Period of moral decline. So it seems convincing but there isnt argument that we are in an era of moral progress and i think more people are starting to speak on this side of moral progress and economic, tangible progress in the world. As i point out in my own forthcoming book libertarian mind, we have seen a reduction in the world of war, slavery, violence of all kinds, we have seen a tendency toward individual rights, Economic Freedom and democracy, those are important elements of progress including moral progress. A new issue of cato policy report, the newsletter for kato sponsors includes a transcript of a speech given at this podium not long ago by stephen banker in which he says the world is Getting Better and better so why is everybody so pessimistic, he tries to understand why is why are people so pessimistic and the Cato Institute has created a web site called humanprogress. Org. Over 700 sets of data on this web site. Everything from child birth to womens rights to democracy that suggests a great deal of progress in the world. I am not sure that website tells you why this progress has come about and that is one of the topics in a new book from henry holt, a publisher is that we will be talking about today. Author of this book Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of skeptic magazine, mccollum is assigned to the american and regular contributors to time. Com and the president ial fellow at chapman university. The is the author of numerous previous books including the be leading brain, from ghosts and dogs to politics and conspiracies, how we construct beliefs and reinforce the mess truths, but the mind of the market on evolutionary economics, why darwin matters, and the science of good and evil. Today he is here to talk about his newest book. Welcomed the author moral arc how science and reason lead humanity toward truth, justice, and freedom, Michael Shermer. It was a degrees when i left california. I dont even have a jacket. I just have this. In make adjustments i guess. The Human Progress website is quite good. I wish it had come out when i was doing my research. There are quite a few of us talking about moral progress. Is not really popular. There are reasons why pessimism sells better than optimism. For me it is a natural extension of what i do. We are a crows science magazine, science and reason is our thing and i have written books talked a lot about science and pseudo science science and religion, science and morality to what extent can science have anything to say about morality and the standard line is it has nothing to say about right and wrong it is a whole separate thing, religion or philosophy so i disagree with that. That is one of the thesis of my book, science and reason have been the primary drivers of moral progress and not religion as much. My title comes from a the inspirational speech of Martin Luther king jr. The climax of his march from selma to montgomerie which is beautifully portrayed in the film that is up for an oscar now. I didnt note, i thought it was a great story, what it took to get there. The speech was given not on the steps of the capital. Every story you read about the selma march that king gave his famous speech from the steps at montgomery, he didnt. Wallace wouldnt let him on the government property. They had to do it on the back of a flatbed truck parked in front on the street. That was interesting. So Nineteenth Century abolitionist creature named Theodore Parker said about the moral universe my i reaches little ways and i cant tell for sure but it looks to me like the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice and that is working got that. It worked. The Civil Rights Movement and demanding equal rights resulting in the Voting Rights act of 1965, four or five months where you could see dr. King looking over president johnsons shoulders signing that into law and granting the franchise to all adults in a society is what we mean by a liberal democracy where everybody gets to vote. This data set, i will have quite a few here today shows there were none in the 1800s. It wasnt really until after the First World War and after the Second World War that there was a real burst in the spread of democracy. The policy project rates democracies on the 110 scale. Some democracies are better than others lose some are transparent, some more corrupt. In hours money doesnt influence the democratic process. [laughter] america slid from 8 to 7. In any case, that is a sign of moral progress if you fink expanding this year to include more people as having equal rights, that is a sign of progress. Part of it is granting the franchise to women and womens rights. You can see the process here. I have the slide. Do i need to here we go. Sorry about that. Just going to try that. That is okay. I will just use i will just use my hand. Anyway. You cant see we didnt pass until 1920 but were quite a way ahead of everyone else. I thought was interesting these little areas in the 1800ss where women were granted the right to vote. Pitt karen island, 12 people, easy to get a majority. The guy owns new zealand and pretty much every country in the world with the exception of saudi arabia. Perhaps in 2015. The vatican city said never. How did it come about . They start from the bottom up. The process of the people that dont have the rights demanding that they have them. They march protest, they say this is not right and we wont put up with this anymore. I came across this amazing photograph of one of the early rights revolution leaders mulholland in her march on washington d. C. In 1913 she led a march on a white stallion. I would follow her anywhere on that white stallion. It would be hard to object to that. Courses are big. I have a chapter on civil rights, womens rights, and so long. Talking about those in turn. You can see the turning point in mid1990s when the percentage of 24 to 32yearold gwynn and was the four year College Degree, in 1970 went from 8 gap to essentially reversing to 7 ahead of men and crossing that line in the year 1990s and having a College Degree correlates with Economic Prosperity so the closing of the gap again from 25 to 34yearolds in the peak of when you really start generating your income from 67 difference in 1980 to 93 difference in 2012. You also see a smaller number like the 73 or 77 figure because theyre counting all age groups and what often happens is there is a gap demographically across time and this is the most important one. That shows progress. Now we are in the middle of another rights revolution. The amazing thing about this right revolution is we can see unfolding before our eyes and keep track of who is against it and who is for it and how the change comes about. Began in 1979 in stonewalling new york with the protests that you can see the changing attitudes from the 1970s when most people believed gays should not have equal opportunity, game marriage should not be legal, to crossing over in the mid and 2000s to over 50 for most people, gallup polls and general survey polls. Even the president changed his mind. In 2008 he said marriage is between man and woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. He is of the girl saying this. Now in 2012 he says i just concluded for me personally is important for me to go and a firm i think samesex couples should be able to get married. You can see it crossed close to where just after he changed his mind that politicians do. That is what everybody does. People get swept along