Exactly. And I think this principle only gets stronger as we move up in scale. A world wide civilization, all pursuing the same goals, would be even stronger and could achieve even more than the present day United States, China, or European Union.
Sure, but their goals were contradictory with other big groups of humans. The reason armies exist is to fend off other armies. The Roman soldiers got along well with each other but their purpose was to war with the Carthaginian army.
Sure, but when they stopped getting along well with each other, they could no longer fend off roving bands of barbarians, much less another organized army (had there been one at the time). That’s the lesson I take away from the fall of Rome. More groups of people all pulling in the same direction (as they were at the height of the empire) = better things for all those doing the pulling. People deciding “every man / small group for themselves, let those other people worry about their own issues” = things get worse for all concerned.* If that’s correct, that means if we could get all of humanity to pull in the same direction, we could probably achieve even greater things. And I think we were headed that way, until for whatever reason some people decided that they cared more about messing things up for everyone else rather than continuing on the path to progress.
*. The mystery isn’t why “we all work together, we can achieve more vs. we all work separately we will achieve less” is a thing. That much seems obvious. The mystery, then as now, is why did those later era Romans / current day MAGA thinking westerners, decide to go with the “let’s all do our own thing rather than working together” route.
The problem with your examples is that they all literally involve warfare fueled by the desire to dominate and possess. The second world war was literally a global affair involving millions of people, huge amounts of money, and a level of organization never before seen on a global scale. Unfortunately, all of that did not go into social and medical improvements for the human race in general, It went into the need to dominate and the resistance necessary to prevent it.
So I am willing to believe it is. And that what we see currently is just a temporary back slide, just like so many before it in history
Though I am genuinely scared that’s not the case, that we are now at the peak and the my kids generation is the first that are only going to see its fall
Except that those that were in it to dominate were going against the philosophy of “let’s all work together to make things better”. And they paid the price for that. My guess is that a hypothetical Germany and Japan that had decided to work with the Jews, Gypsies, Koreans, Chinese, etc. rather than trying to dominate them would likely have performed better against the Allies than the real world versions of Germany and Japan did.
ETA: And of course the opposite held for the Allies. The US benefitted from the efforts of those traditionally excluded, whether that was Jewish scientists that worked on the nuclear bomb to Black and Latino soldiers who fought on the front lines.
My fear is that while most folk want EVERYONE ELSE to compete fairly, they’d really prefer if they personally had at least JUST A LITTLE advantage. Because they know they personally aren’t a bad person and wouldn’t do anything wrong as a result of their advantage, right?
I’m wondering if it is a worthwhile comparison that most high level sports need rules and officials. When the stakes get high enough, can the competitors truly be trusted to not seek out some minute advantage?
Maybe extending from that, I think that is one reason I lean towards a strong “socialist” government. I think that one positive sign of human nature is the extent to which they are willing to give up some amount of their personal autonomy to a government which will (presumably) work towards the benefit of the society as a whole.
For some reason, my recent readings about French history and the 100 years war really made me wonder where a consistent upward thread was for the past 2000 years. It was just a constant history of people fighting over their neighbors’ land and resources. I found Monaco especially disgusting. Some guy sneaks into town, lets in his army, steals the fucking place, and now, 700 years later, his playboy son has legitimacy as the “serene” ruler? So much of so many peoples’ histories are similar. Some time in the past, they were able to seize control of some land, and their legitimacy depends SOLELY on their ability to hang onto it.
In fact, when you learn about the Celts and Gauls, the Romans, the French/English/Burgundians - what does it really mean to speak of the “French” culture. Or folk who buy into the bible. So God supposedly simply chose the Jews out of all the other tribes? That He created? (But apparently wasn’t all that omnipotent or omniscient if he fucked them up so badly.) And sent a Messiah that no one asked for? And the Jews are somehow better than the Eqyptians, Sumerians, etc. whose cultures preceded them? And the Jews have more claim to this chunk of desert than the many other people who lived in and fought over it for 10-30,000 years?
Yeah, I know I’m getting far afield, and I do not wish to expand this thread beyond any/all meaning or interest. Thanks, all, for being willing to participate in this manner of musing in response to my recent musings and less than clear OP.
I don’t think it’s been consistent in that sense. It’s been more of a 3 steps forward 2 steps back than thing, with shorter periods of 1 step forward 2 steps back, and the three notable episodes of a whole lot of steps back with minimal steps forward (the fall of the western Roman Empire, the colonialism of the European powers towards non-European people that started in 1492, and the current MAGAfication of the western democracies).
