 Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer, Michael Surmer So our book table is down there. When you go by there, please say hi to Pat Lindsey. Pat is the person who does all the covers of Skeptic Magazine, all the layout and design and typography, and all the flyers and all the artwork you see on the web page and so on. She's my partner in the Skeptic Society, Skeptic Magazine, and she doesn't get a lot of recognition. She's behind the scenes, the power behind the scenes there. So say hi to her and also to Will, who is our webmaster, who does skeptic.com. And when you get a chance, the second favor is, check out skeptic.com and our Skepticism 101 program, which we just launched last week. And so we're taking skepticism into the classroom, how to teach a course in skepticism, how to take a course in skepticism. It's a little bit like ted.com or the Khan Academy. We're accumulating videos and PowerPoints and keynotes and lectures, lectured notes, readings, illusions, projects that teachers can assign to students, things like that. If, and it's all free, you can just download stuff. So if you're an educator of any kind, a teacher or just a person interested in educating people, if you have materials you'd like to put up on the web page for people to use that you think might be useful for teaching, critical thinking, skepticism, all the good stuff that we do. We'd love to have your input on that. So when I was walking back to the green room here, I noticed the crawl said something about Michael Schirmer making a presentation about his previous books simultaneously about his next book. I'm really embarrassed because that's exactly what I'm doing. So I was sitting back there thinking, is there some other talk I can give? And the problem is I'm a writer, so I write about everything I speak about, so it's kind of inevitable. So the next book is, oh, I guess do we have, is it on the screens? No, okay, so if we could put up the, yeah, okay. So what I'm doing here is taking an inspiration from a 19th century abolitionists named Theodore Parker. I'm just trying to get a full screen here. I can see what it actually says. That should do it. Is that, can you see that? You know what, I think it, I gotta go to view. Yeah, you guys, you didn't turn it on to the play. Here we go. It's play is what we want. There we go. So he writes, I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight. I can divine it by conscious and from what I see, I'm sure it bends toward justice. So we've come a long ways in a century and a half in terms of figuring out what has actually been going on. So what I'm doing is I'm taking, I'm pushing forward from these four books, my own, The Mind of the Market. I always pick up in the last chapter and write a new book from there. But Matt Ridley is the rational optimist. Robert writes non-zero and especially Steve Pinker is the better angels of our nature. I've all tracked the trend lines that things are getting better. Things are getting better economically, politically, socially, culturally and especially morally. So where I'm going with this brief presentation is I'm gonna do a data dump of show you that things really are getting better and then offer some explanations for why. And ultimately I think it comes down to the fact that it's reason and science. I'm using the word science, the moral arc of science and the broader sense of reason, empiricism, logic, open-mindedness and liberal values that came out of the Enlightenment. So that's where I'm going with this. So something extraordinary happened from hunter-gatherers to consumer traders, just starting economically and then politically. So if you count up all the items in a Yanamomo village and you calculate what their average annual income is, the equivalent thereof, they average about $100 per person per year and they have about 300 different items in their catalog of stuff. If you walk into the Manhattan village and count up all the goodies and products that the Manhattanites have in their stores, it comes out to about 10 billion different products. That's based on the barcode, SKU stock keeping unit system of the barcodes and about 400 times more income, about $40,000 per person per year. The question is, how did this happen? So here's a different hockey stick curve that is the tracking of world GDP per capita just a little over 60, it's about $6,600 per person per year for the entire planet. And all that has happened in the last 150 years or so. And this is the projection. It'll double by 2030. Every single one on average across the world of the 10 billion or so that will be at 2030 will average about $12,000 per person per year. Obviously there's a big difference between the West and other countries, but we'll come back to that. So as people got wealthy or a lot of other things got better, poverty collapsed dramatically. That is poverty defined by a dollar per day as the baseline rate. That's tracked down fairly consistently. Even in Africa, even though it's been bumpy bouncing up and down for the last half century, the last decade and a half or so, it's getting much better even in Africa. Global serial harvest. So you see the flat black line there is the acres harvested. So we're not harvesting any more acres but the yield per acre has been increasing thanks to science and technology. Life expectancy at birth, world average from just a little below 50 to just a little under 70 now in the last half century. Percentage of increase in world population is