Violence is declining, argues psychologist Steven Pinker. What are we doing right?
Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people’s moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the Golden Rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the precariousness of one’s own lot in life, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I.”
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.
Has there ever been a confirmed death by prayer, Baptist Pastor Prays For The Death of President Obama (Video)
Drake: I think it’s appropriate to pray for the will of God. I’m not saying anything, what I’m doing is repeating what God is saying, if that puts me on somebodies list then I’ll just have to be on their list.
There have been several examples of evolution in relatively short periods of time – yet another, Study catches 2 bird populations as they split into separate species
Other examples include Darwin’s finches – The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time and the peppered moth.
Media ignore Sen. Jeff Sessions’ double-standard on judges’ reliance on personal
These outlets did not note that Sessions voted to confirm Justice Samuel Alito, who stated during his confirmation hearing in 2006, “When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.”
Sessions and Alito are both conservatives.
inkbluesky 