Tom Guarriello argues we're living in the safest era in human history, but vivid media makes it feel worse. We have tools to see far in space but not far in time, so we misjudge the present against a past we can't visualize. Steven Pinker's data backs this up.
Well, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. I'm making a quick response video to Victor Gimme a Break Man. Victor, good video, and watching the clips that you included in your video just brought up a few quick ideas that I want to talk about. The, you know, human beings, we live in in a peculiar kind of middle world in terms of the planet where we live and the universe that we live in. And the middle world that we live in is a middle world of space and time. What do I mean? Well, you know, we have perceptual mechanisms, our senses, that permit us to see a very— a relatively narrow bandwidth of the frequencies that are available to us. We know that animals can see more acute— other animals can see more acutely than we can. They can hear things that we can't hear. In terms of size, we can only see things in this range of things. We can't see things that are very small. We can't see things that are very large. But we've developed tools to do that in the realm of space. We have telescopes, and we have microscopes, right, that enable us to see things that are too big for us to see, distances that are too far for us to see, and things that are too small for us to see. But in the realm of time, we have no tools that enable us to escape this minuscule, minute amount of time that each of us is given as a life. Now, we have history. Fortunately, we have history. Those who have come before us have written extensively about their times, and so We know that we currently live in the safest, most civilized moment in human history and continue to become safer and more civilized as we progress. Now, many of us hear those statements and think, "What, are you crazy? Didn't you see the video of the 8 girls beating the other girl? Haven't you seen what's going on in Iraq? Don't you know what's happening? Darfur? Are you crazy? Are you— No, I'm not crazy. What we don't realize is where we've come from in terms of time. What life was like, everyday life was like for people who lived before us. Now, Forget about the fact that violence on a day-to-day basis, prior to the establishment of civilization, of governments, of the rule of law, of establishing ways for us to interact with one another to enable the civilizations that we've built that have accomplished the things that we've accomplished. Yes, we can say, boy, look at these civilizations, they've brought us pollution, they've brought us this, they've brought us that. Yes, but we aren't drawn quartering people on a daily basis at this point in time. Uh, um, women who have historically been abused violently throughout history, only in the last century in, in America have been given the vote. But the fact of the matter is that we are now at a point in time where women are every bit as civil— are treated in every bit of civilized way as men are treated. We have accomplished a great deal as a civilization, as a species. We've accomplished a great deal, but we didn't have, as Perry put it in his video, we didn't have YouTube back in the time of the Roman Empire. So we don't have images of people being thrown to the lions. We don't have images of people being hacked up by Roman centurions as they walk down the street. We don't have the imagery of hundreds of people lynching Black men in, in, in the South. We don't have the images of the slave ships coming over from Africa. We don't have those images. And so we believe that our civilization is awful. And, and we all know, truth be told, that in many instances it's not particularly pretty. But if we compare, if we are able to for a moment look at time the way we're able to look at space, and without the aid of imagery it's very difficult for us to do so, but if we were able to do so, we would see that what we've made is tremendous progress. I'm going to put a link here to a video by a Harvard evolutionary psychologist, um, Steven Pinker, who did a magnificent presentation at TED in 2007 about this issue. And, um, uh, it certainly was an eye-opener to many of us in the audience and clearly demonstrates, I think, that what we have done is to mistake once again our local time phenomenon and think that what's happening now and not be able to understand the context of what's happening now. You know, when I made some of these videos about, uh, this website that we're thinking about, uh, and I got, I got a lot of comments from people saying, you know, you, you make such a big deal about civilization, as if civilization is such a great thing. And I would go, it is a great thing. Do you understand the accomplishments that we've made? In the, the last, I don't know, 300 years in terms of civilizing ourselves, living in the kind of world that we live now where it's safe to go down the street. It's safe. Yes, you might get mugged, but it's not like what it was 200 years ago. It's not like what it was 100 years ago. It's not like what it was 30 years ago. It's not like what it was 10 years ago. So let's not lose perspective. Yes, a lot of what we see horrifies us, but it's because we see it and we don't see the things that have happened in the past. So thanks a lot, uh, Victor, very good provocative video, uh, as always, and I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.