going down. World population is not going down yet but the rate of increase is going down and eventually that'll flatten out. And the UN projects that about by 2100 it'll flatten out at about 10 billion people and then we'll start decreasing. We'll be back to where we are now by about 2150 or so. So even though overpopulation has always been a mantra of my generation, I think there's progress there too. So just culturally, just think about King Louis, the 14th, the Sun King who had a fabulous kitchen and hundreds of servants and compare that to the average middle class person today where you can walk into, you and I have hundreds of servants waiting for us right now. You can go down to Starbucks and there's a barista waiting for you to make your vente latte just the way you like it. There's somebody to work on your car and so on. There's kitchens like this fabulous kitchen, way better than anything King Louis, the 14th had that you can find in almost any middle class home being built today. And as life got better it also got safer. This is a little known fact that rates of homicide have plummeted in the last six, 700 years from about 35 murders per 100,000 to in Europe, less than one per 100,000 today. It would be zero except there's always some nut job that does some crazy thing that you can't control for. Otherwise violence is practically zeroed out in Europe. It's about a little under five per 100,000 in America but even that's mostly clustered in inner cities and gang-related drug-related crimes. You can see it in, if we track the databases of a lot of different data sets here, violent deaths in prehistoric societies compared to state societies today. So the red line there is the average of all those data sets to the left of the percentage of deaths in warfare. And here's the United States and Europe in the 20th century, the world for the entire 20th century, the world in 2005 is not even a single digit, a single blip on the screen there. And then you do another data set here of war deaths per 100,000 people per year in non-state societies. So the previous data set were archeological data sets. These are current non-state societies and their average rates of death per 100,000 people in war. So that's the average on that red bar there compared to Germany in the 20th century, Russia in the 20th century, Japan in the 20th century, the United States in the 20th century, the entire world in the 20th century and in the world in 2005, again, not even a single blip on the screen there. So things are definitely getting better in terms of warfare. Again, homicide rates have plummeted from almost 100 in some areas to practically down to below zero now. You can see it in different independent data sets from different countries in Europe and then the overall, the blue dot, the non-state societies average versus over the past 700 years of the plummeting rate. So it's a logarithmic scale there. So you're going almost 100 per 100,000 murders down to less than one per 100,000 in Western Europe. Even wars are becoming more civilized even in the 20th century. So it's hard to get around, it's hard to say things are getting better and ignore the 20th century. But it's good to remember the 20th century was 100 years long, not 50. The first 50 years look bad, but the second 50, as we'll see. Great power wars, here's some more data sets from Levy and Thompson. Great power wars, 1,500 to 2,000, a portion of years that they spent fighting each other has plummeted down, bounced around on the bottom there and is now zero. Duration of wars involving great powers. We're talking about great European powers here. Between 1,500 and 2,000, again, bouncing around but plummeting back down to zero now. Frequencies of wars involving a great power. Just think about it now. What are the chances that France will march an army through the channel and invade London? It's not gonna happen, right? And yet, that was the history of the great power is that they always were at war with one another. So again, remember, the 20th century is 100 years long, so although there's the two huge blips of the First and Second World Wars, the big mystery to explain is how come there haven't been any others since then. In fact, since 1946, there's been zero wars between the US and USSR, zero nuclear weapons used, zero wars between the great powers, zero wars between Western European countries. Before 1945, there were two wars every year for 600 years and that has ended. Even genocide. So these are Rudy Rommel's data sets that have been since collaborated by others that, so that even though there's Rwanda and Cambodia and things are grim, so here's the problem, our brains are designed to, design, evolve, sorry to get past that word. Designed by natural selection. Okay, thank you. To just notice the bad news in the immediate horizon of our time frame and environment. So of course, we noticed Rwanda and Cambodia and so we remember these things more freshly, but they are minor blips compared to genocides in previous centuries, especially culminating in the Holocaust. So how did all this progress happen when we live in such a tribal world? Okay, I'm just gonna blast through. By the way, that was like 1% of the data slides that I could have presented. There's a lot of data to show things really are getting better. Okay, what happened? So five points there that we'll go through. Beginning with the fact that we do have moral emotions. We are moral creatures by nature. We evolved a dual moral nature. We