Web to weave, and corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The philosopher Karl Popper felt that "the belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition." Besides, he added, even if there were a destiny, it would be unknowable. "There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods."
Popper’s basic argument was simple. History is heavily influenced by the growth of knowledge. And we can’t predict the future growth of knowledge. After all, if we could say today what new things we’ll know tomorrow, then we’d already know them today, and they wouldn’t be new tomorrow. Right?
Right. If we knew today how to build an affordable desktop computer that is fifty times more powerful than current desktop computers, we’d already have it on our desks. On the other hand, does anyone doubt that eventually we will have such computers on our desks? For purposes of prediction, isn’t the fact that we’ll have them more important than the question of exactly how we’ll make them?
But wait. There’s always a chance, according to Popper, that science and technology will come to a halt. This could be arranged "by closing down or controlling laboratories for research, by suppressing or controlling scientific periodicals and other means of discussion . . . by suppressing books, the printing press, writing, and, in the end, speaking." Well, maybe. But, even assuming that a government had the power to do that, it would soon find itself governing a not very powerful nation. To stop technical progress is to reserve a place in the dustbin of history.
That helps explain why several trends span all of human history: improvement in the transport and processing of matter, improvement in the transport and processing of energy, improvement in the transport and processing of information. We know that these trends will continue, even though we don’t know the technical details that will sustain them. Or, at least, we know with, say, 99.99 percent confidence that these trends will continue. That’s good enough for me.
Of course, predicting the persistence of technical trends is a long way from predicting their social consequences. When we move from the former to the latter, our confidence drops below 99.99 percent. Still, it doesn’t get anywhere near zero. There are trends in social and political structure that more or less follow from trends in technology.
Finding predictive value in trends makes me guilty of "historicism." According to Popper, historicism involves the belief that insight into the future can be had by discovering "the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns,’ the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history." Popper considered historicism not just misguided, but dangerous. For example, people persecuted under Hitler were victims "of the historicist superstitions of the Third Reich." Popper failed to note that by his definition the Enlightenment-era thinker who founded American democracy, with their progressivist view of history and their attendant sense of mission, harbored "historicist superstitions" as well.
Whether the world of tomorrow will indeed be a logical outgrowth of today’s trends is, of course, a question we can’t settle today. The (fleeting) beauty of any predictions made in the next two topic is their temporary unfalsifiability. But one thing we can do today is see whether the world of today is a logical outgrowth of yesterday’s trends. If it is, then maybe extrapolating from trends isn’t quite the muddled and heinous endeavor that Popper alleged it to be.
Consider seven basic feature of the contemporary world that have gotten much attention from social and political analysts. All of these feature are genuinely important—even, in some cases, as important as the analysts claim. But none of these feature is new. All, indeed, are grounded in very old, very basic dynamics of cultural evolution. Their past stubbornness is valid reason to expect their future persistence.
Not-so-new feature #1: The Declining Relevance of Distance. A book published in 1997 was titled The Death of Distance. But of course, distance isn’t quite dead.True now; true a century ago, as steamships plied the waterways, telegraph lines crossed oceans, and railroads criss-crossed continents; true five centuries ago, when Columbus crossed the Atlantic; true two millennia ago, when the Silk Road took shape. Ever since boats were paddled and trails were blazed, distance has become less and less an obstacle to contact. As transportation and communication get smoother and cheaper, long-distance trade and collaboration make more sense.
Not-so-new feature #2: The "Ideas" Economy. According to the futurist George Gilder, the second half of the twentieth century saw the dawning of the "microcosmic" era, which brought "the ascendancy of information and mind in contemporary technology, and hence in economics as well." Thus, the value of computer hardware "resides in the ideas rather than in their material embodiment." Gilder has a point: you won’t recover much of the original cost of a new computer if you sell it as scrap metal. Then again, that’s also true—if a bit less so—for a new Buick. And it was true—if less so still—for a 1939 Buick. And for the cotton gin, and so on. The growing "designedness" of things is a by-product of technological evolution generally, not of the microelectronics revolution.