with the tide of the changing rights revolution and those who are opposed to it just quit talking about it. Rarely does anybody else and publicly say i changed my mind. You have to if you are the president but most people change their mind quietly and dont say anything more about it. More secular European Countries like germany gay marriage and samesex marriage and gayrights is truly noncontroversial. These are friends of my wife who is german. Lot samesex marriages there, he is no big deal. No one talks about it. Is a non event. They look at us like we are barbaric for even having this conversation. You can see how it comes about in terms of age. Millennial far the most unfavorable. People born after 1981. Generation x is lagging behind, people born after 1965. Baby boomers are slowly being pulled up with our fingernails dug in and taking on for dear life. The silent generation not likely to give it up but they will be gone soon enough anyway. That is an old observation actually. Mark flunk observed in science revolutions only change when the old guard dies out and the new guard comes up. So who opposes this . Primarily religious fundamentalists and litter realists. White evangelicals, black protestants, white protestants and catholics have been largely against it. Revolution has been led by the religiously affiliated and to give credit where credit is to the episcopalians and secular jews were in favor of gay marriage long ago. Some good news for you libertarians hearing favor of the legalization of pot and gay marriage, i found biblical support for both. In live thick as chapter 20 it says if i man lies with another man he must be stoned. So other kinds of progress, the abolition of torture collapsed by the mid19th century. The United Statess injunction against cruel and unusual punishment would include torture. Not enhance interrogation but these are just words. Nothing like what used to be fairly like breaking on the wheel after you poked a guy full of holes and strapped into a wheel and brake him with hammers or burning at the stake or signing somebody in half upsidedown. Takes longer to die. Impaler monopole or scraping, ripped the skin off of somebody and the reason this happen is not because of a new religious interpretation of the bible or revelation from the deity and interpretation of that became from enlightened philosophers trying to think how can we improve society . Irrational means of changing social policy and political policy . People like jeremy the 1764 book on essays. As a on crime and punishment. This was the first to propose the idea of proportionality. There ought to be a fixed proportion between crime and punishment. That was the idea. He invented that ideas that if you want to change Human Behavior and get people to do Something Different raptors and just punish them, rather than recruit of justice might give them their just dues, law, up, lets see if we can improve society by changing people by giving them different motivational structures. So this comes from christopher balms work on the studying of Capital Punishment amongst huntergatherers today and then in the archaeological record to the extent that you can figure that out. And the reason for this is because in order to have a relatively peaceful, just society thats stable, you have to deal with free riders and bullies. And so theres all sorts of ways of dealing with them nonviolently, you know shunning gossipping ab them about them embarrassing them, not inviting them to your party [laughter] all sorts of social pressures you can put on people that dont play nice, by the rules. But, ultimately, pretty much almost every group that balm has found practices Capital Punishment. Just pause if you have a large because if you have a large enough population by chance youre going to get somebody who is just a real bastard who just will not come around, whos just not a nice fellow, a real bully. And so hes got several stories about how they do it, and its an eye opener. They dont have some to have more i humane techniques like the guillotine or the firing squad or old sparky the electric chair or the process of botched executions through drugs. But instead, no, they just take em out for a hunting expedition, and they dont come back with him x. There are just various ways you get rid of him, throw him off a cliff bash him in the head, fill him up with arrows, that sort of thing. But thats a fairly barbaric way of dealing with problems like that. In the United States, the death sentence has been collapsing the granting of death sentences has dropped dramatically since the mid 1990s which was reflecting the crime wave of the 70s and 80s as more and more death penalties were handed out. And lagging slightly behind that are the number of executions actually carried out thats also on the decline. As you probably know, most criminals on death row die of old age before theyre executed which costs, i dont know, Something Like 100 more to house somebody on death row. Its quite a bit more. And so im predicting that if you follow that curve out and the rate that states are changing their policies on the Death Penalty, itll be extinct by the mid 2020s, 2035 sometime in there there wont be any more Death Penalty in the United States. Of thats my prediction. Of well see. The abolition of slavery, of course, was driven as we know by quakers and mennonites and so on so yes, there were religious people who promoted the abolition of slavery. This is the rate at which states started to abolish it. But really if you look at what they were inspired by, if you look at what the abolitionists wrote about, they were primarily inspired by the United States declaration of independence and the french revolutions declaration of the rights of man. And so what you see in their literature is the talking about of legal rights x rights were invented in the 18th century, and theres nothing in biblical scripture or holy books that says, you know slavery is wrong. So in that sense, you know, if the creator of the universe wrote a book that purports to be a guide to morality, how can he never mentioned that how come he never mentioned that enslaving people is wrong . Not only not mention it, but heres all the ways you should do it and how you should treat your slaves and so forth. So it really doesnt come about until enlightenment philosophers created the idea of equal treatment under the law, that people should always be treated as an end to themselves, thomas jefferson, john locke and so forth came up with these ideas. So how far is the moral arc bent . I claim that todays conservatives are more liberal than liberals were in the 1950s. [laughter] just think about that for a minute. Just think of the social attitudes. Im not talking about economic policy, but just social attitudes of how people today treat blacks and women and minorities and so forth, gays what not animals compared to, say, the 1950s. So ill come back to that in just a moment. Theres, of course, exceptions, what about terrorism . So i have to address this issue because its in the news pretty much every day. So its a problem, but im not sure its a problem really of what were told we should be concerned about. Although it may work by terrorizing governments into spending trillions of dollars on saving just a handful of lives. But, in fact the real, supposed real threat was debunked by a political scientist who has this really amazing data set for the last threequarters of a century or so of every campaign