We are designed by evolution, and we are as moral as evolution decided we needed to be to survive and thrive in our environmental niche. Parasitic wasps and butcher birds are very immoral from a human perspective because in their environmental niche that is how they need to act to survive. Evolution invented compassion, suffering and morality at the end of the day.
However as homo sapiens are social animals, we feel social emotions like empathy and compassion. Which is good. But on top of that, humans self domesticated. What supposedly happened is that starting around 600,000 years ago, our ancestors became so advanced that they were able to use tools and language to gang up on, and murder any alpha male bully who tried to take over the group. This helped remove those genes from our gene pool. As a result, homo sapiens are one of the more egalitarian primate species because we’d gang up on and murder the assholes in our hunter gatherer tribes. Also in cooperative societies, women preferred mating with the more cooperative males over the alpha bullies. This ‘could’ be a reason humans out-competed other homo species like the Neanderthals’.
When the researchers looked at those hundreds of BAZ1B-sensitive genes in modern humans, two Neanderthals, and one Denisovan, they found that in the modern humans, those genes had accumulated loads of regulatory mutations of their own. This suggests natural selection was shaping them. And because many of these same genes have also been under selection in other domesticated animals, modern humans, too, underwent a recent process of domestication, the team reports today in Science Advances.
Wrangham cautions that many different genes likely play a role in domestication, so we shouldn’t read too much evolutionary importance into BAZ1B. “What they’ve zeroed in on is one gene that is incredibly important … but it’s clear there are going to be multiple other candidate genes.”
As for why humans might have become domesticated in the first place, hypotheses abound. Wrangham favors the idea that as early people formed cooperative societies, evolutionary pressures favored mates whose features were less “alpha,” or aggressive. “There was active selection, for the very first time, against the bullies and the genes that favored their aggression,” he adds. But so far, “Humans are the only species that have managed this.”
That may not be believable, but its true. But again, its evolution. In the USSR they did an experiment where they took foxes and bred them in two directions. In one direction they used selective breeding to select for tameness and friendliness, and in the other direction they used selective breeding to pick for aggression. After a few generations (I forget how many) they had 2 species of foxes that acted totally different.
There is no overarching moral arc in the universe. Using ~10 generations of selective breeding, you could breed a species of humans that was full of sociopaths and evil people, or you could breed a species of humans that was full of love and compassion.
But humans are social animals, and on top of that we self domesticated. As a result, the arc of the moral universe for homo sapiens is towards justice.
Yeah - but specifically WRT France, I had a hard time appreciating Versailles or the great cathedrals, with my nagging question of exactly what the common man got from them - other than possibly as jobs programs. Meanwhile, the king and church just got richer and richer - so long as they had armies or strong friends to keep the peons in line.
Sure, there was a lot of great art and scientific advancements, but how much of that directly benefitted the mass of the population.
Then there was the revolution - followed shortly by Napoleon. Let’s gloss over the glories of French colonialism. And we’re up to the past couple of hundred years. A mere blink of the eye. And today, Le Pen’s party has considerable support, and there are ongoing struggles WRT secularism and immigration.
It is easy to look at the clean, efficient Metro and the ubiquitous flush toilets and say, “Look how far we have advanced.” But I’m not sure such “surface” elements tell the whole story.
I wanted to think as you suggest, of a gradual rising slope, with shorter, shallower adjustments. But when the past quarter century gets us the Iraq invasion and now essentially 1/2 of our voting population supports Trump? And seems to turn against science or competent public officials? It is hard to see this backstep as either shallow or short-lived. And the specter of increased Chinese and Russian global influence, and the seemingly widespread trend towards authoritarianism. (I have ZERO belief that the US should stand astride the world as the sole superpower. But I’m not persuaded of the beneficence of dominant Russian or Chinese regimes.)
The problem is that there are pendulum swings in the current behaviors and culture. Progress is a slow thing, and it has many backtracks.
But consider that the Western world is showing a long term trend for reduction in casual violence. I mean, look at the concepts of justice and humane treatment. It used to be common practice to stake people up on a cross and let them die a slow, painful death. It used to be common to secure people in the town square and let everyone else pelt the with trash. It used to be the death penalty had a much greater use. Now some countries have abolished it completely, and even in the US is use is more limited, with many levels of legal review, and a debate over the most humane method.
