Can We Improve? - The New York Times - 1 views
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are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested?
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I’d like to focus here on a more recent moment: 19th-century America, where the great optimism and idealism of a rapidly rising nation was tempered by a withering realism.
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Emerson thought that “the Spirit who led us hither” would help perfect us; others have believed the agent of improvement to be evolution, or the inevitable progress of civilization. More recent advocates of our perfectibility might focus on genetic or neurological interventions, or — as in Ray Kurzweil’s “When Singularity Is Near” — information technologies.
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One reason that a profound moral improvement of humankind is hard to envision is that it seems difficult to pull ourselves up morally by our own bootstraps; our attempts at improvement are going to be made by the unimproved
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People and societies occasionally improve, managing to enfranchise marginalized groups, for example, or reduce violence, but also often degenerate into war, oppression or xenophobia. It is difficult to improve and easy to convince yourself that you have improved, until the next personality crisis, the next bad decision, the next war, the next outbreak of racism, the next “crisis” in educatio
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It’s difficult to teach your children what you yourself do not know, and it’s difficult to be good enough actually to teach your children to be good.
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Plans for our improvement have resulted in progress here and there, but they’ve also led to many disasters of oppression, many wars and genocides.
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One thing that Twain is saying is that many forms of evil — envy, for example, or elaborate dishonesty — appear on earth only with human beings and are found wherever we are. Creatures like us can’t see clearly what we’d be making progress toward.
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His story “The Imp of the Perverse” shows another sort of reason that humans find it difficult to improve. The narrator asserts that a basic human impulse is to act wrongly on purpose, or even to do things because we know they’re wrong: “We act, for the reason that we should not,” the narrator declares. This is one reason that human action tends to undermine itself; our desires are contradictory.
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Perhaps, then if we cannot improve systematically, we can improve inadvertently — or even by sheer perversity
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As to evolution, it, too, is as likely to end in our extinction as our flourishing; it has of course extinguished most of the species to which it has given rise, and it does not clearly entail that every or any species gets better in any dimension over time
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Our technologies may, as Kurzweil believes, allow us to transcend our finitude. On the other hand, they may end in our or even the planet’s total destruction.
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“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity. Man is … not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago.”