have a good side that is within our groups, we practice enmity, we're nice, we're cooperative, we're post-social, we're altruistic to our fellow tribe members and between groups. We practice enmity. So we have a little bit of Oscar Schindler, a little bit of Amon Gert. We have inside of us both Colonel Kurtz and Captain Willard and we are both a good Kirk and bad Kirk. Hey, you watched that episode again. That's pretty deep. When Spock explains to McCoy why this is such a good experiment to understand the dual nature. And in fact, Roddenberry had really constructed the whole cast to be like that. So McCoy is sort of the emotional brain and Spock is like the rational brain and then Kirk is the ideal of both. You gotta have testosterone and oxytocin. Kirk had maybe a little too much testosterone but that's okay, he always got the girl. Anyway, so there's a little bit of that. In other words, we're both naughty and nice. More seriously, I think both the Stanley Milgram shock experiments and Phil Zimbardo's faux prison experiments show that on the one hand it is easy to get people, even middle class college students to commit acts of violence. It's not hard to do but on the other hand if you actually watch the videotapes and in the replication since then people are very distressed at doing it. It's hard to get them to do it. You can get them to do it but they're not happy about doing it. There's a whole program you have to set up to shift the good part of our nature and squelch that down and bring up the other part of the thing. It's doable so the whole point of civil societies is to set it up in a way to attenuate the one and accentuate the other. And the long-term trend is that there's been an expanding evolutionary circle of sentiments. That is evolution granted us a sense of empathy for our own kin and kind. And the circle has expanded from bands and tribes to chieftains and states to all races and sexes. Well not quite but we're pretty close. We're getting there. By the way I'll make my annual prediction about gay marriage. In a couple of decades this will be like the black and white drinking fountain thing. It'll be much ado about nothing and people in 50 years from now will look back and they'll write the little history about the early 21st century and say what were they thinking? That was insane. And by the way the Christians will take credit for it. They'll say you know that Episcopalian minister? That was our guy. He was one of ours. Yes, right? Anyway I'm just putting that on the records. That's there. So my argument is that we've been climbing this pyramid of on the bottom rungs being most concerned about ourselves, our immediate family, our kid and kind, our fellow tribe members and ignoring all the rungs above it. But historically speaking we've been shifting our empathetic concerns to the higher rungs, the community, people in other tribes, even other species, and maybe even the biosphere. It's a long road to hope but we're getting there. Okay how did this happen? Two, the Leviathan state. You have to have a state. Okay so here's the non-libertarian surmer speaking. You gotta have a system of rules or people will cheat in case you didn't notice. And I'm not just talking about sports. So what basically what a Leviathan state does, this is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. This was his argument that you have to have a state that takes a monopoly on violence so all the little mafioso types and thugs and gangs, that's what drives rakes of violence up is they solve their own social problems and conflicts personally. It's called self-help justice. If the state doesn't do it, I'm gonna do it. I'm going over to your house at midnight and we're gonna settle the score. Tomorrow at noon, you know, out of the street, something like that. The state says you're not gonna do that anymore, we're gonna do that. That's why the law says it's the state versus so and so. The state is now taking care of justice. So that reduces the need for deterrence and vengeance and that reduces violence and it makes conflicts resolved in a more peaceful way. The problem is the Leviathan state can turn into an autocracy, a theocracy or secular dictatorship which is a destroyer of peace, prosperity and freedom. So not any state will do, democracies are better. The first theoretician on this was none other than Emmanuel Kant in a little-known book that he wrote called Perpetual Peace. He basically outlined three conditions you need for this to operate. He called it a republic, but he meant a democracy of some sort. And then the second one was some sort of United Nations or a League of Nations or some kind of interdependency between nations and then the third one was sort of an interdependency of people through trade, through commerce. In the 20th century, Rudy Rommel was the first to identify the fact that governments kill a lot of people. So although violence has declined between people, governments got more violent for a while until democratic peace process took over in the last century or so. His books, Death by Government and Power Kills documents some of that. Now Rudy was the first to put forward this idea that Tom Friedman picked up in The World is Flat that no two countries with McDonald's ever fight each other. Well that's actually not quite true, but it was Rudy that first identified that through a smaller data set over the course of the last two centuries, in which he claimed that there were no wars between democratic nations. And