History Readings

Ben Gvir, in his role as national security minister, has presided over the shocking torture and dehumanization of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, which Israeli human rights group B’Tselem detailed in a graphic report last week. Testimonies documented by the group reveal how, since Oct. 7, the prison system in Israel has transformed, in B’Tselem’s words, into “a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy” and facilities where “every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering.” (Israel denies these claims.)

When footage emerged on Israeli media last week of soldiers carrying out an alleged gang rape of a Palestinian detainee, Smotrich denounced the leak of the footage rather than the hideous apparent crimes. Ben Gvir cheered on the storming of Israeli facilities by far-right protesters and sympathetic reservists (and at least one Israeli lawmaker) after Israeli authorities detained a handful of soldiers implicated in assaults on Palestinian prisoners. A lawmaker in Netanyahu’s Likud party declared that all abuse of detainees was “legitimate” in Israel’s struggle against Hamas.

The cumulative effect here is profound: Israel is frequently shielded from censure on the international stage by Western powers whose arguments defending Israel get undermined by Israeli officials themselves. And then there’s the deeper sense that many in the West’s political establishment don’t seem to mind the severity of punishment that Israel has meted not just on Hamas, but on Palestinians writ large.

Just a month into the war, Israel’s far-right Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested in a radio interview that dropping a nuclear weapon from Israel’s clandestine arsenal was an option. His comments were swiftly rejected by Netanyahu and Gallant, but his other remarks — casting the entirety of Gaza’s populace as culpable and calling for the emptying of the territory — have been echoed by myriad Israeli politicians.

First, they examined research going back decades from 60 countries, asking people whether they thought others were less friendly, honest, kind or good than they used to be. The studies included approximately 575,000 participants.

Then they looked at research probing how people behave toward one another. The studies asked people whether, for instance, They had recently been treated with respect, done something nice for someone else or donated to charity. 

A remarkably consistent portion of people over the years—around 60%—have believed that people are less good now than they were in the past. They also have believed that the moral decline began in their lifetime.

Psychologists call this the Fading Affect Bias and say it makes life more tolerable by helping us defang our bad experiences over time and cherish the good ones.

They also consistently said that their own friends and family members behave better than ever. (Don’t be so surprised. “We ignore their flaws to sustain the relationships,” says Waterloo’s Eibach.)

Why do we believe that society is worse than it is? It’s partly the way our brains pay attention. We have a negativity bias. We pay much more attention to bad events or emotions than good ones. This is a survival instinct; we need to detect threats. 

“The strategy that keeps me vigilant on whether the lion is going to get me keeps me seeing threats everywhere,” says Julia DiGangi, a neuropsychologist in Chicago.

Memory might play a part, too. We often remember the past more fondly than is perhaps warranted. That is because the emotional power of a positive experience stays with us longer than the emotional power of a negative one.

“People think the world has gone to hell in a handbasket,” says Adam Mastroianni, an experimental psychologist and lead author on the study. “But as far as we can tell it’s just the same as it always was.” The title of the study: “The Illusion of Moral Decline.”

Getting older might change our perceptions, too. People often see the world as more dangerous and risky during life transitions such as becoming an adult or a parent,

“Being in a role of responsibility makes people hyper-responsive to misconduct,” says Waterloo’s Eibach, who conducted the research. “And we don’t realize that the world didn’t change—we did.”

There’s a danger to believing that people are getting worse when that’s not really true. That belief distracts us from real problems that need to be solved. It makes us susceptible to people in power who want us to believe the worst so they can claim to be the only one who can fix it. And it keeps us from connecting with each other.

“If we believe the worst in people, we treat them in terrible ways,” says Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, who has a book coming out on cynicism. “And then we bring out the worst in them.”

His advice: Fact-check your assumptions about others

Talk more about the positive things people do, a practice he calls “positive gossip.”

And take a leap of faith on someone: Ask a neighbor for help, give an employee more responsibility, talk to a stranger.

In a population where different groups maintain different internallystable equilibria, each supported by a different norm, those groups following normsthat lead to higher group success may be expected to reproduce more rapidly, inwhich case the behavior predicted by group selection models may predominate

Several game theorists in the 1950s nearly simultaneously discovered a resultknown as the folk theorem, which tells us that in indefinitely repeated games, almostany pattern of individual behavior can be sustained as a Nash equilibria by a stable,self-policing norm.

Our detailed analysis of the two-population case without selection illustrates how complex the relationship between migration and conformist transmission can be

Thus the claim that “conformist transmission generates a population-level process that creates and maintains group boundaries and cultural differences through time” (ref. 4, p. 231) is not always true.

Rather than unquestioningly adopt group norms and institutions, individuals and groups appear to evaluate, design and shape them for self-interested reasons (where possible). As individual fitness is frequently tied to group fitness, this often coincides with constructing group-beneficial norms and institutions, especially when groups are in conflict.

Media Summary: Culture is a key human adaptation, but if and how Cultural Group Selection has shaped human cooperation remains unclear.

informational and normative. Informational conformity is the tendency to turn to a group to glean information, make decisions, or form opinions.

Conformity denotes a wide-ranging phenomenon in which people (intentionally or unintentionally) shift their behavior or beliefs to fit in with a larger group

Groupthink refers to a specific kind of dysfunctional decision-making in which a group of well-intentioned people make irrational decisions. Groupthink is often, but not always, spurred by a desire to conform.

Internalization occurs when the ideas and behaviors to which the individual is conforming reflect their sense of self and have become congruent with their values. In other words, they're not just behaving in accordance with the group's beliefs; they actually believe them, too.

Recent research has shown that social disapproval provokes the brain's danger circuits. Conformity soothes.

We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.