for political change both violent and nonviolent and tracked the percentage of successful campaigns. Nonvice president campaigns are about nonviability campaigns are about twice as successful than violent campaigns. And then failed attempts at political change, violet campaigns are much violent campaigns are much more likely to fail. She tracks it over time and you can see where it shifts in the 1950s and continues on much more dramatically today. She points out that no, no terrorist organization has ever overturned a state and established a new government, for example. And so if were worried about terrorists like, taking over the country or Something Like that, thats not going to happen. I mean, even isis, isil is not even really a state even though it calls itself a state. Of course, you can get into power and then become a corrupt government like syria or the case of what the nazis did, but thats different than the terrorist threats. So in terms of it as an existential threat, i think its not unless you want to argue that spending trillions of dollars to prevent even one death by terror im, maybe it works to terrorism, maybe it works to that extent. What about Donald Sterling, Trayvon Martin ferguson, these are stories in the news. Well okay Donald Sterling im from l. A. , you know, the owner of the clippers. And it was in the news about this every night, there was human cry about this and people like civil rights leaders today were calling for, you know a crisis intervention that americans are more racist than theyve ever been or at least as racist as they were in the 1950s. But if anything, actually the Donald Sterling case shows quite the opposite, that, you know, here in private to his mistress he complains about, you know africanamericans at his game. Well, most old guys in the 1950s thought like he did and they werent particularly private about it. They were pretty vocal about it. I mean my fathers, my bio dad and my step dad they werent like Donald Sterling, but they werent particularly quiet about it. Its sort of understood thats how people thought, and they dont think like that anymore. Traw von martin case ferguson these are tragedies but on the other hand the Police Brutality and the inner city crime was much higher in the 1950s and 60s than it is today. Max rosier is another great data set for tracking optimistic trends about human civilization and things like this. Has this nice data set on lynchings from the late 1800s through well, pretty much zeros out by 1950. And remember when interracial marriage was a big controversy . Well, i dont really, actually it was so long ago. But people used to the make arguments that blacks and whites should not be allowed to marry. If you look at 1959 there on the far left, you know, 4 of americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites. I dont know anybody that even discusses it anymore. Although i am sort of perplexed by the 87 figure. You mean theres 13 of americans who said they would not approve of a marriage between a black and a white . Why isnt it 100 . I dont know, you know, maybe theres just a few outliers Something Like that. And then finally i have to address the Charlie Hebdo mass murder. Im a little worried about this one because im a magazine publisher, and i dont want to end up like this guy. Now, unfortunately skeptic doesnt really deal with islam we dont do that, and portraying famous people in, you know, sort of nasty, star cast you can, satirical sarcastic, satirical ways is not our style. But still, you know, the freedom to be able to do that is a real issue. So lets address what the real problem is here. Im going to give you a little quiz, see if you remember. What did the murderers shout when they killed the staff at Charlie Hebdo . Moses rocks, jesus saves [laughter] buddha threes it thrivers, atheists rule or allahu akbar . Of course, you know the answer. So this is the elephant in the answer. All my liberal friends are sort of wringing their hands about this. We really know what the problem is but we dont want to say because we dont want to offend people. Liberals are in favor of free speech but also of not being too offensive. Is i think its good so i think its good to clarify what were criticizing, whatever your style is. Mine is just to address claims from a scientific perspective a rational perspective, im not entered in laughing at people although interested in laughing at people although humor works well. Its the ideas we should be focusing on, not the people even saying religion is the problem it doesnt help us, its too broad. And even saying religious extremists is not correct either. James wont kill anything, they wont even kill a being. Theyll crawl and move around on the ground not to hit a gnat or an ant. Thats extreme. But im not worried about them coming to skeptic magazine headquarters and causing problems. So its violent religious extremists. In particular those that hold beliefs that lead to violence. Thats the problem. So its the parts of sharia law that lead to violence that i think are the ideas that we should be focused on, debunking bad ideas. The analogy i make in the book by the way i call it the witch theory of causality. If you believe that women cavorting with demons in the middle of the night causes bad weather, crop failure and disease, then youre either insane or you lived 500 years ago when everybody believed that. Were these people immoral for burning women at the stake . No, i dont believe. They were mistaken. They believed they were helping their group, helping their community, they were solving this problem. Of course, they didnt know about rights back then because rights werent invented. Rights would trump that. We still wouldnt do it because we have a deeper principle of Human Flourishing and equal rights. But nevertheless, often i think a lot of moral problems are just factual errors. People just think this is a good way to the treat people and its not. Or this is going to have this particular effect, and it wont. So as me friend sam harris said, you know these sharia law idea, islam is the mother load of bad ideas was the phrase he used on bill mahers show, and i know what he was talking about he was talking about some of these ideas. So just a few of the percentages why im concerned about the moral arc slightly bending backwards here, these are the percentage of muslims who favor enshrining sharia law. Im just sort of putting these up to get a general sense that this is not a tiny handful of bad apples that we dont really have to worry about. It is something to be concerned about. Heres the higher support for sharia is higher where theres where islam is the officially favored bigs. Again, 99 religion. 