What used to be expected behavior is now considered barbarism.
The phrase about the arc of the universe bending toward justice only applies to humanity. The topic of that adage is collective human behavior. The point of the quote is not that there is continuous progress. The adage is predicated on the explicit comment that things don’t always get better. It’s the average over time that shows improvement.
It linen to me like we were seeing a long run of social improvement. We’ve hit a setback with Trump and MAGA, a countereaction to the progress that had been accumulating. How far back the pendum swings and for how longand how much damage is done, remains to be seen.
But I remain convinced that if we don’t mange to ignite a WIII, or trigger a nuclear exchange, or get invaded by space aliens, then our society will swing back eventually. I just hope to be alive to see it.
I can’t help but think of this more on an individual level. There’s a theory that the human brain comprises modules, or networks, that have differing evolutionary goals. Sometimes it’s the status network, sometimes it’s the mating network, or familial nurture, or whatever, and these different networks produce conscious thought to try to get you to do something associated with an evolutionary goal. And then the consciousness basically makes up a plausible story for why you had that thought or why you did that thing that probably has nothing to do with evolution.
As someone who spends a lot of time observing my thoughts, this makes sense to me. Most of what I observe are thoughts that can be interpreted as yet another bid to protect the self. My particular thoughts tend to be status-oriented, worried about failure and productivity and that sort of thing.
My point is, even at the individual level, there are conflicting goals and obfuscations. This gets even more complicated at the societal level. Humanity is a mixed bag. We have cooperative impulses and we have predatory impulses, those impulses create cultures, cultures can exaggerate or perpetuate how often those impulses are expressed. It’s all very complicated.
I’m not convinced that human society isn’t cyclical in terms of progress. This is outside my area of expertise but there are, as I understand it, hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization unaccounted for because nobody wrote anything down. We don’t even know our own history, really.
Given how much progress we’ve lost in such a short time, It’s hard for me not to feel we’re on our way down again.
Any excluded middle? It’s all excluded middle.
Humans and human society are basically both good and evil. Some incline more one way than the other.
That’s what gets into most history books, anyway.
I don’t think there is one to the universe, no.
But I think there has to be one in our species – or else we’re not going to survive.
We needed, and evolved, to cooperate in small groups working at intervals with much larger networks. That we can do, though sometimes better than others.
At our current population and technology levels – we need to do much better than that. We need to be able routinely to cooperate in large groups working more or less continuously with hugely larger networks. That we’re sometimes capable of that is proved by the fact that we got this far. That we’re sometimes not capable of that is shown all too clearly throughout both history and current events.
Whether we’re going to learn to manage it well enough in time to survive seems to me to be currently entirely unclear. We might not do it at all. We might manage only by knocking ourselves back to handfuls of survivors living in small groups cooperating occasionally with larger networks. I still think we might, just, somehow pull through at a higher population level than that; but as I said I’m not at all certain.
Human groups schism. Religious groups, political groups, economic groups, even family groups. That is simply what humans do.
Human groups also come together and cohere into larger groups. Religious groups, political groups, economic groups, family groups. This is also what humans do.
The question is how to encourage the latter tendency where it’s needed, and how to limit the former into forms in which it doesn’t do damage – and to do it without excluding from the wider group individuals, or for that matter groups, who in one way or another don’t fit in the wider group’s assumed boxes. It’s not a matter of going against human nature; because both of those things are part of human nature; but they need to be recognized as such; and they need to be recognized as both having usefulness.
Quoted by Wesley_Clark, not written by Wesley_Clark.
Bonobos have managed it. There may well be other examples; but it certainly isn’t only humans.
Quoted for truth.
Bonobos didn’t self domesticate though. My understanding is that the Congo river geographically separated the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos.
The ancestors of the bonobos were on the south side of the river, where there was abundant food and no competition from gorillas. On the north side where the chimpanzees evolved there was less food and more competition from gorillas.
So the bonobos evolved to be less aggressive and the chimpanzees evolved to be more aggressive because that is what their environments required of them to survive. But they didn’t self domesticate. The bonobos didn’t strategically kill off the assholes in their groups which over endless generations made them more domesticated. They were shaped by their environment.
From an economic perspective, there was growth, it was just much slower.
Supposedly before the industrial revolution, global GDP only grew by maybe 0.01% a year. Now in 2025 it grows by about ~4% a year.
