Reasonable doubt | Michael Shermer | TEDxGhentSalon

good evening thanks for having me here so my latest book the title the moral arc was inspired of course by the words of the great dr. Martin Luther King jr. on his climax of his march from Selma to Montgomery Alabama which we just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary last weekend on March 7th the start of it actually took him not two weeks to get there but it wasn't until President Johnson sent the armed troops in to make sure that they would get there that that particular moral revolution happened which he observed when he finally got there that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice and in fact five months later the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 with President Johnson there and dr. King looking on and so that's part of the rights revolution of the spread of democracies which I've tracked on this graph here I'll have a series of these graphs from the book showing that in 1800 in fact there were no liberal democracies there was nowhere in the world where every adult could vote and and so the the the march was you know slow but progressive there was a nice little burst after the first world war then after the Second World War and then in the 70s and 80s there and and finally got to the point where there's now 118 out of 196 countries are liberal democracies part of that has to do with the rights revolutions that unfolded over the centuries the abolition of slavery the abolition of torture in case you're wondering since I'm from America we don't torture we just use enhanced interrogation don't confuse the language the rights revolutions of the late 18th century and again in the 1940s and 50s and then more recently civil rights movement women's rights gay rights same-sex marriage and animal rights the abolition of slavery came about with the invention of Rights that is it was not although it was driven in part by religious groups like the Quakers and the Mennonites and religious agitate agitators such as William Wilberforce in fact they had almost no effect until the rights arguments were made rather than religious arguments and that happened the end of the 19th century end of the 18th century early 19th century when that really took off same thing with judicial torture the abolition of judicial torture again that happened with the argument that basic rights arguments arguments that came out of the Enlightenment that were inspired by the age of reason and the Scientific Revolution that you have to have reasons for your arguments you have to have logic behind your arguments evidence for your arguments you can't just proclaim that we got this from on high and expect people to accept it when you live in an age of science and reason so you'll and so just a few of the just a reminder of how far we've come because most people when they they hear me say something like we're living in the most moral period of our history they think are you hallucinating haven't you what been watching the news you know Isis and Syria and just today there was shootings in Ferguson of a couple of police and so on it seems like things are bad and getting worse but if you follow the trend lines instead of the headlines it's actually quite a different story just as a little reminder this is what how states used to treat prisoners and and would-be criminals this is the rack here is a few of the ways that they used to torture people to get the truth out of them so called truth breaking on the wheel burning at the stake sawing-in-half great fun penetrating somebody through both orifices clawing at them like this and that's related to the death penalty of course the whole point of torturing somebody was not to kill them but to make them suffer for as long as possible one of the points of the Rights Revolution was that people should not suffer unduly and and and so death of course is the ultimate form of suffering and that has been abolished in in all European states and well we're not quite there yet in America I'm sorry we're a little bit behind you all here but if you took out Texas Ohio and Florida we're almost there I'm from California we haven't executed anybody since 1992 and most prisoners on death row die of old age and I'm predicting that the death penalty will be extinct by 2025 the death penalty is on death row right now these are some of the different ways that people have used to execute people in the past hunter-gatherers this is the earliest known depiction of an execution ten archers with ten bows and a guy lying on the ground with ten arrows in them this is how hunter-gatherer groups used ultimately to deal with freeriders cheaters bullies nasty people people don't play nice by the rules you just take him out for a hunt and come back without him the guillotine was supposed to be more humane as was the firing squad Oh Sparky the electric chair that didn't always work so well and then lethal execution which is now often botched so again we won't be doing any of this within the next decade or so in fact this was all replaced by judicial rational judicial systems in which with the couch Ehrman's held here by Lady Justice you know the the the the scales were balanced the blindfold so she's not biased and then the sword to enforce the rules these were driven in part by enlightenment philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria the latter who wrote a best-selling book in 1764 on essay an essay on crimes and punishments still in print could only hope my books would stay in print for so long in which he first articulated the principle proportionality that there ought to be a fixed proportion between crimes and punishments before this it was just torture them all as long as you can and make it as miserable as possible what great fun could that be and they were the first to say maybe we should instead take a rational approach to this and see how we can reduce crime because torture doesn't seem to work the death penalty doesn't seem to work the arc of women's suffrage you can track quite dramatically again a burst after the first world war burst after the Second World War Switzerland last of the industrial democracy Saudi Arabia hopefully maybe this year if they do that'll mean every state in the world allows women to vote I did I did note that the Vatican City said never of course they don't have any women so that's part of the problem and I'm not just talking about the vote that's a nephron issue in fact we're in the midst of another rights revolution right now gay rights and same-sex marriage again in the United States is a huge problem but big debate my wife is from Cologne Germany this is her dance partner and his friend and and gay marriage there is this partner gay marriage there is no big deal it's something