Human History Is an Ever-Expanding Circle of Empathy
The world has become freer, more just, more compassionate, gentler, and more equal. But there is clearly room for improvement.
Marian L. Tupy —
There are many different ways to look at the history of U.S. race relations. One extreme, for example, compares America’s past and present state of race relations with a future when all of America’s remaining imperfections will have been ironed out. Let’s call that the “future perfect” perspective. The other extreme compares the flawed present with a past scarred by still greater injustices. Let’s call that the “past imperfect” perspective. Both can be illuminating and both can be held at the same time. An appreciation of the past-imperfect perspective provides an understanding of history as a complex and messy process of gradual liberation. The future-perfect perspective reminds us that we can and should strive to do better.
Progress of Civilization
Were a reasonable person today asked to design a society de novo, the blueprint would almost certainly contain a proviso stipulating that all people are equal under the law. Few things strike the modern reader as more sensible than equal protection without regard to race, sex, or class. What’s often underappreciated is how extraordinarily recent such sentiment is.
Homo sapiens is, by some accounts, 300,000 years old. Throughout most of that time, we were engaged in a zero-sum struggle for survival. We survived through the slaughter of wild animals and flourished by thieving from other humans or enslaving them outright. Our allegiances rested with our family and tribe, which made our individual survival easier. The notion of bestowing equal dignity on all people — no matter what they looked like and where in the world they lived — would have struck our ancestors as utterly fanciful. Not surprisingly, scholarly understanding of “our place in the universe” reflected the dismal reality of human existence. Most of the ancient thinkers believed that history was a process of gradual decline from a mythical “golden age.” Homo homini lupus — a man is a wolf to another man.
Fast-forward some 10,000 generations to the time of the Renaissance, when the renewed interest in science had to be reconciled with the main tenets of the Christian religion, including the often-ignored and inconsistently applied insistence of Christian teachings on the equal dignity of all of God’s children. That led some thinkers to theorize that the physical world had to be governed by divine laws. Since the Christian God was good, the Renaissance reasoning went, so must be the laws governing society in general and individual lives in particular. Working from that assumption, later philosophers, such as the Scottish thinker Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) argued that a good society resulted from “natural bonds of beneficence and humanity” in all people. That idea of universal human bonds formed the foundation of the Enlightenment. Humanism was born.
According to the American scholar Arthur Herman, the Enlightenment developed the “first secular theory” of human progress, which was then known as “civilization.” As a historical process, civilization came to be seen as a linear transformation with distinct stages. First, humans existed in a “state of nature.” They were alone and vulnerable to cold, hunger, and predation. In the second stage, humans came together to form nomadic bands of herders and hunter-gatherers. With agriculture came the third stage of human development. Finally, people gathered in towns and cities and began to live through industry and commerce.
With each stage, humans become more productive, more connected, and more civil. As agriculture improves and food becomes abundant, people specialize in distinct tasks and live through exchange. People who might have been rivals become trading partners and friends. As human relationships become more complex, people become socialized, polite, and refined. All of that stimulating conversation eventually leads to further advances in art and science.
The underlying force that drove the process of civilization was, the Enlightenment thinkers believed, commerce. In the words of Scottish historian William Robertson (1721–1793), “Commerce . . . softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them, by one of the strongest of all ties, the desire of supplying their mutual wants.” People, who might have otherwise hated one another, in other words, were brought together in the pursuit of profit. By the 18th century, the extent of human cooperation within the context of the market economy reached levels that even philosophers, such as Voltaire, felt obliged to opine about it.
Go into the London Stock Exchange — a more respectable place than many a court — and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
Besides creating wealth and friends, commerce created the middle class, or “bourgeoisie.” This class of people was educated, but unlike the nobility, the bourgeois still had to work to survive. The Scottish literary critic Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) argued that the unique position of the bourgeoisie was responsible for the continuing moral, social, and economic advances of civilization. Finally, commerce allowed people to create wealth independently of their rulers, which in turn allowed them to question the political relationship between ruler and subject. Once people could make a living outside feudal structures, which is to say without the need for a lord’s land, people started to question the need to obey the lord’s laws.
To thinkers such as the Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723–1790) and French historian François Guizot (1787–1874), dependency and tyranny were remnants of humanity’s barbarian past, while liberty and self-governance were the hallmarks of the Enlightenment. The French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) went as far as to predict the global triumph of liberty. He wrote:
Then will arrive the moment in which the sun will observe in its course free nations only, acknowledging no other master than their reason; in which tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments, will no longer exist but in history and upon the stage; in which our only concern will be to lament their past victims and dupes, and, by the recollection of their horrid enormities, to exercise a vigilant circumspection, that we may be able instantly to recognize and effectually to stifle by the force of reason, the seeds of superstition and tyranny, should they ever presume again to make their appearance upon the earth.
His contemporary, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), agreed. Since the Europe of his day was once barbarous, he reasoned, surely everyone was capable of enlightenment. Arriving at that point, it needs repeating, took centuries. The evolution of ideas was mirrored in the real world by the gradual liberation (empowerment, in today’s parlance) of the formerly powerless (or excluded). Human institutions, which were previously dominated and exploited by the nobility, the clergy, and the army, began to serve a broader spectrum of society. The role of the bourgeoisie, as the University of Chicago at Illinois economist Deirdre McCloskey documented in her trilogy of books on the bourgeois era, was crucial in breaking the power monopoly of the “higher orders.”