of course, Polly Sy, a professor, jumped all over that and said, ah, there's lots of different examples of democracies that have fought each other. The Greek wars, the Punic wars, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, these are all democracies fighting each other. So we have to move away from the black and white two categories. You're either democracy or you're not because there's lots of shades of gray in between. The best book on this is Triangle, 80 in Peace. Bruce Russett and John O'Neill, they tested Kant's thesis of the triangle of peace. And this is the correlates of war projects. So they have 2,300 militarized interstate disputes in their database. It's 10 times the size of Rudy Rumble's database. And then they use the polity project, which assigns each country a democracy score. So you're a democracy from one to 10. It's not just you either are or you aren't, it's a scale. This is good science, right? Shades of gray, okay. And those are defined on how competitive the political process is, how openly the leaders are chosen, how many constraints on the leader's power. So they found that when both countries are fully democratic, disputes decreased by 50%. When the last democratic member of a pair was a full autocracy, it doubled the chance of a quarrel. So shifting from a minor democracy to an autocracy increases the probability of violence between states. And so there you can see the rise of democracies and the collapse of autocracies in the last half century. We have to just think about that. There were no liberal democracies anywhere in the world in 1900, zero. Even in America, women couldn't vote. Adult population could not vote in America until 1920. I mean, that's really amazing. On the one hand it's a little embarrassing, but on the other hand, we've come a long ways. So here's the part three, the part that the libertarians will like. And that's trade or general commerce. That is plunder is non-zero. This was Bob Wright's argument in non-zero that there's been an increase in non-zero games and exchange is a way when it's done by the rules. Trade is a non-zero sum, win-win type exchange. And improving technology allows trades of good and ideas. Matt Ridley calls this ideas of having sex. It's all, even just trading products for money and just basic shopping. This is a form of swapping ideas and swapping it. Any time strangers exchange with one another in a positive some way, it reduces the probability you'll treat them as a tribe member in some other tribe who's an other, who's not like us. It reduces those sort of tribal barriers there. So open economic barriers decreases political barriers and therefore leads to more empathetic consideration of the other as a fellow tribe member. So Russet and Oni put that to the test in their dataset and they found that for every pair of at-risk nations, they entered the amount of trade as a proportion of their GDP gross domestic product for the more trade dependent member. They found that countries that depended more on trade in a given year were less likely to have a militarized dispute in the subsequent year, controlling for democracy, power ratio, great power status and economic growth. Democratic peace works only when both members of a pair are democratic, but trade works with either member of the pair has a market economy. I think it was Friedman that said, one reason not to go to war with China is they make my car. Or my computer or my iPad or whatever. So the rates of international trade have gone up dramatically in the last, a little over a century, especially in the last half century. So international trade is good. So you put them all together into the peace triangle, democracy trade and then the third one membership in IGOs, intergovernmental organizations. So Russet and Oni accounted the number of IGOs that every pair of nations jointly belonged to and ran a regression analysis with democracy and trade scores and found that democracy favors peace, trade favors peace, membership and IGOs favors peace. And a pair of countries that are the top 10th of the scale in all three variables are 83% less likely than an average pair of nations to have a militarized dispute in a given year. So that's the growth of membership and intergovernmental organizations. Why does that work? Because evil happens in secrecy. This is why North Korea is a secret society. The moment everybody is watching you and people know what you're doing and people are talking about you, you're less likely to commit violence. This is the whole reason for joining these organizations. Even though countries don't really want to selfishly, it's a good thing that we've shifted toward that. So that's the third in those. Point four, the classical liberalism and the civilizing process. By classical liberalism, I just mean the enlightenment values that we're all familiar with. Since the time of the enlightenment, we've expanded the idea of liberal values, of treating people as an ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. That's the basis of Kantian ethics. And the first guy to create a data set on this is, well, what Steve Pinker calls the most important person you've never heard of, Norbert Elias, the civilizing process. Elias was a sociologist. So his data set were old manuscripts with woodcuts about what life was like in the Middle Ages and books of manners about what you should not be doing. Don't foul the staircases, corridors, closets, or wall hangings with urine and other filth. Don't