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.
Summary: Trade tends to reduce prejudice by fostering cooperation, competition, and repeated interaction across groups. Economic theory and empirical research show that economic freedom and globalization are consistently associated with lower levels of nationalism, ethnocentrism, and discrimination. By enabling mutually beneficial exchange and expanding social contact, markets help cultivate tolerance and weaken “us versus them” thinking.
In earlier essays, I argued that trade makes us richer, more trusting, more honest, and more fair. Yet over the past decade or so, we have witnessed a growing populist backlash against globalization and international trade. Many critics portray international trade as an example of “foreign intrusions on national sovereignty.” At first glance, the backlash might seem to suggest that trade with outsiders breeds resentment, cultural tension, and ultimately prejudice. In this essay, however, I argue that trade mitigates discrimination and prejudice, paving the way for greater tolerance.
In Capitalism and Freedom, the late Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman dedicated a chapter to the market’s relation to discrimination. Drawing on Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker’s groundbreaking work, Friedman wrote, “The preserves of discrimination in any society are the areas that are most monopolistic in character, whereas discrimination against groups of particular color or religion is least in those areas where there is the greatest freedom of competition.” He continued:
The man who objects to buying from or working alongside a Negro, for example, thereby limits his range of choice. He will generally have to pay a higher price for what he buys or receive a lower return for his work. Or, put the other way, those of us who regard color of skin or religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result.
Survey data can shed light on the relationship between trade and attitudes toward others. A study of international survey data published by the Brookings Institution found that feelings of national superiority and chauvinism were positively associated with opposition to global trade across multiple countries. On the flip side, pro-trade attitudes and greater exposure to global markets are negatively associated with nationalism, ethnocentrism, and prejudice.
For example, negative attitudes among Americans toward outsourcing appear to be associated with an “us versus them” mentality. According to a study by political scientists Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz, switching from the most isolationist to the least isolationist outlooks predicted a fivefold increase in support for outsourcing. Shifting from the least ethnocentric to the most ethnocentric attitudes predicted a 50 percent decrease in support for outsourcing. And changing from the least nationalistic to the most nationalistic views predicted a 25 percent decrease in support for outsourcing (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Support for Outsourcing by Level of Nationalism
Source: Edward D. Mansfield and Diana C. Mutz, “US Versus Them: Mass Attitudes Toward Offshore Outsourcing,” World Politics 65, no. 4 (2013): 601. Perceived national superiority reduces support for outsourcing when the economic practice is explicitly labeled as “outsourcing.” This is the “Mentioned outsourcing” line. When the same economic practice is described without using that specific term, the same pattern does not occur. This is the “No mention of outsourcing” line.
The evidence compounds. Employing data from the General Social Surveys conducted from 1977 to 2010, Northwestern University’s James Lindgren found that racism, intolerance toward out-groups (e.g., homosexuals, atheists, and others), anti-capitalism, and pro-redistribution go hand-in-hand. Even after controlling for gender, logged income, education, age, and year of the survey, Lindgren showed that racism and intolerance are still strong predictors of socialist pro-redistribution and anti-capitalist attitudes. Lindgren’s analysis led him to conclude, “Those who support capitalism and freer markets and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be . . . less traditionally racist” and “less intolerant of unpopular groups.”
That tracks with the work of the Mercatus Center’s Virgil Henry Storr and Ginny Choi, who compared respondents from market societies to those in nonmarket societies using the World Values Survey. When asked who they would not like to have as neighbors, those in market societies were less prejudiced against those of a different race, language, or religion, as well as foreign workers, homosexuals, and cohabitating couples (see Figure 2). Trade, it seems, is next to good neighborliness.
Several studies by economists Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson investigated the relationship between tolerance, economic freedom, and globalization. The evidence they gathered suggests a causal relationship between the level of economic globalization and the willingness of parents to teach their children tolerance. Another analysis found that economic freedom plays a seemingly causal role in parents teaching their children tolerance and fostering tolerance toward homosexuals and people of different races (see Figure 3). Focusing solely on the United States, Berggren and Nilsson found a similar causality: Economic freedom increases tolerance toward homosexuals, atheists, and communists. Another study found that economic freedom increases tolerance toward homosexuals, particularly in societies that are high in trust.
Source: Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson, “Economic Freedom as a Driver of Trust and Tolerance,” in Economic Freedom of the World: 2020 Annual Report, eds. James Gwartney et al. (Fraser Institute, 2020), p. 196.