89 in, you know, palestinian, malaysia these are nontrivial numbers. Those who believe that sharia is the revealed word of god versus just created by humans, you can see the right side is much darker and bigger than the left side. And then Corporal Punishment for crimes such as theft, so, again this is going backwards against the enlightenment idea or those who believe in punishment for adultery concern not the guys, mind you, just how it works. Or sharia those who support is sharia idea of executing those who leave islam on the right, for example Corporal Punishment and so on. Now, i know some of these canings and whippings are kind of simple bolick. Symbolic. You can see these on youtube where the guys just sitting there bent over to and they just sort of tap him like that. Its not really punishment. But there are ones where it really happens, where it actually is really painful and destructive. And the idea here is that the moderates are enabling the extremests by holding the same beliefs. Yes, i believe in sharia law. I wouldnt personally stone somebody to death for momentumly, but i believe in sharia adultery, but i believe in sharia law. So thats, its a small step once you believe the bad idea. And thatses why i think we should be focused on these bad ideas. To that, we should say nein that you shall not murder our freedoms. This was the berlin courier the day after the happening and independent had this youve probably seen hundreds of these now. Theyre all european. There were no American Press that were doing anything remotely like in this. So in the land of free speech, people are terrified about offending people, and i think thats a concern. Its a debatable subject. I like this one yesterday, today and tomorrow, were just going to keep criticizing bad ideas and publish the very things you dont want people to see, you know, and thats how we make progress. Okay. So sort of the second part of the talk here is explaining what caused all this good news. You know, im willing to acknowledge theres potential setbacks, but for the most part the arc is bending. It begins with the expanding moral sphere that begins at the self and then your kip and kind, then your kin and kind, then your extended family, so a basic evolutionary model gets us to the yellow portion of the curve no problem. First principle is to help your kin and kind, the second moral principle is reciprocity ill scratch your back if you scratch mine. That takes care of everybody were related to, everybody we know. Your genes are more likely to be propagated into the future by helping somebody else whos either genetically related to you or is a friend or somebody that will help you when youre in need, so you should help them when theyre in need, and thats all been worked out mathematically by the evolutionary biologists. And then i mentioned we had the dark side, the bullies and free riders, and is we need to adjust that. So we have a dual nature of good and evil, fairness and justice helping and hurting, cooperative and competitive altruistic and greedy. As steve pinker says, we have better angels and inner demons. So now im going to show you a video clip that i think nicely captures this dual nature that we have, the sense of wanting to help somebody and also a sense of wanting to not hurt somebody, but impose justice on somebody who hurt somebody else. So one day i stumbled across this short video clip. Its only about 20 seconds long. When i wasnt. Watching cat videos. [laughter] so i think its in europe somewhere. The guy on the left reaches out and shoves this woman backwards, and she sort of stumbles back, and the guy in the middle reaches out to grab her, and he misses her and into the pit she goes. You would think his hoping instinct would kick in, and he does, then he stops and another urge bubbles up like that no good bastard, and he just cold concludes this guy cold cocks this guy twice. And then you see him there was Something Else i was supposed to do. Oh, yeah. [laughter] and then he pulls her out of the pit, and he says to her are you okay and the moment she acknowledges, he then goes back after this guy. Youll see that. And ill show it twice because theres a guy at the top of the screen who looks like hes running to go help this woman and all of a sudden, no, he turns and chases this guy. Here we go. Again, watch him watch it again. Its like are you okay . Yes and the other guy, you know, into the its worth seeing a second time. Oh bam. And then like there was Something Else oh, yeah. Then the guy takes off and this guy, he goes after him. Are you okay . Yep, okay. So we have this dual sense of we have a sense of justice things have to be made right. Somebody wrongs you they need to be taught a lesson or punished for this. This is part of our nature. And, of course, we have a sense of helping and altruism and all that stuff. Theres another video clip that shows this is why i make the argument this is part of our nature. These are ca pew chin monkeys, you may have seen this before this is an experiment in which these monkeys are taught just classically conditioned to associate these little pebbles that they give them with food that they like. So its like money. Theyre given a pebble, so its like a dollar and they have to give the pebble back and they get a cucumber or a grape. They like grapes better, who doesnt . [laughter] theres also something i write about in minor markets that theres a supply and demand curve that goes along with this. If they have way more of the supply way more of the demand the supply changes and so on according to the same curves. So these are deeply ingrained in12eu7b9s. But then what youll see is the one on the left, he chases the rock, and he gets his cucumber, and hes happy about it. The one on the right exchanges his rock, and he got the grape, and the one on the left sees he got a grape for the same price and then hes given the cucumber again, and then you see hes not too happy about this. So he gives a rock and we give her a piece of cucumber. Give a rock to us and thats what she does and she gets a rock. He sees that, so he gives the rock to us now he gets a cucumber. [laughter] [inaudible] hell give it to us. And he gets a cucumber again. [laughter] so we all have this instinct, and i can prove it to you. I will just ask you this thought question have you ever fantasized about killing someone you dont like . Come on, show of hands. Be honest, come on. Thats right a. Almost all of us have. This is the research from david bus reported in his book the murder next door why the mind is designed to kill. And so here is the data the set he presents, males versus females frequently thinking about or just occasionally. So men are about twice as likely as women to frequently think about killing somebody but the women sort of almost catch up there on the occasional. He provides rather colorful examples of this. Like one guy said he went 80 of the way toward killing a former friend and now a jealous rival. First id break every bone in his body, then i would puncture his lungs and maybe a few other organs. Basically, give him as much pain as possible before killing him. A woman said she went 60 of the way toward killing an exboyfriend who threatened to make public their sex video. I actually did this. I invited him over for dinner and as he was in the kitchen looking stupid, i came to him laughing gently so he wouldnt suspect anything. I thought about grabbing a knife quickly. I actually did the first thing, but he saw my intentions and ran away. [laughter] all right. So about this point that the mind was designed to kill its because we have this deep instinct for wanting revenge for people that wrong us. And as pinker says in the better angels of our nature, the problem is not that we dont have enough morality its that theres too much morality. 