Actually, the "ideas" that go into designed goods are only one of the reasons their value so exceeds the value of their raw materials. The other factor is labor—the meticulous assembly that subtle design often entails. Together, these factors encourage long-distance trade by giving practical items a property once confined to gems, silks, and other exotics—a high ratio of value to mass. Along with falling costs of transport, the rising ratio of value to mass has been a basic elevator of trade in recent centuries.
Not-so-new feature #3: The New, Weightless Economy. Various people have made two observations: (1) information, in its modern incarnations, doesn’t weigh much; (2) more and more of what we sell and trade is information. Both claims are true, and it’s also true, as claimed, that they are connected. One reason trade in information is brisk is that sending $10,000 worth of software across the Atlantic doesn’t cost as much as sending, say, $10,000 worth of pig iron. But this logic is simply the latest, if a quite dramatic, example of the above-noted long-term trend: higher and higher ratios of value to mass. Purely informational products are products in which raw materials count for very, very little, and design counts for very, very much.
Not-so-new feature #4: Liberation by Microchip. Suddenly, we are told, information technology is on the side of freedom. This observation gained currency in the final years of the twentieth century, quickly attaining the status of boilerplate in American presidential speeches. Before leaving to visit China in 1998, Bill Clinton observed: "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is . . . essential to the greatness of any modern nation."
It’s true that the latest information technology is forcing historically oppressive nations to grant more freedom if they want more prosperity. But, as we’ve seen, the printing press had much the same effect. And earlier, in Europe’s late Middle Ages, an information metatechnology—incipient algorithms of capitalism—made new local freedoms the price for prosperity. Even back in ancient times, the coming of that potent information technology, money, argued for a certain personal liberty, as free markets now made more sense than before. So too with ancient writing. Had those Assyrian traders in the late second millennium B.C. been denied the skills and freedom to write their own contracts, Assyria would have been the poorer for it.
The basic trend is this: new information technologies open up new vistas of non-zero-sumness. But typically the transmutation of non-zero-sumness into positive sums depends on granting broad access to those technologies, along with the freedom to use them well. And, over the long run, polities that fail to respect this liberating logic tend to get punished with relative poverty. Far from being new, this is to some extent the story of history.
One thing that is new is how vividly and swiftly the polities get punished. Political leaders now see their competition up close, in real time. And, with technological change coming faster than ever, stagnation breeds calamity in decades, not centuries.
Another new thing is the extent of the decentralization of power that is now essential to prosperity. Printing presses, though more cost-effective than monasteries full of scribbling monks, were still a fairly pricey form of mass communication. (As the old maxim has it: Never get into an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel.) Today, though, a kind of printing press is standard desktop equipment in advanced economies. And it is more powerful than the old kind. At almost no cost, it can make any diatribe available to computer user all around the planet.
Even governments not enthusiastic about this power, such as China’s, have had a hard time curtailing it without hobbling their economies. The reason—the link between prosperity and nationally diffuse data processing—was spelled out by one reform-minded Chinese thinker, Hu Weixi, in 1998. He observed that China’s 1.2 billion people "are not only a ‘labor force’; they are also the world’s largest thought warehouse and brain. We can thus use the magic weapon of freedom of thought to achieve success." (As of 1998, Chinese thinkers of Hu Weixi’s stripe were having forums on the right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of libertarians and one of the first economists to view an economy a an information-processing system. Long before the fall of communism, Hayek identified its oft-overlooked weakness: not only did it fail to offer an incentive to work hard; it forced signals connecting supply and demand to travel a tortuous path that invited distortion.)
Seeing history as the unfolding of human liberty is one symptom of being a "Whig historian." According to Herbert Butterfield, who coined this pejorative, a Whig historian is someone who tends "to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present." But the fact is that things can work vice versa—the present can ratify a particular story about the past. When Butterfield wrote, in 1931, various historians—the classic nineteenth-century Whig historians—had depicted history as the unfolding of freedom. But they hadn’t suggested a plausible mechanism to explain why exactly freedom tended to triumph later in history rather than earlier. The present age—the information age—has suggested the mechanism by letting u watch it work in real time. Every year, advances in information technology are making Stalinist economics less tenable (and, by some accounts, are making centralized organizational hierarchies in general less tenable). From this fast- forward vantage point, we can look back and see the same basic dynamic at work, albeit more slowly, in centuries, even millennia, past.
