Optimistic Viewpoint of the Day | 0211
Slavery used to be practised by every single civilisation. Now it is illegal everywhere on Earth. The concept of equal rights for women wasn’t a concept until a couple of hundred years ago. Now it is part of the explicit belief of all world bodies and most countries. The rights of children not to be exploited for their labour, racial equality, religious tolerance, freedom of speech… it’s very difficult to find clear statements of these values before the Enlightenment. There were some statements in ancient Greece, but they certainly didn’t carry the day then. In almost everything that you could take as an index of moral progress, the data show that we have been making it.
Steven Pinker, in: ‘The way to deal with pollution is not to rail against consumption’
[x]#13766 fan zondag 11 februari 2018 @ 18:03:11