90 of homicides are moralistic in nature, the victim deserved to die. So in this sense we all want justice, and if theres not a civil state with courts and so forth to adjudicate disputes and properly execute justice, then were going to do it ourselves and thats called selfhelp justice. So where states are weak or where the people in a community dont believe that the Law Enforcement is fair or that the courts are fair they undertake justice themselves, and that leads to an increase in violence. Its one of the reasons that our rates of homicide are about eight times higher than europe, theirs is about 1 per 100,000 ours is about 8 per 100,000. Its because we have a, a lot of guns and b illegal drugs. So if some other rival gang, you know violates your turf or your deal you had with them, you cant go to the police and go that guy is selling ill deal drugs illegal drugs, so you have to settle it yourself, and that leads to increases in crime. So my argument is ever since a scientific revolution in the enlightenment, weve been applying the methods of science to solving social problems; that is, crime is a problem to be solved. Homicides are a problem to be solved, war is a problem to be solved. And these guys were all scientists. Now, they didnt call themselves that because that word wasnt even used it wasnt even ip vebted in the mid 1800s. But i have a whole chapter on this, they were all inspired by newton and galileo and William Harry and all the great scientists harvey. They wanted to do in their fields what those guys did in physics and biology; that is, apply the methods of science to softing economic and social problems one of which was the leviathan state. Thomas honest book is thomas hobbs book is that the leviathan is us, its a social contract, its a body of people. And so we endow the state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. So this explains a lot. Why did ferguson happen . Never a good idea to reach inside a cops car grab his gun. Thats a violation of monopoly on the legitimate use of force, so theres really only one result thats going p to happen with that. And thats why those kinds of things happen. If the citizens dont feel the police are fair then you have conflicts like that. The leviathan state reduces the need for deterrence and vengeance, it replaces selfhelp justice with criminal justice and replaces the culture of honor with the culture of law. In other words, we need a shadow of enforcement to make sure that we are nice to one another and moral. You cant [laughter] sorry, thank you. You cant rely on human nature alone. So a public goods experiment on altruistic punishment is very instructive in this regard. You may be familiar with some of these experiments. Just imagine youre one of these player at a table, round table each of four players get ten 1 bills. And the offing there is you can make anonymous contribution to the commons. You can put however much you want into the envelope there anonymously, and no one knows how much you gave. Now, what im going to do is whatever amount is in there, im going to multiply by 1. 5 for the common total and then distribute it equally amongst everybody. So lets say all four of you give 10, so we multiply that by four so thats 40 times 1. 5, and then we divide it equally we even get 15, were all 5 richer okay . Now what happens is if its no transparency, its anonymous and theres no way to punish free riders, heres what happens. Lets say a decides im not going to put 10 in. I think ill put 5 in. But the ore three players, b, c and d each give 10, what happens is youve got 35 times 1. 5 is 52 divided by four is 13. 12 each but now a has 18 because he kept his five. In other words if you free ride the system, you cheat just a little bit, you can gain an advantage over other people. Do people really do that . Oh yes. [laughter] they certainly do. On the left side of the graph is the data showing contributions over six rounds declined fairly quickly. In other words, as soon as somebody does it and somebody does it then everybody else sees, wait a minute, im not getting as much as i put in. Somebody held some back. Im going to hold some back and then everybody else, and it cascades. On the right side of the graph the scientists who did this experience, they added an element of transparency and then an opportunity to punish afterwards. All of a sudden people got very generous prosocial, cooperative and nice with one another. In other words, we need a Civil Society based on the rule of law. Jus tissue shah has these similar polls symbols for a reason, the scales for fair and balanced but the sword to enforce the rules. So we need those. Of course, were libertarians here and we dont like any governments. Its like saying religions the problem. Some religions are better than others. Same thing with leviathan states. Murders of civilians by government happen by just three of the worst leviathans in the 20th century. So its not fair to say that. Informs, it in fact, it was rudy rommel who tallied up how many people have been murdered by their own governments. Its staggering. Its in the hundreds of millions. But then he showed democracy as a method of nonviolence, some governments are better than others. So this was first put forth by e man call conte emanuel conte in his book entitled perpetual peace t in which he said democracy, trade and membership in international community. And this has been confirmed by many social scientists, political scientists. Russ et t and oneill tested this, for example, using the correlates of war projects of 2300 militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001. Plus the polity project that assigned, you know a 110 scale for each democracy found that when both countries are fully democratic conflicts between them decrease by 50 . When the less democratic member of a pair lean toward autocracy conflicts increase by 10 . So the formula was by 100 . You cant just say no two democracies ever fight each other. Yes, they do. Theyre just less likely to fight than autocracies. And you can see what happened as the decline of wars interstate and societal conflicts just at the time when democracies over, surpassed autocracies in the number of states in the world around 1992. And, of course, we all love this one, the second element of the triangle of peace is trade. Trade is good because plunder is zero sum. Costs money to steal peoples stuff. I mean, canada has a lot of nickel. We could invade canada finish its an open border and just take their nickel. But its really cheaper to just buy it. Trade is nonzero as you know and improving technology allow ares trade of good and ideas over longer distances lowers the price larger number of people are able to benefit from it. But more to the point not the economic model but the moral concern is that other people then become more valuable alive than dead. So its just cheaper to buy it from somebody rather than killing them and taking it. So weve seen the result t of this. Again, im not so concerned about the hockey stick of wealth. We like to point that out, that thats a good thing for a lot of reasons. Thats the projection of the world gdp from a little over 6,000 to double that by 2030. I found this graph from an economist at stanford projecting into the 21st century about how much richer everybody will be. So i mean, hes projecting that in the 21st century, well see more wealth accumulated than in all the previous centuries combined my point here is i should probably point out because of the income inequality debate is a popular one, its true that the rich have gotten richer. This is the right side of the curve is the top quintile. So if you break them down into four parts, you can see that the super rich are getting super richer and the rich are getting richer. But notice whats not happened in the bottom four quintile. They didnt get poor they got richer. So although this is a debatable topic, i know but