And it’s not just parents teaching children tolerance. The media also plays a role in shaping our outlook. An interesting study by researchers at St. Olaf College, Stanford University, and George Mason University combed through a corpus of New York Times articles written over a 20-year period in search of moral language that Americans used in discussing other countries. They then measured the US market interaction with these countries by looking at bilateral trade flows and immigration statistics. Their results indicated that the more market interaction the United States had with a country through trade and immigration, the more news articles contained humanizing language toward that country. We tend to be cordial toward those we do business with.
Of course, it’s easy to say you’re tolerant in a survey or write nice things in an op-ed. It may even be socially desirable. We all want to look good. But does this translate into action? Several studies suggest that it does.
A clever set of experiments published in the European Economic Review showed that both local (monopsonist) and wholesale (competitive) buyers in the Bangladeshi rice market held prejudicial views of ethnic minorities. Prejudicial attitudes were the same across the board. Yet the wholesale buyers quoted the same price for both ethnic majority and minority farmers, whereas the local buyers did not. Why? The authors concluded, “This suggests that the taste-based discrimination that these buyers have against the ethnic minority group . . . can be eliminated if competition is strong enough.”
Those findings were supported by another set of experiments that demonstrated that market exchange decreases discrimination by increasing participants’ focus on their personal gains and reducing identification with their social in-group. Banking deregulation yielded similar results: As the financial sector was deregulated, competition intensified, leading to reduced discrimination against women and minorities.
Protectionist restrictions can exacerbate prejudicial attitudes. As the late economist Walter Williams explained, anti-competitive regulation “lowers the private cost of discriminating against the racially less-preferred person.” But when there is money to be made, trading only with groups who look or think like you doesn’t seem so important. And the more you trade with different groups, the more you realize that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t as bad as you thought.
But let’s go a step further. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Bates College have also shown how trade can break down prejudice in practice. The researchers examined areas along the Silk Roads, a network of trade routes throughout Eurasia that has been used for over millennia. It turns out that areas within 50 kilometers of the Silk Roads today have higher economic activity compared to those that are 50–100 kilometers away. No real surprise there. But more importantly for our purposes, the former areas also have higher rates of intergroup marriage. It’s hard to find a better example of tolerance than asking someone of another ethnic group to become family and spend the rest of their lives with you.
You see this in 19th-century America as well. Railroad-driven market integration between 1850 and 1920 helped reshape American social horizons. A new study found that as counties gained better access to this intrastate trade, the likelihood of marrying someone outside the local community increased. That’s what’s called extra-community marriage. Other signs of tolerance and trust became apparent: Newspapers began to adopt language that reflected generalized trust. Parents began to give children nationally popular names rather than locally distinctive ones, implying a social circle that had extended beyond the local community. But one of the strongest findings was the increase in religious diversity: A 1 percent increase in market access raised religious diversity by 0.27 standard deviation, indicating a greater tolerance for religious identity and practice. Perhaps most striking, families who moved to these more market-integrated areas adapted quickly, especially those working in commerce-intensive industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale, retail, and transportation.
The available evidence suggests that repeated exchange softens suspicion toward outsiders. Sustained commercial contact makes unfamiliar people feel less distant and, consequently, less threatening. Trade provides a mechanism through which tolerance is learned and reinforced. As the 18th-century English theologian and scientist Joseph Priestly noted over 200 years ago,
By commerce we enlarge our acquaintance with the terraqueous globe and its inhabitants, which tends to greatly expand the mind, and to cure us of many hurtful prejudices. . . . No person can taste the sweets of commerce, which absolutely depends upon a free and undisturbed intercourse of different and remote nations, but must grow fond of peace, in which alone the advantages he enjoys can be had.
“After a yearslong trend of elite colleges dropping standardized test requirements from their applications, the tide seems to be turning for the SAT. Long derided as unfair, unnecessary, or even sexist and racist, college entrance exams are gaining new defenders who point out that, contrary to common conception, standardized tests help—not hinder—talented yet disadvantaged students.”
1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023
A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
Malcolm Cochran —
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
Which Students Get Into Advanced Math? Texas Is Using Test Scores to Limit Bias
“A new Texas law calls for every student who performs in the top 40% on a fifth-grade math assessment to be enrolled automatically in advanced math for sixth grade.”