To keep ourselves in the warm confines of conformity, we rely on two independent yet related types of social cues. First, we look to others for information about what's going on (informational cues). Second, we look for others to see what to do about it (normative cues).

We start to seek out these cues early. As the notion of self crystallizes in the second year of life, the child begins the effort to align the self socially. An infant who falls down looks up to the parents to gauge whether to cry. If mom reacts in fear, tears will follow. If the mother laughs and reassures — no tears.

This early attentiveness to informational cues is called "social referencing." Shortly after, the child also begins to align their behavior with those of the group by conforming to expectations to share, wait, or not hit (picking up on normative cues).

we use others to figure out what's going on. This can be a very good thing. Consultation, compromise, education, and information exchange are the levers of civilization

Informational cues, however, can also mislead us. Two quite random examples will illustrate: The 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast about an alien invasion led to panic because many people who missed the beginning of the broadcast turned to each other to find out what was going on, misinforming each other

Normative influences work because we depend on social acceptance to survive and thrive

In a classic '50s study, psychologist Solomon Asch told student participants they were to take a vision test. Participants in small groups were required to compare the length of lines. All the participants except one, however, were confederates who at some point began giving wrong answers. Overall, roughly 3/4 of the naïve subjects complied, adjusting their public judgment to conform to the group even though in their individual notes they indicated the right answer consistently. We use normative cues, in other words, to help us gain public acceptance.

Asch's work showed that people are reluctant to break with group norms even if the group is small, ad hoc, and made of complete strangers. But normative cues tend to be even more potent when they come from people whose friendship, love, and esteem we value

Looking outward, tight groups of friends will often make a decision that is bad for addressing the external situation because they seek to maintain internal cohesion.

For humans, both the problem and the solution are group-based. The group is the source of both conformity and rebellion. The dual system of informational and normative cues explains how social conformity spreads as the two types of cues converge (informational cues relay the messages and normative cues ensure compliance

But that dual system also explains social change over time as the cues diverge. Normative cues keep the majority opinion in power through public acceptance, while contradictory, informational cues, affecting private acceptance, may spread stealthily in the cultural underground until they gather sufficient momentum to rise and upend the old order.

n fact, effective nonconformity is in itself a group phenomenon. Psychological research from Asch's to Milgram's has shown time and again that, quite ironically, the presence of allies is the best predictor of nonconformist behavior. Our individual courage is a manifestation of group convictions and affiliations

The visible courageous individual is but the tip of a social iceberg. When you go against the group, you do it not on your own, but in the name — and with the backing — of another group

In other words, we can't avoid conformity. What we can do is raise our own consciousness and become more aware of conformity cues. Then we can try to find good information and the right allies who will help protect us from ourselves.

Cement plus CCS will always be more expensive than just producing cement,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “The green premium in cement is real.”

There is still much less demand pull for green cement than there is for steel,” said Julia Attwood, an industrial decarbonisation analyst at the energy research firm BloombergNEF. “Customers further down the supply chain – say, the owners of large commercial buildings, or real estate developers – need to put more pressure on their suppliers to source green materials.”

Iranian-American writer Azar Nafisi, author of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, who spoke with palpable anger of Western progressives who defend the compulsory hijab as part of Muslim women’s cultural identity and see Western cultural imperialism in critiques of Islamist patriarchy. Nafisi, who has been attacked by Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi as a “native informer and colonial agent” for her criticism of Iran’s repressive regime, cited the slogan of Iranian women’s rights protesters: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western; freedom is global.”

New York Times columnist David French also addressed the question of left-wing illiberalism, calling it a “a giant blind spot” for the left

the overarching question of how Enlightenment-based liberalism can exist when many people are rejecting the Enlightenment itself—not only “post-liberals” on the right, but progressives who see the liberal tradition as steeped in racism, sexism, and other bigotries

University of Virginia religion and culture professor James Davison Hunter, who popularized the term “culture wars” back in the early 1990s, spoke of the troubling replacement of a common culture by a “fundamentally nihilistic” alternative culture. He also warned that authoritarianism is a likely outcome of the loss of basic cultural solidarity, something essential to the functioning of institutions and societies: “If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively.”

intellectual historian Keidrick Roy, who discussed his forthcoming book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism. His view is that the social hierarchy of the slave states was a “racial feudalism” that betrayed the liberal ideals of the Founding, and his book focuses on black thinkers who sought to reclaim those ideals by relying on the Enlightenment tradition to challenge slavery and white supremacy. Drawing inspiration from Frederick Douglass, Roy proposed an “identity-aware” liberalism—a middle ground between the “identity-driven” and the “identity-blind.”

The panel on “a new theory of liberal internationalism” asked when foreign intervention by liberal powers is justified or desirable, but fell short of articulating a persuasive standard, with most of the discussion retracing the “responsibility to protect” debates of the 1990s. One suggestion was replacing the paradigm of “liberal democracy vs. autocracy” with one of “impunity vs. accountability”; but it’s unclear how such a framework would be meaningfully different

What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. Not good enough for Trump, by the way, who suggested later in the “conversation” that five hundred years might be more like it.

And of course time has proved them right. We’re now living through the hottest temperatures in 125,000 years; it’s causing crazy levels of flood and drought, fire and storm. The poles are melting.

The latest study predicts that the great currents of the Atlantic will collapse between 2037 and 2064, with a median prediction of 2030.

Trump’s biggest funder after Elon may be Harold Hamm, the fracking billionaire. He took Trump up on his offer that for a billion dollars he’d give the oil industry whatever it wanted, and he’s been working the phones ever since:

Mike Cantrell, a former Continental Resources executive, said that if anyone could eventually raise $1 billion from the oil industry, it’s Hamm. “It’s limitless what he can raise, if he wants to do it,” he said.