again its not as bad as it seems. Poverty will be ebbs ting wished extinguished probably by 20302050 according to the Gates Foundation that tracks this compared to 1820 when 94 of the world lived in abject abovety and 84 in extreme poverty. So thats moral progress. So if you put all these together democracy, trade and the third one is membership in intergovernmental organizations on counted the number of ngo that every country ran and found that democracy favors peace, trade favors peace and membership in intergovernmental organizations favors peace. So a pair of countries that are in the top tenth of the scale in all three variables are 83 less likely than an average pair of countries to have a militarized dispute in a given year. And thats the chart tracking the number of membership, countries and memberships of intergovernmental organizations, and thats the triangle of peace that increases the probability of peace. And you can see itesting a good case using the method north korea versus south korea. You can see the difference from space, you can see it in their height, about two to three inches shorter. Just crappy diets from low income. And the difference in their per capita gdp of 19,600 versus 1100. How would you like a 1750 president raise in 1750 raise in your standard of living . Is to conclude im making an argument that if we know that spreading democracies is good because theyre better than autocracies, then thats what we ought to do. We ought to be working to expand trade like with cuba. What a good idea. And spread democracies wherever we can. And democracies place more emphasis on individual rights and individual hinter than any other form of rights than any other form of governance. Whats the foundation of right or wrong . So i start with the individual. Its the individual, sentient being, an individual that can suffer and feel pain. Races dont suffer, individuals suffer. Races dont have brains or genders dont have brains people have brains that suffer. Races dont vote genders dont vote minorities vote women vote, people vote. Theyre people individuals. Its the individual that counts. Natural selection operates on the individual, not the group, so i kind of debunk the Group Selection model. Thats a minor wrinkle in all this. In conclusion, the constitution of Human Society ought to be built on the constitution of human nature and i conclude with another quote from Martin Luther king jr. About in this dual nature we have. The great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command and every time that old lower self acts up and tells us to do wrong let us allow the higher self to tell us that we were made for the stars created for the everlasting born for eternity. Well, we have, in fact made from the stars. Our atoms were forged in the interiors of indiana stars that ended ancient stars that ended their lives in supernova explosions that dispersed those atoms into space wherever they coalesced into new Solar Systems with planets, life and sentient beings capable of moral wisdom thats the final sentence from my book; we are stardust, we are golden, we are billionyearold carbon. You know the reference right . So morality is something that carbon atoms can embody given a billion years of evolution. Thats the moral arc. Thank you. [applause] thank you, michael. Well take some questions now. The book is the moral arc, and we have copies outside although if we run out, it is available at all bookstores and all fine online booksellers. Ill let michael call on people to ask questions. Please wait for a microphone to get there, and then announce to your name and affiliation. Here and well, that guy. And then you can do yep. [inaudible] maybe start with this one then . No, we the helicopters are standing by to plop, plop plop over the schools, right . So youre only going to hear the bad news. And were more concerned about bad things than good things. Most of us are risk averse, and we have loss aversion. The way its phrased by economists is that losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good. So this has all sorts of implications for investing in the stock market and stuff like that, people are mostly risk averse. But it probably paid in our evolutionary paths to be more focused on things that could take us out of the gene pool rather than things that make us feel that much better because Natural Selection would have just selected for that. And so those are the two sort of underlying things. I dont think its religion per se. I think there is a sense also built into that that whatever team youre on whatever your ideology is you always want the other guys to not be doing as well because then that makes our side look good. Then also for fundraising for nonprofits, you cant send a letter out going boy, things are so good and Getting Better. Really we dont need your money that much, but we hope you send some in for overhead and payroll. Thats not going to do it. People are starving and dying, war and slavery. Its bad and getting worse. I know because i run a nonprofit. [laughter] i cant say things are so rational and science is so perfect. [laughter] yeah. Congratulations on another excellent book. Thank you. Were doing a review of it probably not for your magazine, that might be a conflict yeah, just a little bit. My question is this since Martin Luther king made his famous i have a dream speech here in d. C. On the mall, 400,000 blacks have been killed by other blacks. Now, again a demographic issue because, you know, as populations age you can actually see the crime rate going down across groups. However, you do see underlying some value issues. If you take a look at ferguson, yes, Police Brutality is outrageous whether that was a case or it or not. I wanted to ask a question about do you see an underlying value problem that could stifle future progress . And by the way i might suggest its the same value problem that causes rioting in ferguson, that causes inner city pathologies and that causes police to be irresponsible and beating people up and doing terrible things. What would be the same values . Actually, the same value would be kind of a negligence for individual autonomy and so forth. It would be a personal irresponsibility that im not responsible for myself, you know . There are a number of these factors. But see that theres some underlying common factor. Yep. Certainly, if you want to talk there clearly are factors on both sides that are causing these problems. Yep. I generally try to look at those things as problems to be solved rather than lets impose a value statement in which were giving our opinions about blacks or whatever. So how can the question is how can we sop those kinds of things from stop those kinds of things from happening. We already have been doing that quite a bit. Most police have sensitivity training and gun training and so fort. But what happens and we should never general rise from a generalize from a particular case which is exactly what happened after ferguson. The ferguson case was a little bit different than the long island case which was different than the North Carolina case. In North Carolina, by the way the grand jury did vote to try that cop. So its not like they never do that because its a racist society. Happens all the time. So but in the case of ferguson you have a couple of Different Things going on. So probably in a lot of these inner cities where maybe there is a little bit of ray similar in the police department, maybe racism in the