Most of the social progress we’ve seen came after the industrial revolution that started in the late 18th century. For whatever reason, as society becomes wealthier we also become more humane. There has been far more progress in human rights in the last 300 years (1725 to 2025) than there ever was in any 300 year period before the industrial revolution (like 2700 BCE to 2400 BCE). In the last 300 years we’ve seen a lot of progress on human, civil and political rights.
Wealth, health and acting like decent people all go hand in hand.
When out-groups grow in number and power, the in-groups become more terroristic, authoritarian and reactionary to protect their status, privilege and safety. In the post civil war society we saw the rise of the KKK. In the 1920s with mass immigration and first wave feminism the KKK came back. In the 1960s with second wave feminism and the civil rights movement the KKK came back.
The MAGA movement is just the 4th iteration of the KKK, pushing back against egalitarianism and social justice. Hopefully in the long run it fails just like the KKK eventually failed the first 3 times. Life isn’t perfect, but it did get better. Jim Crow was better than slavery. The post civil rights act world was better than the world before it. A US where a black person can become president is a better place than a US where that isn’t possible.
Things aren’t perfect, but they are moving forward. thats why the 4th incarnation of the KKK in the form of the MAGA movement is so powerful, because in-groups want to push back against progress.
There’s a good documentary on HBO Max about Frederick Douglass - most notably, his speeches.
I think about Douglass a lot. He spent all that time fighting slavery and at long last, saw abolition come to pass, but by the time he was older, Jim Crow had undone so much of that progress.
And he just kept going.
I think to a certain extent, we are the ones who decide which way the arc of the moral universe bends. There will always be people fighting for good.
There’s an idea I heard floated that the biggest factor in increasing humaneness was the advent of public works that provided clean water and got sewage out of the streets. But that might be backwards, because public works projects are largely altruistic. The drive to clean up and prevent disease came from somewhere beyond just the knowledge of germs.
It’s interesting that there are still cultures in the world that behave in ways is westerners consider barbaric and below humanity, when in fact those behaviors have historically been how humanity behaved. There’s something about the Enlightenment that drove to improve the lives of the everyday person. The more power shifted to a wider group, the more people viewed society as responsible for that larger group.
As the outgroups became in, they broadened the rules to include themselves. That’s why diversity is so important. If you really feel all people have equal inherent worth (as opposed to worth they earn with actions), then it is necessary to include as many different people in the decision-making groups to ensure they have a voice.
Witness what happens when, for instance, trans inclusion to Congress is limited. The current power brokers are under pressure to exclude trans people. Fortunately, there are allies, but unfortunately, the allies’ power is also limited at this time.
These are interesting concepts - that altruism is shown through public works. Or, as others say, enabled by wealth. When everyone is working at a subsistence level, it might be challenging to look out for others. Of course, I suspect that even in the remote past, folk saw the benefit in working for the good of the clan/tribe - dividing duties, caring for the young/ill…
So I have to acknowledge that, throughout MOST of the world, outright slavery has been abolished. And there are more non-monarchical/dictatorial governments. Like I said upthread, there have been improvements in literacy, access to energy/clean water, life expectancy… But such improvements fall quite short of what is often urged in developed economies, that we love - and celebrate - our fellow man, irrespective of their color, religion, ethnicity, gender identity…
I find myself wondering, how much of public works reflects the self interested of the wealthy/ powerful. Good drinking water and sewage disposal helps keep the wealthy from getting sick, as well as the poor. Providing public works might serve a PR purpose - “Don’t question why we run things - look at the wonderful aqueduct/sewers we built for you!” And the wealthy/powerful have an interest in maintaining a healthy - and relatively complacent - mass of workers.
I think I would have to say that, if I consider humaneness/altruism as an increase in basic sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare available to all persons, there has been an increase.
Thanks again for the discussion. Happy to keep it going.
Or it might be essential; because anyone might, at any time, be urgently in need of the assistance of their neighbors; who’d be far more likely to provide it to those they could count on to do the same for them.
(side note)
Which was a fallacious way of teaching it: many of these civilizations overlapped for centuries, and at the time of displacing one another from regional dominance they were civilizational peers, “progress” happening because time passed. e.g. Alexander overthrows Achaemenid Persia but after the fall of the Hellenistic kingdoms the Parthians and Sasanians held both Old and New Rome to a stalemate for half a millennium and then had splendid civilization under various Islamic dynasties. Western history teachers just stopped paying attention to anyone non-Europe-based after the Punic Wars.