common. "Such incidents have been accelerating and have been occurring on average over twice a week with regulated pathogens in academic and government labs across the country." Just as these scientists feared, the world has now been polluted with a novel, partly engineered virus (possibly two) that has caused millions of people to die and has negatively affected every person on the planet. All we need is an engineered Nipah or MERS coming out of a sloppy lab in China (and state department cables did mention their sloppy safety practices) and it all ends. This is hardly a dip in the curve. This is a critical moment, and almost no one is even paying attention, much less taking action.
I disagree. It is another dip in the upward curve. There are two major enabling factors, i.e. evolution and social learning, which will continue to push the curve upward. Big and complex brains will be favored by evolution and we will learn from the mistakes we make.
We could all be dead next year, with the “right” lab leak. Big and complex brains take lots of time to evolve!
We could, but it is very unlikely. Even with a worse pandemic, not all human persons will die. Evolution and social learning will still be there.
Lol! I’m glad you’re so relaxed about it!
“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” – Aristotle
Bravo!
Michael, that is an excellent tribute to MLK and also a good description of your book The Moral Arc. Thanks for this essay.