Like any other revolutionary idea, greater inclusion and empowerment (or, to use the original terminology, “liberalism”) did not progress steadily and without setbacks. Some people jealously guarded their new rights, while others refused to bestow equal dignity on others outright. And so, liberalism coexisted with imperialism and slavery for centuries. On occasion, rights that were previously granted were violently, but thankfully only temporarily, withdrawn from some people, such as the Jews during the Third Reich, Black Americans during the Woodrow Wilson administration, and Japanese Americans during World War II. But the tide of gradual liberation continued, eroding eternal prejudices that still remained.
Equal Dignity Emerges
Since both the Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie arose in Europe and its offshoots in North America, it stands to reason that the initial beneficiaries of the change in relations between the powerful and the powerless were the city burghers or the newly enriched white men. Of course, the matter did not rest there. Once the power monopoly of the “higher orders,” which characterized human society since the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, was broken, others saw an opening. And so, over the past 200 years, Western economic and political institutions came to include women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities. Ponder that for a moment. Two centuries. That’s 0.07 percent of our time on Earth.
The process of institutional change differed across the globe. In England, for example, the parliament that emerged from the Glorious Revolution in 1688 originally consisted of nobles, bishops, and shire representatives, and the franchise was restricted to a tiny sliver of propertied men. The Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 expanded the franchise further. By the time of the Representation of the People Act of 1884, some 60 percent of all men could vote. All men over the age of 21 and “qualified” women over the age of 30 got the vote in 1918, but equal enfranchisement of all women had to wait until 1928.
In America, the first people to get a say in politics were white male property owners. During the early part of the 19th century, state legislatures begin to limit the property requirement for voting; the de jure racial barrier to Black enfranchisement was removed only by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870. As everyone knows, the Southern states used every trick imaginable to keep Black Americans from voting as a practical matter for decades to come, and women were enfranchised only in 1920.
The Present Should Give Optimism about the Future
As a result of ideological and institutional changes, the world has become freer, more just, more compassionate, gentler, and more equal. But clearly there is room for much improvement. Our economic and political institutions are flawed because they are a product of flawed human beings. Or, as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed in 1784, “from such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made.”
The future-perfect perspective is right to point to the injustices that still persist, but that does not mean that our society in general and our institutions in particular are unsalvageable. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater in exchange for a promise of a utopian future, as some extremists demand. The word “utopia” combines two Greek words, οὐ (ou, or “not”) and τόπος (tópos, or “place, region”). It literally means “no place.” Those who attempted to reach it in the past — be it the religious zealots during the Wars of Religion in the 17th century, the French revolutionaries in the 18th century, or a plethora of Communist governments in the 20th century — failed to achieve freedom, prosperity, peace, or equality (except, of course, for the equality of suffering).
Those advocating a new start include Harvard University professor Cornel West said last month on CNN:
I think what we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment. What I mean by that is that the history of Black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure. Its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way that people could live lives of decency. The nation-state, its criminal-justice system, its legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties. And now our culture, of course is so market-driven — everything for sale, everybody for sale — it can’t deliver the kind of nourishment for soul, for meaning, for purpose. . . . The system cannot reform itself.
I doubt that West is right. After all, the United States has abolished slavery and Jim Crow laws and passed extensive civil-rights legislation — all in an attempt to overcome overt discrimination against Black Americans. Other reforms should follow. They should include policing reforms, aimed at protecting the safety and dignity of the citizenry, and occupational licensing reform, aimed at reducing the ranks of the unemployed.
But even if West is right, who is to say that out of the ashes of the old society, a better one will emerge? The evolution of ideas — the ever-expanding circle of empathy that the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer has written about — is ongoing. As ideas change, so will the institutions that govern all of us. Judging by the universal condemnation of the killing of George Floyd, it seems reasonable to say that our society can adapt and change. Let’s keep it and make it better.
A version of this essay originally appeared in National Review.
Morocco’s Remarkable Progress in Reducing Child Mortality
“According to the report, the under-five mortality rate in Morocco has declined by an impressive 4.8 percent, dropping from 81 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 52 in 2000, and further to 17 in 2022.
The report also reveals that the infant mortality rate in Morocco has decreased from 64 deaths per 1,000 infants in 1990 to 15 deaths in 2022. Additionally, the neonatal mortality rate has declined by 3.9 percent, falling from 37 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 29 deaths in 2000, and reaching 11 in 2022.”
Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Cities have emerged as epicenters of innovation and progress throughout history, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought. By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.
Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.
But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.
Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.
The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?
“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”
One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”
A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?
That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:
Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.
Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.
During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.
Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.
And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.
Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.
That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).
That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.
Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:
Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.
The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.
As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐called Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.
Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.
The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.
And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.
By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.
Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.
Historic Milestone as Global Child Deaths Fall Below 5 Million in 2022
“In 2022, the number of children that died before their fifth birthday worldwide dropped to below 5 million for the first time, according to a recent United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation report.
Since 2000, the global under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, from 76 per 1,000 live births to 37 per 1,000 live births, the estimates show.”
Indian State of Maharashtra Sees 11 Percent Drop in Child Mortality
“Child deaths in Maharashtra (in terms of absolute numbers) has seen an 11% decline over the last four years, according to data released by the state public health department on Wednesday…
Deaths among children aged up to five years decreased from 19,185 in 2019-20 to 17,150 in 2022-23. About two-thirds of the deaths continue to be in babies less than a month old, a bracket that’s the most vulnerable to conditions such as sepsis, pneumonia, and low birth weight. The most significant drop, 15%, has been observed in infant (0-1 yr) deaths.”
