People are Getting Better and Better.

Back in the 1500s there was nothing people liked more than a good old cat-burning.  Now, says psychologist Steven Pinker, “such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world.”

Here’s what Stephen M. Kosslyn another Harvard psychologist thinks, as reported by Arnold Kling.

Just as a body builder can do curls to build up biceps and dips on parallel bars to build up triceps, we can design computer-game-like tasks that exercise specific parts of the brain&mdashmental muscles, if you will.

Maybe so.  Things are going to get better and better as our knowledge, our physical wellbeing, and our moral reasoning improves.

But I’ve just been reading Judith Rich Harris’s Nurture Assumption, and what all these people are missing out is Harris’s Big Idea.  Groupness.  We all belong to groups and we think that our group is best.

That’s why university professors all think that the world can be saved with a bit more scholarly research.

Let us take warfare.  In the lasts 500 years here in the West we have made astonishing advances in the technology of war, both on the hardware side and also on the organizational side.  Yet what really has changed?  The chaps in the Middle East have found a new way to wage war that is designed to neutralize the Western advantages in technology and in human organization.  They’ve organized themselves into small, village-sized cells that conduct old-fashioned border wars on the lumbering modern western beast.

Here’s what progress does.  It raises the stakes.