Steven Pinker, another speaker at TED today, said something that strikes me (as one raised to believe in a world with 6-8000 years of history and a happy-go-lucky creation before Eve did her deed) as profound in its implications:
"The truth is that our ancestors were far more violent that we are, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful times in history".
Is that true? I wonder where his data comes from. Certainly when we study primitive cultures we find substantially higher rates of what we would consider violent crime. And in spite of our evils America is no
Roman Empire.
If one accepts the theory of evolution as more-or-less true, then Pinker's quote can be taken substantially further: the humanity in which we now take comfort, like the biological equivalent of indoor plumbing or a relaible postal system, comes at the cost of literally unimaginable numbers of deaths by lesser creatures. We stand on the shoulders of not only cultural giants, but also bilogical ones, byproducts of the bipeds who bested their neighbors to get here. In such a light any Christ-like self-offering for
the other is truly revolutionary... almost unimaginably so...