that's not even talked about in America this will come to an end probably in June when the Supreme Court votes all the other states then we'll follow suit by precedent and then Social Attitudes will lag behind about 5 to 10 years and in 2025 or so we'll be looking back on 2015 like we now look back on interracial marriage debate of the 60s and 50s and 60s when if you can believe it people used to debate whether it was okay for blacks and whites to get married nobody argues that anymore so my prediction by the way is that this is this revolution is primarily well I can show you where it crossed in late 2012 late 2010 early 2011 when those in favor of it caught up and passed those who were opposed to it but if but but what will happen is is we know who opposes it it's mostly deeply religious people fundamentalists and so forth and it's mostly led by the non church the non religious and the most liberal of the religions Episcopalians Reform Jews Universalist Unitarian z' humanists and so forth and but begin in ten years everybody will be in favor of it and they'll all take credit for it that gay marriage think that was our idea you know those Episcopalian okay whatever it takes to get us there and that that's usually how these revolutions happen by the way those of you that are in favor of both gay marriage and the legalization of pot which is another revolution were undergoing in the United States right now I have some good news for you I found biblical support that you can use you can quote the Old Testament because in Leviticus chapter 20 verse 13 it says if a man lies with another man he must be stoned now that that's good you and you know what the word stone means okay that's a universal word now animal-rights you know we're almost there in terms of at least the treatment of animals it began with Jeremy Bentham's original argument the question is not can they reason nor can they talk but can they suffer so our moral concern should be the survival and flourishing of sentient beings in terms of do they suffer can they feel are they sentient are they self-aware do they know when they are feeling pain and did they know that the cause of the pain and so forth that that's the beginning of our moral considerations this is how we began to expand the moral sphere to include more and more creatures so I I define my moral starting point as a survival and flourishing of sentient beings so that it's not just us it's all the cetaceans whales dolphins and so forth it's all the great apes and monkeys probably most mammals we'll get to perhaps this century how far is the moral arc bent I claim that everybody today conservatives included are more liberal than liberals were in the 1950s that's how far we've come just think about how people use to talk about Jews and blacks and women and so forth and how we talk about it today the kind of language used in pop culture films novels and so forth or signs like this and we think about the barbarity of things like Islam and Isis extreme Islam Islamism and Isis and violent revolutions but it wasn't that long ago this is a illuminated Bible from the 12th century in which two Christians are about to behead two Jews for killing Jesus okay this is just an idiotic idea I mean the Jews killed Jesus Jesus was Jewish and in any case if he had to die for our sins you should be thanking his executioner's that's what was supposed to happen okay this whole idea is insane so the debunking of these kinds of ideas and the expansion of the sphere to include all people as members of our group is how we got there or the burning of women Isis burned a Jordanian pilot alive Christians used to burn people alive all the time they work witches so I call this the which theory of causality if you believe that women cavorting with demons in the middle of the night causes plagues disasters crop failures and bad weather then you're either insane or you live 500 years ago in medieval in early modern Europe when everybody believed this and so what happened is is that reason in science debunked the witch theory of causality we replace the witch theory of causality with scientific theories of causality now it's not the only cause as we've noted that argumentation is is the route to go but sometimes you need to change the law first sometimes you need to make it illegal to do these things but ultimately I don't not burn witches because it's against the law I don't burn witches because it never enters my mind to do it I don't even think about doing it and that's the goal of these long arc of the moral arc and expanding the moral sphere is to change people's thinking so they don't even think about doing that gay whatever dude who cares like blacks and whites getting married who cares that's the attitude that we have to get to so I claim my central thesis of the moral arc is that ever since the Scientific Revolution in which the scientific revolutionary is discovered that the universe is governed by natural laws and principles that we can understand and apply to change the world the age of reason and the Enlightenment was then the byproduct of that that is scholars in other areas taking that idea that perhaps the social world the economic world the political world the moral world is also governed by knowable principles and laws that we can understand and then change to make the world a better place that's what we've been doing for the last several centuries roughly speaking this is called they're generally speaking the enlightened enlightenment humanism whatever you call it it's just using science and reason to make the world a better place and change things and that has to do with reasoning abstractly and so what we've discovered James Flynn discovered over the last couple centuries is that IQ scores have been going up about three points every 10 years for almost a century so people are getting smarter but not on all forms of parts of the IQ test but just in the abstract reasoning portions matrices and similarities in particular we're getting smarter at this matrices are things like this where you have to find the pattern look at this find the pattern and then fill in the one that goes here it's number five or similarities or like what do what do dogs and rabbits have in common if you said you use dogs to hunt rabbits you're thinking concretely if you answered both are mammals you're thinking like a scientist and classifying organisms by type which is an abstraction so in this sense expanding the moral sphere to include people who are not like you as members of your group your honorary moral group worthy of dignity and moral respect and so on that's an abstract reasoning concept and we're getting better at that the Flynn himself said that he attributes it to a more schooling more technologies in society more technical