police department, maybe the local black kids are tired of being sort of profiled and targeted and bullied by the police, and their may have just had it. Maybe Michael Brown walking down the street hes in the middle of the street and the cop said move over to the sidewalk. I dont think we know exactly how he said it but in any case it triggered no, im not. So all of a sudden now you have the problem of well, were the Law Enforcement. You have to do what we say and you dont, then we have theres a social problem because were the enforcers of the rules and if somebody doesnt enforce the rules, you have chaos. But like i said, that moment you reach for a cops gun youre very likely to be shot. Forward panic kicks in. Its sort of like the limb big system in your brain just floods your whole brain with the fight or flight syndrome and it is survival time. The classic example is the rodney king beating on the 210 freeway in southern california. Just like a pack of wolves. This was the culmination of a long series of things happen that got these cops riled up. Normally we keep those in check. We dont say what we really think to somebody on the phone or whatever we just keep it in check. That can with overridden that can be overridden. And thats probably what happened in the case of ferguson. I think the other cases are slightly different. Now, the deeper causes of maybe some poverty, maybe some racism but probably deeper is just the lack of consistency of enforcement of the laws and inner cities perhaps and maybe i would go for some family issues, you know theres a break down of, you know, no fatherhood, no fathers in the homes of a lot of the black kids. I think its Something Like two or three times worse than it was than when moynihan First Published that work. I think 25 were raised without fathers, now its 60 something. [inaudible] yeah. So i think thats probably a different one, although thats politically incorrect to say. If were just looking for causes of events to change things i think thats one. How about this woman here. With the microphone coming. Janice [inaudible] ive just started a group, pro se america. And were whats it called again . Pro se america. Pro se . Pro se america. And were disclosing the judiciary, the government and elected officials who break their oath of office. And we basically have a wall of shame for each one out of each state. And the question is why cant they just stand up and say, im sorry, i made a mistake . Why is it that the coverup just like with nixon, he didnt resign because of the crime, it was the coverup. And the coverups are so huge and ridiculous. First of all im glad youre doing that a. You know, thats one way of Controlling Free riders and bullies and other people that dont play nice, is shame em. Right. We dont have a choice. Now we have to be careful about that. You can shame people online unfairly, internet bullying. For the most part, the answer to your question is the book called mistakes were made but not by me. [laughter] pleasure you know, sort of the third person reference, you know the indirect action. Something happened here, and you know, im sorry if you misinterpreted what you think i said that i didnt you know those kinds of, you know, halfassed apologies, we all recognize them for what they are. The answer is cognitive dissonance. The moment that youre committed to a particular thing youre doing, a belief system or an action, you start down that road its almost impossible for any of us to to back out change your mind or admit we were wrong. Carol explains in this book why that is. The cognitive dissonance was discovered by a psychologist who discovered this when he went to top of the mountain with a ufo cult in 1954 in chicago to wait for the mother ship to come on december 23st at midnight telephone 21st at midnight. So he was curious what would happen when the mother ship doesnt come. I wonder if theyll all go, ooh, that was dumb. No, they did the opposite, they just rationalized it. Well we miscalculated, its tomorrow night. No, we forgot to carry the one next year. And so all doomsday cults do this they rationalize why they arent wrong. And i think we get back to this loss aversion thing, it hurts to be wrong and we would rather spin doctor for ages, you know why were not wrong and that ends up costing us more. Its counterintuitive, its irrational but we do it. The one thing i would like to say is we are allowing people if they come to us and say it was a mistake, to reverse. Well good. I hope that i think its only fair. And actually, you can sew where politicians that do admit it they actually profit from that. Celebrities that do something stupid and go on the tonight show and laugh about it and apologize, they tend to carry on. Things are okay. We need to hype that more. Lets see, how about here . Yes. My names phil, im from hope college. I was just going to ask you if you believe theres a causal correlation between the moral arc bending towards justice and a more connected society through technology . Do you think that theres empathy there or do you think that its isolating . Yep. In some way . So the question on the arc bending in part because of technology, so starting with book publications and increasing literacy rates all the way up to the internet, i think this is part of it. I have a whole chapter on what pinker calls the moral flynn effect. The flynn effect is iq scores are going up three points every ten years on abstract reasoning portions of the iq test for about a century. Its quite amazing. So were counting on you, young students, to solve those problems like alzheimers before us baby boomers hit the wall. [laughter] but in short, the increase in the ability to reason abstractly is in part one of drivers of moral progress because morality has to do with interchain bl inter interchangeable perspectives. And we seem to be Getting Better at that. And i think literacy i have a data set toward the end of the book on, i mean, in the first chapter to the end of that chapter on experiments with people that read a lot of literature and their ability to mind read, read other peoples minds, facial expressions interpret what they are and a few other tasks that have to do with the ability for you to put yourself in somebody elses shoes and sense what theyre thinking and feeling. And so the idea is that the moment you start a novel youre hooking at the world through the characters youre looking at the world through the characters in the novel. Your brain has been transposed into this functional characters grain fictional exacters brain, and that retrains the brain. Lets go with how about this person right here. Yep. And then ill go to the back again. Thank you. Thomas [inaudible] im actually a fan. Ive enjoyed your various other books. Im in biotech. Youre making a historical argument about the moral arc. I wonder if youve speculated about any structural underpinnings for why that may be the case if its true . I mean obviously, there are historical answers like religion theology etc. , but ive wondered about axlerods experiment why do you think that the moral arc bends toward justice if, in fact, it historically seems to be doing that . Well, i touched on some of it. Just the invention of right, the enlightenment, emphasis on lets treat these things as problems to be solved using science and reason rather than glory of the nation or some other just emotional aspect of the human condition. And that transition took centuries, but thats underway. So