Not-so-new feature #5: Narrow casting. Suddenly we have moved from the age of "broadcasting," featuring a few TV networks offering mainstream fare, to the age of "narrowcasting," featuring lots of more specialized channels. This is truly a new development—new, at least, for this particular medium. But an analogous thing happened with print as the costs of publishing dropped in the fifteenth century and continued to drop thereafter.The first two magazines in the United States, published in the mid-eighteenth century, were called American Magazine and General Magazine, much as early broadcast networks had names like the American Broadcasting Company. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were magazines such as Popular Science—rough equivalents of the Discovery Channel.
This parallel between media is often lost in the course of cosmic media theorizing. The emphasis, instead, is placed on the supposedly determinative differences among media. Marshall McLuhan, for example, said that "the medium is the message"—that different media have different intrinsic, culture-shaping properties. Thus the phonetic alphabet was said to be a "hot" medium (though ideographic script, oddly, was "cool"), and TV was said to be "cool" (though movies were "hot").
What did McLuhan mean by "cool" and "hot"? Deciphering McLuhan’s prose is not always a cost-effective way to spend time. Besides, the merit of his particular taxonomy is not the main point here. The main point is to deflate such typologies in general—to question the notion that media shape culture and history mainly by virtue of their peculiar sensory properties. Whatever the differences among video, audio, and the written word (and there are important differences), their essential potential is the same: they are instruments of communication, persuasion, coordination. All can ease the mobilization of groups with a common goal. You could in principle have started the Protestant Reformation via TV. (Luther was a preacher, after all, like Billy Graham.) But TV didn’t exist.
Moreover, when TV was invented, the core similarities between video and the written word were concealed by the fact that, at the time, the two media had different economic properties. Since the invention of writing in ancient times, a series of innovations—paper, ink, mass-produced paper, the printing press, better printing presses, better mail service— had made this means of ending signals quite cheap. But the cost of producing and widely distributing video—whether movies or TV shows—was still high. In the case of TV, the preciousness of video was further heightened by the finiteness of the broadcast spectrum—a finiteness that led to government control of the medium via broadcast licensing. All in all, splinter groups need not apply. (Ozzie and Harriet did not have countercultural tendencies.) But cable TV would change things a little, and as the World
Wide Web goes broad bandwidth, things are changing a lot, driving the cost of telecasting down near zero.
This factor—the economics of a given medium, not its purported temperature—is the key to its social effects, and thus a key to history’s basic direction. Because in the long run, all information technologies follow the same economic pattern: using them gets cheaper and cheaper; narrowcasting is the fate of all media.
The excessive focus on the type of medium, and the underemphasis of its economics, is understandable. At any given time, after all, the different types of media, being in different evolutionary stages, may have radically different economics, and thus seem qualitatively different. Given the cost fifty year ago of video production and transmission, it was natural to think of TV as inherently a mass medium, controlled by big hots, in contrast to such low-cost media as paper. (In Orwell’s 1984, it was Big Brother who communicated by TV, while subversives had to scurry around with handwritten messages.)
So too with computers. Half a century ago, when they were monstrous and monstrously expensive, they seemed just the tool for top-down government. Indeed, some communists hoped they would do for command economies what money had done for market economies. Maybe a building full of computer in downtown Moscow could orchestrate the Soviet economy! By the early 1960s, cybernetics was an officially hot topic in the Soviet Union.
But, meanwhile, microelectronic progress was favoring the market; cheap computing power would soon spread across society. Video, too, would become a tool of the masses, via the camcorder. And now these two media—video and computer—are evolving in synergy. As video production costs plummet (thanks to desktop editing), the Internet is driving transmission costs way, way down. Now even subversives can have TV shows.
What matter about the Internet, then, is not whether it is "hot" or "cold." It can be either, transporting phonetic script or ideographic script, TV shows, movies, or radio. What matter is that the net is rapidly lowering the cost of all these media. Though declining costs of communication are an age-old story, the suddenness of the current drop is bound to be jolting.
All of this may help explain why the long-run political picture (growth in freedom and pluralism over the millennia) looks different from the short-run picture (vacillation between despotism and pluralism over the decades and even centuries). When new information technologies first appear—writing, audio, video, computers—they are often very elite-friendly; for economic and other reasons, control over dissemination is not widespread. So technological evolution periodically favors the centralization of power— specifically, when whole new kinds of information technology, such as writing or audio or video or the computer, first appear.
