Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Moral Arc 2015

Welcome to the Cato Institute institute. I am david boaz executive Vice President of the institute and its my honor today to be able to introduce and moderate this program. We hear a lot these days for the past few decades about moral decline in america, moral decline in the world. It covers a lot of different areas. Not clear that those are always the most relevant areas to what we might consider public morality. Bill bennett made a career out of talking about moral decline. Lots of radio talk shows have that is a common theme. Most days theres an oped in the Washington Times decrying moral decline in america and indeed i saw recently that threequarters of americans think that we are in a period of moral decline. So it seems pretty convincing but there is an argument that we are in an era of moral progress and i think more people are starting to speak up on the side of both moral progress and economic tangible progress in the world. As i point out in my own forthcoming book, the libertarian mind, we have in fact seen a reduction in the world in 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. The new issue of cato policy report the newsletter for cato sponsors includes a transcript of a speech i was given at this podium and not one ago by stephen pinker who says the world is Getting Better and better so hes trying to understand why people are so pessimistic. The Cato Institute has created a web site called human progress. Org. At over 700 sets of data on this web site everything from childbirth to womens rights to democracy that suggest a great deal of progress in the world. Im not sure that web site though tells you why this progress has come about and that is one of the topics in a new book from henry holt publishers that we will be talking about today. The author of this book Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of skeptic magazine name monthly columnist for Scientific American and a regular contributor to time. Com and the president ial fellow at chapman university. He is the author of numerous previous books including the believing brain from ghosts and gods to politics and conspiracies, how we construct the leaves and reinforce semester is the mind of the market on the evolutionary economics, why darwin matters and the science of good and evil. Today he is here to talk about his newest book. Please welcome the author of the moral arc how science and reason lead humanity toward truth, justice and freedom Michael Shermer. [applause] thank you david. Hi everybody. Thanks for having me here and thanks for the snow. It was 80 degrees on saturday when i left Southern California for my book tour so i forgot a jacket. I dont even have a jacket. You make adjustments i guess. Human progress web site is really quite good. I wish it would have come out when i was doing my research. There are quite a few of us talking about moral progress. Its not really popular. As peter described here there are reasons why pessimism sells better than optimism. For me its been natural extension of what i do for my day job. I have written books and talk a lot about science pseudoscience, science and religion, science and morality to what extent can science have anything to say about morality and the standard line is that has nothing to say about right and wrong and human values. That is a whole separate thing in human philosophy i disagree with it and its one part of the thesis of my book. Science and reason are the primary drivers of moral progress and not religion as much. My title comes from the inspirational speech from the second greatest speech Martin Luther king jr. Gave and at the climax of this march from selma to montgomery which is beautifully portrayed in the film which is up for an oscar now. I didnt know would become a film. I just does a great story of what it took to get there. The speech was given not on the steps the capital. Pretty much every story youll read about the selma march that king gave his famous speech from the Capitol Steps of montgomery and he didnt. Wallace put him on the Government Property there so they had to do it on the back of a flat bed truck parked in front on the street. I was sort of interesting. He was a 19th 19th century abolitionist preacher named Theodore Parker who said the moral universe my eye reaches but 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 where king got that. And in fact it works. The Civil Rights Movement in the demanding of equal rights resulting in the Voting Rights act of 1965. For five months later you can see king standing over president johnsons shoulder signing that into love. Granting the franchise to all adults in society is what we mean by a liberal democracy where everyone gets to vote. This particular dataset shows there were none in 1800. In fact it wasnt until after the First World War and the Second World War where there was a real burst in the spread of democracy. The policy project rates democracy on a scale of one to 10. Some are more transparent and some are more corrupt. Fortunately in our spiny does not influence the democratic process. [laughter] i think america slid from an aide eight to a seven. In any case that is a sign of moral progress. If you think that expanding the moral sphere many people have more ago rice and thats a sign of progress. Part of it is the granting of the franchise to women and womens rights and you can see the process here. Sorry about that. Thats okay. I will just use my hands. Anyway you can see the United States. We are still quite a ways ahead of everyone else. What i found interesting