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 t