Further muddying the long-term pattern is the fact that, in a given place and time, whether a technology conduces to despotism or pluralism or neither can depend on context and contingency. Radio and TV, pre-Internet, could be used in a mildly pluralistic way, as in the United States, or in a totalitarian way, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Still, as we’ve seen, in the long run governments have little choice. Even China, an authoritarian (and once-totalitarian) nation, had seen by the late 1990s that it needed the Internet. And its attempts to filter the net—glean the economic benefits without enduring the political consequences—had hardly enjoyed unalloyed success; the nation was more porous to outside information than at any point since the communist revolution. Conceivably, the regime could reverse this trend—but the price would be a dismal economic future. Ultimately, around the world, the combined logic of technology and politics points toward the cheaper, more profuse, more pluralistic use of all media.
Not-so-new feature #6: Jihad vs. McWorld. This phrase, popularized by the political scientist Benjamin Barber’s book of the same name, refers to a paradox. On the one hand, the world is growing more "tribal," breaking up by ethnicity or religion or language, as when Yugoslavia dissolves into factionalism; or when French-speaking Canadians push the secession of Quebec; or when fundamentalist Muslims oppose secularists in Turkey. On the other hand, there is the globalization of economics and culture, as represented by a McDonald’s in Moscow, say, or MTV airing in Europe. Thus, says Barber, the planet is "falling apart" yet "coming together," and the tension between the two forces has sent the world "spinning out of control." Or, in the formulation of an earlier but less famous analysis, there is at once fragmentation and integration—"fragmegration."
What is really happening here is, at its core, neither new nor deeply contradictory. It is the story of the modern age, going back to the printing press. Information technologies, by lowering the cost of data transport, are making it easier for entities with a common interest to coordinate.
Sometimes the result is "McWorld." TV broadcasters in various countries hare an interest with their viewers and with the owners of MTV and the musicians MTV features—an interest in sustaining the phenomenon of MTV. In a somewhat different way, information technologies (and transportation technologies and other technologies) give McDonald’s owners and managers and workers around the world a common interest in sustaining the phenomenon of McDonald’s—an interest they share with their customers.
Meanwhile, the other half of Barber’s paradoxical dichotomy—"Jihad," the "fragmenting" force of "tribalism"—is also lubricated by the declining information costs of coalescence. In that regard, modern tribalism is like such earlier, print-fueled Jihads as the Reformation or the surging Serbian nationalism of the nineteenth century. The first big boost for Quebec’s independence movement came when Canadian broadcasting began to get narrow—in 1952 with the first French Canadian TV channel. Today there are various Francophone cable networks. They not only serve as mouthpieces for pro-sovereignty politicos, but also weaken bilingualism, which in earlier day drew strength from American broadcasts that seeped across the border, into the brains of teenager who had nothing better to watch. (Of course, politics has influenced the timing of all this. The end of the Cold War weakened various national bonds, including those in Yugoslavia and in balkanized African states whose superpower sponsor had once muted division. But in effect what happened was simply the thawing of a natural, long-term process that the Cold War had frozen—the continued crystallization of nationalist coherence through the ongoing decline of information costs.)
Thus Jihad and McWorld—both sides of "fragmegration"—have a common impetus. Improvements in information technology ease interaction among people who benefit by interacting. And not only are the two halves of this paradox thus bound by a common origin; their effects turn out to be not as contradictory, nor even as different, as you might think. Quebec’s tribalism, for example, is a two-way street. The satellites and underground cables that divide Canada with Francophone narrowcasting also mean that TV channels from France can be broadcast in Quebec. Is this transoceanic export of culture an example of McWorld, like other such exports, or of Jihad, since it helps balkanize Canada?