is these areas in the 1800s where women were granted the right to vote. Karen island there were 12 people they are so easy to get a majority. Pretty much every country in the world has them with the exception of saudi arabia. Perhaps this year in 2015 and like the vatican city said never. How do rights come about . They start from the bottom up. Its a process of the people that dont have rights demanding that they have them. They march, they protest and they say this is not right and we are not going to put up with this anymore. I came across an amazing photograph of one of the early rights revolution leaders Inez Milholland in her march in 1913. She led this march on a white stallion. I would follow her anywhere on that white stallion. It would be hard to object to that standing in front of that. I have a chapter on civil rights and womens rights and an all right so i will be talking about this in turn. You can see the turning point in the mid1990s when the percentage of 25 to 32yearold woman had a 4yearold for your College Degree went to reversing it to a 7 gap crossing the line in the early 1990s. Having a College Degree correlates with Economic Prosperity so that closing of the gap from 25 to 34yearolds is the peak of when you really start generating your income. The 67 difference in 198293 difference in 2012. You often see a much smaller number like 73 but thats because theyre counting all age groups. What often happened is there is a gap demographically across time but this is the most important one that shows progress. Now we are in the middle of another rights revolution. The amazing thing about this rights revolution is that we can see it unfolding before our eyes and keep track of who is against it and he was for it and how the change comes about. Of course it began in 1979 in new york with the protests and you can see the changing attitudes from the early 1970s when most people believed that should not have equal opportunity to crossing over in the mid2002 over 50 for most people in gallup polls and General Social survey polls. Even the president changed his mind. In 2008 he said i believe marriage is between a man and a woman and im not in favor of marriage and he is a liberal saying this. Now in 2012 he says i have just concluded for me personally its important for me to go ahead and affirm that samesex couples should be able to get married. You can see where it crossed pretty close to, right around the time that he changed his mind that is of course what politicians do but in fact 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 come out publicly and say ive changed my mind. Most people change their mind quietly and dont say anything more about it. More secular European Countries like germany marriage and samesex marriage and is truly noncontroversial. These are friends of my wife who is german. There is lots of samesex marriages there. Its no big deal. Its a nonevent and they look at us like we are just barbaric for even having this conversation. So you can see how it comes about in terms of age. Millennials are in the most in favor of it. Generation x is lagging behind people born after 1965. Baby boomers are slowly being pulled up with her for her nails dug into the past and hanging on for dear life for the oldschool as assigned generation not likely to give it up but they will all be gone soon anyway. [laughter] that some old observation. Max plonk observed in science evolution only changes when the old guard dies out and the new guard comes out. Who opposes this . Of course primarily religious fundamentalists and literalists. White evangelicals, black protestants, white mainline protestants and catholics have been largely against it and the revolution has been led primarily by their religiously unaffiliated and give credit where credit is due, and the episcopalian sense were in favor of marriage long ago. And by the way i have some good news for you libertarians that are in favor of the legalization of pot and marriage. I found biblical support for both. [laughter] in leviticus chapter 20 it says if a man lies with another man he must be stoned. [laughter] so other signs of progress the evolution abolition of torture collapse by the mid19th century. The United States of course its injunction against cruel and unusual punishment and apparently not enhanced interrogation but these are his words. Certainly not what used to be common like breaking on the wheel. After you poke the guy full of holes and you burn him and strapped them into wheel and brake them with hammers or burning at the stake or signing someone in half upside down. It takes longer to die impaling on a pole or scraping where you ripped the skin off of somebody. The reason this happened is not because of some new religious interpretation of the bible or revelation from the deity and an interpretation of that. It came about from enlightenment philosophers trying to think how can we improve society through some rational means of changing social policy and political policy. People like Jeremy Bentham and baccarat particularly the 1764 book on as book on essays. An essay on crime and punishment. This was the first to propose the idea of proportionality. There ought to be a fixed proportion between crimes and punishment. That was a new idea. They invented that idea. If you want to change Human Behavior and get people to do Something Different rather than punish them rather than retributive justice lets see if we can improve society by changing people by giving them different motivational structures. The book is still in print by the way. As well as the same arguments not only against torture