relieve yourself in front of ladies. Don't touch your private parts under your clothes. Don't greet someone while they are urinating. Don't make noise when you pass gas. When you share a bed with someone in an inn, don't lie so close to them that you touch them. Don't blow your nose into the tablecloth. Don't spit into the bowl while washing. Don't pick your nose. Anyway, you get the idea. People in the Middle Ages were disgusting. So Elias's data set was showing that. In fact, there's been sort of a trickle down from the aristocrats to the middle classes, the lower classes, that we should stop acting like animals and start acting like civilized people. When you do that, you're less likely to stab the guy with your knife across the table or something like that. In other words, violence starts to decrease as argument was with that increase in civilizing process. And all this leads to the humanitarian revolution and the rights revolutions. So we can see, I'll just do another data dump for you here. These are lynchings from 1860 to 1880, 1960. Hate crimes, murders of blacks, 1996. Unfortunately, the FBI only started keeping track of these data sets in 1996. So we don't have a long data set. But the trend lines are still good. Non-lethal hate crimes against blacks, intimidation, simple assault, aggravated assault, all decreasing, whites hostility to blacks. These are questionnaires, if a black moved in, in the neighborhood, would you move? So forth. Those have all been shifting toward more tolerant responses in the last half century. Discrimination against minorities. So countries with policies favoring ethnic minorities has been going up. And countries that discriminate against ethnic minorities has been going down. Rates of rape, again, these are just FBI statistics that have gotten really good in the last couple of decades, but tracks since 1975 have been going down. Domestic violence has been decreasing. Spousal murder in both directions has been decreasing. US states with corporal punishment has been decreasing. There's still some approval of spanking. Even that has been decreasing, mostly in the Western world, slower in the United States, but getting there. Child abuse has been decreasing. School violence has been decreasing. States that have decriminalized homosexuality from 1791 to 2009, world versus the United States. So we've lagged a little behind, but we're catching up. Anti-gay attitudes. Again, the general social science survey and Gallup, these data sets show that people are becoming more tolerant. And that, again, hate crime, intimidation has been decreasing. This is the data set from the FBI since 1996. Even animals, the interest in hunting has been decreasing. It's still popular in the Midwest, I know. But, and vegetarianism has been increasing. The number of animals harmed in movies has been decreasing. In fact, it's zero now, except for that horse movie, I guess, last year or something like that. But even that, the fact that a horse was killed in a movie makes front page story. That's progress, that's moral progress, right? And then finally, I'll just end with the three chairs for freedom and for science. That is that by science, again, empiricism, logic, reason, open-mindedness, open inquiry, because scientific thinking is more abstract and abstract reasoning expands the evolutionary circle of sentiments. Here I'll put forward an idea of a moral Flynn effect. The Flynn effect is that IQ scores have been going up three points every 10 years for the last half century. James Flynn is a New Zealand psychologist who first discovered this. And it's not on the learning parts of the IQ test, like information, arithmetic, and vocabulary. It's in the abstract reasoning, those tasks where you have to rotate a figure in space like three different times and then pick the one down below that matches what it would look like. We're getting better at that. And that's a form of moral, because morality requires abstract reasoning. You have to rotate yourself in space and become somebody else and imagine what it would feel like if that happened to you and then you can decide what the moral thing to do is. We appear to be getting better at that. And so literacy, and what do we do about it? Literacy, education, public discourse, more abstract reasoning, rising above parochial vantage point, and we're replacing the morality of tribalism, authority, and puritanism with the morality of fairness and universal rules. We've expanded the circle of sentiments, which we're continuing to do. And I'll end with the man who picked up from that Theodore Parker quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. Not in his, I have a dream speech, but in his slightly less famous, how long do we have to go speech? And he said, let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Now he was a preacher, so he's crediting probably sources you and I wouldn't. I think I can actually show, I actually have a whole set of slides. It isn't religion, religion is always lagged behind. They're always just like a decade behind the social wave of moral change. It's the enlightenment values of liberal thinking, of democracy, of expanding the circle of sentiments, other consideration. People are valuable in and of themselves. And it's the whole idea of science as an open-ended, open-minded, liberal tradition of testing ideas and finding out what works. That's the best thing that's happened to us in the last half century. It is science that did it. Thank you. Thank you.