i think thats one of the underlying ones. Now, of course, political and economic changes are underlying some of that too but even those are rational, reasonedthrough scientificallytestable ideas and just showed you why democracies are better, how much democracies are better than autocracies in the effects that they cause using data. So we ought to do more of that. But even economics. I didnt mention the physioaccurate. The french physiocrats all patterned themselves after these scientists in the scientific revolution. In fact, they consciously made an analogy with william harveys circulation of the blood that money circulating through an economy is like blood circulating through a human body, and theres if things cricket it or block it constrict it or block it, its not healthy for the body. Too much government restriction on the economy blocks the flow of capital through a country and impedes economic progress and so on. Those are all arguments made from a rational scientific perspective, like we should just treat the economy as a problem. Its just a scientific problem, lets figure out the best way to structure it so we are all more prosperous. That, i would argue, is really the big driver more than anything else. Okay, lets go to the back there. You, sir. Thank you very much more your book. My name is [inaudible] from ows. I just wanted to see what would be your comment on this statement that says that moral is a figurative language of patience . Im afraid i lost that i didnt get that a last part. The statement said moral is a figurative language of passions. Yes moral is a figurative language in passions. Of passions. Of passions. Okay, what im talking about is that we involved moral emotions. So emotions are emotions evolved as just proxies to drive an organism to do something, to behave in a serb way. So you dont in a certain way. So you dont have to compute calories and so on, you just feel hungry. And that emotion of hunger drives you to seek out food. And the species has to propagate itself through sex so we have a sexual drive. Emotions, just feelings. You dont have to calculate the curves and waisttohip ratios like the evolutionary psychologists study. You dont have to do any of that. You just look around and go, wow, i like that, and i just have this feeling. So hunger sexual impulse these are all basic emotions that drive organisms selected by Natural Selection. Moral emotions are the same way. Jealousy is an emotion to lead people to make guard so your genetic composition is not compromised by a relationship with your significant other, anger is an emotion to deal with injustices and unfairness and people that want to treat to cheat you. Kicking a rock and kicking another organism the other organism will kick back, so you have to be careful about what youre kicking and who youre kicking. So those emotions are there for a reason. So i treat things like violence and homicide not like as a defect in our nature, its part of our nature. You dont want to get rid of that. You have to be able to stand up and fight back. Thats part of, you know being a social primate. But the whole point of a Civil Society is to structure it in a way that it keeps in check the sort of violence impulses that overrun things and cause too many problems and attenwait the good things attenuate the good things make people more cooperative. Okay, lets go to you sir right there. Hi. Ben garthwright im a member of the National Capital area skeptics. One thing that pains me to read about is the belief in witchcraft which is still very strong in parts of africa. It leads to kidnapping children for their body parts and a lot of people. But the basic idea that keeps a lot of them poor is that if someone suddenly succeeds the people around them not succeeding think its because theyve stolen their good luck from them. And, seriously, this goes way back in the literature of the area. Of. Yep uhhuh. And i was thinking when europe finally got away i think it wasnt just that they started thinking we really shouldnt burn all women we really shouldnt drown strange people. You could read in the discovery of in some of the trials the judges basically didnt believe that witchcraft was a real phenomenon. Uhhuh. They were beginning to think scientifically. Uhhuh. And so yep. Can you just reflect on i mean, this was science changing yeah, i have a story in my book about this german that mayor of the town or whatever he was, magistrate of this german town who started thinking like you that, you know maybe this witchcraft thing is, you know, maybe this is a bunch of bologna, and maybe torturing these women is not such a good idea. But his two jesuit priests in charge of the torture and the whole inquisition, in charge of the inquisition, they were total believers. So he took the two of them down to where they had this woman who was being tortured, and he brought em in there and said you know lady i have strong feelings that these two men here are warlocks. I think they might have been cavorting with satan. Executioner, crank up the torture wheel just a little bit more. What do you say maam . What do you think . Oh yes, i have seen both of them. They were cavorting with the dell, they turned into with the devil, they turned into goats, she went on and on. And they said oh. So that was, like an early experiment. Test the hypothesis. Laugh and he wrote a book about that, and that started the abolition of witchcraft in the year peen witch craze. Anyway european witch craze. As for there still witches . Of course. Where theres impoverishment lack of education so the solution is get them all wealthier is so they can afford education, and thatll all just go away. Lets take one more question. One more question. Okay, how about you sir . Right there. Richard kennedy retired an letses. I notice analyst. Why people [inaudible] it was pretty clear when i was in graduate school its a less dangerous drug than alcohol or tobacco. I just wonder from your perspective, all the work youve done any reason there why its taken so long for that a fact to seep into the general consciousness . Yeah. Its just social and political, and is, you know theres sort of a puritan streak through there, but then why alcohol . Its all very inconsistent. And whats, you know, once you go down this path like the cognitive dissonance, you know, weve been against it for half a century, the laws and so on, too committed to the war on drugs. Why not just say we lost and change our minds . People rarely change their minds and say i was wrong. I think thats going to come about. I think the decriminal seation of marijuana is probably next after gay rights. And us atheists its not that i feel oppressed i live in l. A. , i mean, come on. [laughter] but, you know, you hear these tropes about atheists dont have morals, and they shouldnt be citizens, just kind of crazy. We need to debunk those silly myths. But thats all happening pretty quickly. Youll get there. And i gave you biblical passages in support. [laughter] [inaudible] Virginia Senate this year. Oh, okay. Good. Great. All right. Thank you, michael. Thank you all for being here. [applause] Michael Shermer will be glad to sign copies of the book and we invite you all to to go up to the second level for lunch. You can take the spiral staircase or the elevator. Therell be books up there and there are also restrooms up on the second floor on your right. Thanks for coming. Thank you again. 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