but the Death Penalty and in europe the Death Penalty is dead and in the United States is on its way to extinction. Here are some of the more colorful ways that humans are practiced killing each other. This is the earliest portrayal of an execution never found by an archaeologist Something Like 20,000 years old and he interprets it as an execution because you have 10 archers and 10 arrows and the guy lying on the ground. This comes from the work of the study of Capital Punishment among hunters and gathers today and the archaeological record to the extent that you can figure that out. The reason for this is because in order to have a relatively peaceful just society that is stable you have to deal with free riders and bullies. There are all sorts of ways of dealing with them nonviolently shunning and gossiping about them embarrassing them not inviting them to your party all sorts of social pressures you can put on people that dont play nice by the rules. Ultimately almost every Group Practices Capital Punishment. Just because if you have a large enough population by chance you will get somebody who is just will not come around who is not a nice fellow, real bully. He has got several stories about how they do it in its an eyeopener. They dont have some of the humane techniques by big lead like the guillotine or old sparky the electric chair or the process of botched executions through drugs. Instead they take them out for a hunting expedition and they dont come out with them. There are various ways you can get rid of them. Throw them off the cliff, bash them in the head and fill them with arrows on that sort of thing. That is an unfairly barbaric way of dealing with problems like that. The United States death sentence has been collapsing and has dropped dramatically since the mid1990s which was reflected in the crime wave as the 70s and 80s as more and more death penalties were handed out. Lagging slightly behind that are the number of executions carried out. That is also on the decline. As you probably know most criminals on death row die of old age before they are executed which costs Something Like 100 more to how somebody on death row. Its quite a bit more and so im predicting if you follow that curve out and the rate that states are changing their policies on the Death Penalty it will be extinct by the mid20s, 20 to 25 to 2030 there wont be a Death Penalty United States. Thats my prediction. We will see. The abolition of slavery of course was driven as we know by quakers and mennonites so yes there were religious people who promoted the abolition of slavery. This is the rate which states started to abolish it but really if you look at what they were inspired by if you look at what the abolition is wrote about they were primarily inspired by the United States decoration in attendance and the french were revolutions declaration of the rights of man. And so what you see in their literature is talking about equal rights and rights were invented in 18th century. There is nothing in the vocals scripture or the holy books that says slavery is wrong. In that sense if the creator of the universe wrote a book that purports to be a guide to morality how come he never mentioned enslaving people was wrong with not only does he not mention this he says here are the different ways you should do it and treat your slaves and so forth. It really doesnt come about until enlightenment philosophers created the idea of equal treatment under the law and people should never be treated as a means to an end but an end to themselves. John locke cant so forth came up with ideas. How far is the moral arc bend . I claim todays conservatives are more liberal than the bulls were in the 1950s. Just think about that for a minute. Social attitudes, not talking about Economic Policy the social attitudes treating blacks and women and minorities and so forth animals compared to the 1950s so i will come back to that in just a moment. There are of course exceptions. What about terrorism so i had to address this issue because its in the news pretty much every day. Im not sure its a problem of what we are told we should be concerned about although it may work by terrorizing governments into spending trillions of dollars and saving a handful of lives but in fact the real suppose it real threat was debunked by political scientist Ericka Chenoweth who has this to merit amazing dataset for the last threequarters of a century or so of every campaign for political change most violent and nonviolent and the percentage of successful campaigns. Nonviolent campaigns are twice as successful as violent campaigns and partially successful nonviolent are twice as successful as nonviolent and failed attempts at political change violent campaigns are much more likely to fail. If you track it over time you can see where shifts in the 50s and continues on much more dramatically today. She points out that no terrorist organization has ever overturned a state and establish a new government. For example if we are worried about terrorists taking over thats not going to happen. Even isis is not a state even though it calls itself the state. Of course you can get into power and become a corrupt government like in syria but in the case of the nazis thats different than the terrorist threats. In terms of an existential threat unless you want to argue spending trillions of dollars to prevent even one death by terrorism may be worse to that extent. What about Donald Sterling Trayvon Martin ferguson . These are stories in the news. Certainly the owner of the clippers and there was a human cry about this. He was in the news every night and p