Again, analogues can be found in centuries past. Nineteenth-century nationalism unified while dividing, at once bringing Italy together and breaking the Austrian empire apart. And, during the Reformation, the same printing press that split the European church actually strengthened its international sinews. Previously, Catholic ritual had differed from region to region; mutations crept into liturgical texts when copied by local scribes, and the pope tolerated these quirks. Now, via the press, liturgies were standardized— McLiturgies. For that matter, the press gave the new Protestant doctrines more coherent international reach as well. As the scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein has observed, "the main lines of cleavage [between Catholic and Protestant] had been extended across continents and carried overseas along with Bibles and breviaries." Again the question: Jihad or McWorld? Fragme or gration?
Barber’s sense that the world is "spinning out of control" is understandable. As Marx saw, when technologies change fundamentally, the economic, social, and political relationships premised on them must sooner or later change as well. The ensuing adjustments can be wrenching. Still, chaos is not the natural culmination of basic historical forces. What basic historical forces are doing is driving the system toward a new equilibrium, in which social structures will be compatible with technology. The big question is how chaotic the transition will be—a question that is for the human species to decide. We’ll explore this question in the next two topics.
Not-so-new feature #7: The Twilight of Sovereignty. This is the title of one of many books about forces that seem to be eroding the nation-state’s control over its destiny. In a way, the basic idea is a corollary of not-so-new-feature #6. McWorld—globalization—is the great crippler of national governments. A nation’s central bank has waning influence, thanks to globalized financial markets that suck currency out of the country or pump it in. And those same financial markets, paired with robust trade, mean that economic instability on one side of the world can prove contagious, leaving nations prey to forces beyond their grasp.
True, but not altogether new. A century or so ago, trade levels, as a fraction of economic output, were almost as high as they are now, and money rushed across borders, if not nearly as fast as today. The dominance of Britain’s pound sterling had so fused some financial markets that, as a popular saying had it, "When England sneezes, Argentina catches pneumonia." Contagion then, as now, worked in both directions. In 1890, Britain faced a financial crisis after falling grain prices rendered Argentina unable to make loan payments to the Baring Brothers bank. Nor was international contagion anywhere near new even then. Half a millennium earlier, Britain’s reckless international borrowing to finance the Hundred Years’ War wound up ruining banks in Florence.
There’s no denying that present-day financial interdependence is unprecedented. But the difference is as much quantitative as qualitative.
A DEEPER UNITY
Speaking of things that are not o new: There is nothing new in pointing out that many things thought new are in fact not. Expert debunkers have already assaulted, for example, the notion that economic globalization is a creation of the twentieth century. But the point of this exercise goes beyond cliche demolition. The point is that trends can be of predictive value. If a century or two ago you had looked around and observed, "In the long run, disseminating information tends to get cheaper, and so does transporting products, so that the world becomes a smaller place," you would indeed have observed trends that could be validly extrapolated into the future, notwithstanding Karl Popper’s views on the intractable epistemological problems associated with uch a maneuver. There is a deep unity between past and present.
In fact, the unity goes one level deeper. All seven of the above not-so-new features boil down to the growth of non-zero-sumness; they either cause it, or are caused by it, or are it. Thus:
(1) To say that distance has become less and less economically relevant is to say that relationships can be non-zero-sum across larger and larger distances.
(2 & 3) To say that the ratio of value to mass has risen is to note one of the causes of this declining relevance of distance, this expanding web of non-zero-sumness.
(4) To say that new information technologies ultimately encourage liberty is to say that oppressed groups—dissidents in an authoritarian state, say—can more easily unite in pursuit of freedom, realizing positive political sums among themselves. It is also to say that the allure of the positive economic sums promised by new information technologies is what ultimately leads governments to grant broad, liberating access to them.
(5) To say that casting gets narrower is to say that smaller and smaller communities of common interest can pool their resources to realize positive sums. Thus literate gun buffs, in effect, pool their resources to sponsor Guns and Ammo magazine, and the Golf Channel is underwritten by duffers.
(6) Both sides of the Jihad vs. McWorld paradox are non-zero-sumness in action. Quebec’s "tribalism" consists of people seeking a common goal that they can gain only in concert. Bonds of mutual benefit also unite McDonald’s far-flung web of businesspersons and customers.
(7) Even the "twilight of overeignty," which sounds so lacking in the cheery properties often associated with non-zero-sumness, is fairly brimming with the stuff. Consider the most famous overeignty sapper, the globalized economy. Obviously, the flow of goods and services across borders, and the piles of money pushed across those borders by financiers and currency traders, are the result of zillions of non-zero-sum interactions each day. But perhaps more interesting are the larger non-zero-sum games that result from the disruptive effects of this commerce. With economic downturn more contagious than ever, nations see common cause in forestalling regional collapse, and in dampening turbulence.