jobs more access to abstract tasks this is our economy has shifted from agrarian to industrial to information based others research I haven't in the book about people who read a lot of high literature are better at reading facial expressions anticipating what people are thinking you know just judging somebody's emotional state by their facial expressions and what novels do particularly fiction is that they transport you into somebody else's head like rotating a matrices in space and anticipating what it would look like from that perspective is what you do when you read novels so the idea that the Republic of Letters education literature reading and so forth literacy rates may be one of the drivers of the pushers of the moral arc not the only one but expanding the moral sphere but by my retraining all of our brains to think what it would be like to be somebody else and so instead of manipulating ploughs cows and machinery were manipulating words numbers and symbols Flynn contrasts the pre scientific world of his father with the post scientific world of today through a poignant anecdote about how he and his brother tried to attenuate their father's prejudice through a thought experiment they presented him what what if you woke up one morning and discovered your skin it turned black with make you any less of a human being the senior Flynn shot back now that's the stupidest thing you've ever said whoever heard of a man's skin turning black overnight so Flynn said of his own father he just wasn't thinking abstract ly in hypotheticals thought experiments that sort of thing which is what abstract reasoning helps you to do so one of the concepts that enlightenment philosophers came up with to reduce the rates of violence to increase the moral sphere and so on was the Leviathan State Thomas Hobbes wrote this book the Leviathan it's considered the most influential political tract ever written in which he argued that the state is a way of decreasing incentives for exploitative attack reduces the need for deterrence and vengeance replaces self-help justice with criminal justice and replaces the culture of Honor with the culture of law and all this is to deal with the fact that we have a dual human nature related to justice and fairness that everybody wants we have a urgency to help as well as hurt others to cooperate and be competitive to be altruistic and greedy that is we have better angels and inner demons as Steven Pinker said in his book the better angels of our nature so I'm going to show you a short video clip here and then wrap up the top it's about a 20 second video clip in which you're going to see these three people are talking and you'll see this all of a sudden this man here reaches out and shoves this woman backwards and she stumbles and starts to fall into the pit this guy reaches out to grab her missus and into the pit she goes he then steps like he's gonna go rescue her and then all of a sudden some like urge bubbles up from underneath and he just turns around and Colt this guy I mean it's a beauty where do you see this thing he just snaps his head back twice and then he staggers around for a second like there was something else I was supposed to do and then he remembers and then he rescues her and he takes off and then he says something to her like are you okay and in the moment she acknowledges this he then takes off after this guy like he's going to get him so helping and hurting so here's the play the video clip and off he goes so now so in other words I'm arguing that states are where the first form of social organization to try to solve the problem of people taking the law into their own hands and have a set of rules and so on the problem obviously is the life and state can turn into an autocracy democracies are a solution to this they're better than autocracies and this was tested so this is a scientific test of this by two political scientists the testing the Democratic peace theory by using the correlates of war project and and the polity project on raiding democracies on a one to ten scale basically in short they found that as both countries are fully democratic democratic disputes decreased by 50% when one of them becomes leans less toward democracy and more toward an autocracy conflicts increased by a hundred percent so the formula is that as democracies increase violence decreases and you can see the effect here these are this is the increase in autocracies which collapsed that after the 1970s the rise of democracies in the 1980s and interstate conflicts decreased with them and here's a beautiful test case North Korea versus South Korea as a dramatic comparison so it's kind of a historical science or comparative science you can see the difference from space between North Korea and South Korea you can see the difference in their heights several centimeters taller when you have well when you have a higher per capita GDP almost 20,000 per capita in South Korea barely over a thousand per capita in North Korea that's the difference between a democracy in an autocracy so in conclusion basically I'm saying that we should go from is to odd if we know that democracies are better than autocracies then we ought to spread democracies wherever we can and and that's because democracies are better able to allow the survival and flourishing of sentient beings when they're able to have more freedom and liberty and access and participation in the political process that leads to greater flourishing and so forth and so the Constitution's of human societies up be built on the constitution of human nature and so to finish up then with a quote from Martin Luther King jr. about this dual human nature we have each of us as two selves the great burden of life is to always try to keep that higher self in command and every time that a lower self acts up and tells us to do wrong let us allow that higher self to tell us that we were made for the stars created for the everlasting and born for eternity well dr. King was a preacher and I'm not I'm an atheist so I reinterpreted this slightly in the last sentences of my book that we are in fact made from the Stars our atoms were forged in the interiors of ancient stars that enter their lives and spectacular paroxysms of supernova explosions that disperse those atoms into space where they coalesced into new solar systems with planets life and sentient beings capable of such sublime knowledge and moral wisdom we are Stardust we are golden we are billion year old carbon and so morality is something that carbon atoms can embody given a billion years of evolution the moral arc thank you

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Belgium, Social Science, Democracy, Religion, Social Interaction

Id: -qP0xUNYzXc

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2015