PROGRESS AT LAST
So what does all this tell us about the present and future? What are we to make of all these non-zero-sum trends? Given that the trends were at work before this century, it is tempting to answer with this lukewarm prediction: the future will consist of more of the same. And it will, at least in the sense that all of the above trends are likely to continue. On the other hand, even long-standing trends move slowly at times and faster other times, and this may be one of the other times. With the coming of TV, the computer, the microcomputer, and allied technologies, this century has seen breakthroughs in information technology that rival all past such breakthroughs, even the inventions of writing, money, and the printing press. Given the centrality of information technology to non-zero-sumness, and the centrality of non-zero-sumness to social structure, is it possible that we are passing through a true threshold, a change as basic as the transitions from hunter-gatherer village to chiefdom, from chiefdom to ancient state?
And if so, what lies on the other side? Is it the promised land? After eons of oppression can liberty at last blossom worldwide? After millennia of mindless strife can there be peace? Or do the more virulent forms of tribalism, and the more volatile aspects of a globalization, foreshadow a future of turbulence and chaos? These are questions we’ll address in the next two topics. Until we do so—and maybe even after—singing "We Are the World" will be premature.
Still, we might nonetheless pause for a celebration of sorts. For the basic arrow of history—the conversion of non-zero-sumness into sums that are on balance positive, and the attendant creation of yet more non-zero-sumness—does seem to have entailed a certain kind of moral progress. By this I don’t mean that savages are savage, barbarians barbaric, and civilized peoples civilized. Indeed, it would be hard to argue that there was net moral gain between the hunter-gatherer and ancient-state phases of cultural evolution. The Egyptians had slaves—which virtually no known hunter-gatherer societies had—and their soldier returned from war of conquest proudly brandishing the severed penises of slain foes.
Even early "western" civilization didn’t bring great moral improvement. Classical Athens is famous for its enlightenment—its art, its science, its egalitarian ethos. But when conquering other cities the Athenians had a habit of executing all male citizens.
Yet progress was in the cards. The reason is that—for the Greeks as for everyone else— broadening interdependence was in the cards; and interdependence has a way of breeding respect, or at least tolerance.
In the case of the Greeks, the interdependence was partly economic, but mainly military. As various Greek states found common cause in fighting off Persians, Athenians began to concede the essential humanity of non-Athenian Greeks.
That this advance in moral philosophy extended no further than the expanding web of interdependence is evident in the counsel that, according to Plutarch, Aristotle gave to Alexander the Great: "to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and kindred, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals." Even today, for that matter, respect for people’s basic humanity—that is, viewing people as people, worthy of decent treatment—may not extend much further than practical considerations dictate. But practical considerations dictate a larger moral sweep now, because interdependence has grown further. You simply cannot do business with people while executing all their male citizens, and increasingly we do business with people everywhere. The growth of non-zero-sumness, a growth driven by technological change but rooted more fundamentally in human nature itself, has in this one basic and profound way improved the conduct of humans. In fully modern societies, people now acknowledge, in principle, at least, that other peoples are people, too.
As we’ve seen, in the process of expanding, non-zero-sumness has brought not only more respect for more people, but more liberty for more people. The point isn’t just—as such thinker as Adam Smith have been saying since the eighteenth century—that free markets are best operated by free minds. The point is that the ongoing evolution of information technology heightens this synergy, underscores it, makes it something rulers can less and less afford to ignore.
The world remains in many ways a horribly immoral place by almost anyone’s standard. Still, the standards we apply now are much tougher than the standards of old. Now we ask not only that people not be literally enslaved, but that they be paid a decent wage and work under sanitary conditions. Now we ask not only that dissidents not be beheaded en masse, but that they be able to say whatever they want to whomever they want. It is good that we thus agitate for further progress, and all signs are that this agitation goes with the flow of history. Still, it is hard, after pondering the full sweep of history, to resist the conclusion that—in ome important ways, at least—the world now stands at its moral zenith to date.
