There is a mood that settles over you if you read the news for long enough. It is the conviction that the world is sliding backward, that whatever decency the twentieth century managed to assemble after its catastrophes is now coming apart, and that we are entering an age of cynicism and brute force from which there is no return. I feel the pull of this mood as much as anyone. When cities are bombed and children are buried, when liars are rewarded and the brave are imprisoned, it seems almost obscene to suggest that humanity is, on balance, becoming gentler. And yet I want to argue exactly that. Not as consolation, and not by closing my eyes to the horror, but because I think the despair is partly a trick of perspective, and that the genuine direction of history, seen across centuries rather than weeks, is the slow and stubborn deepening of humanism.
The trick the news plays on us
Begin with the despair itself, because it is worth asking where it comes from. An outstanding German sociologist once described what news actually is, and his account has stayed with me as the single most useful tool for understanding why the world always feels like it is ending. Out of the countless billions of things that happen on any given day, only a vanishingly small number ever become news. Someone is born; someone dies; someone helps a stranger; someone robs one. The media is a filter standing between that ocean of events and our attention, and the filter has rules. An event is far more likely to pass through if it is novel, if it involves conflict, if it carries hard numbers, especially casualty counts, if it is close to home, and above all if it represents the breaking of a norm.
That last criterion is the decisive one. A car that drives down the highway and arrives safely is not news. A car that crashes is. An old woman helped across the street is not news. An old woman pushed into traffic is. The logic of selection guarantees that scandal, blood, and cruelty will reach us at a wildly higher rate than kindness, patience, and repair, even if kindness vastly outnumbers cruelty in the world as it actually is. We are not, in other words, perceiving reality when we read the news. We are perceiving a curated distillation of its violations. And then we mistake that distillation for the measure of our species.
This is why I distrust the feeling that humanism is finished. The feeling is real, but its source is not a measured assessment of where we stand; it is the inner mechanics of how information is manufactured. To see anything truthfully, you have to step outside the weekly cycle and let your eye adjust to a longer exposure.
The same mocking question, century after century
Do that, and a pattern emerges that I find almost uncanny in its repetition. Humanism is not a fixed quantity. It is a circle of moral concern that has been widening for a very long time, and every single time it has widened, the widening was greeted with the same sarcasm.
Consider how narrow the circle once was. For most of recorded history, full moral standing belonged only to a small caste: adult, free, propertied men. Everyone else, slaves, women, children, foreigners, people of other faiths and other skin, stood somewhere outside the warm circle of full humanity, treated as means rather than ends. The expansion of that circle to include them was not a smooth unfolding of obvious truths. It was a series of bitter struggles, each of which struck contemporaries as faintly ridiculous. There was, within the Catholic Church, a genuine learned debate over whether the indigenous peoples of the newly encountered Americas should be considered human beings at all, and therefore entitled to humane treatment. The question looks monstrous to us now. It did not look monstrous then; it looked like a reasonable thing to wonder.
The detail that I cannot get out of my head concerns the British Parliament. When the idea was raised that women, too, were full human beings with rights of their own, there were lords who responded with the easy wit of men who knew they were on the right side of common sense. If we go down this road, they jeered, where will it end? Next we shall be talking about the rights of animals. They meant it as a reduction to absurdity, the final proof that the whole project was foolish. And here is the thing that ought to make us pause: they were correct. The road did lead there. Some time later, the idea of animal rights did in fact emerge. What they offered as the self-evidently insane endpoint of moral expansion turned out to be simply its next station.
So when someone today giggles that the defenders of animals will soon be demanding rights for worms and mosquitoes, I recognize the voice exactly. It is the voice of the lord in Parliament, the voice of the theologian doubting that the people across the ocean had souls. The mocking question, where will it end, has accompanied every enlargement of the circle, and it has been wrong every single time.
A religion of love with no god in it
What is happening with animals now deserves to be looked at directly, because I think it is one of the most remarkable moral developments in human history, and it is unfolding so quietly that most people do not notice it as a development at all. For tens of thousands of years, human beings related to animals in a purely utilitarian way. An animal was food, or it was labor, or it was a tool, a cat to catch mice, a dog to guard the flock. The relationship was instrumental from beginning to end.
Then, over roughly the last hundred and fifty years, something appeared that has no real precedent: the mass phenomenon of animals becoming family. Cats and dogs, and increasingly stranger companions besides, have entered our homes not to perform any function but simply to be loved. From a coldly practical standpoint this makes no sense whatsoever. The cat is not earning its keep against the mice; the dog is guarding nothing. They are kept for affection alone. You could ask why people direct that accumulated tenderness toward non-human creatures instead of toward children or spouses or friends, and there is no rational answer. It is not rational. It is something more like a faith.
I sometimes call this a religion, not because it involves the supernatural, but as a metaphor for the sheer scale and intensity of the shift, this explosion of non-utilitarian love across an entire civilization in the span of a few generations. And I understand it as nothing other than the continuation of the same expanding humanism that once admitted slaves and women and foreigners into the circle of moral concern. We are now extending it to beings who live alongside us and who are, we increasingly recognize, capable of suffering, of pain, of fear, and in their own fashion of thought. The circle is widening again, exactly as it always has.
This is not a sentimental project, and it is not a simple one. It opens genuinely difficult questions that the mockers like to wave around as if they were knockdown arguments. Where, exactly, on the long ladder of evolution does the capacity for pain and suffering begin? We can readily put ourselves in the place of a dog, a cat, a dolphin, a great ape; empathy comes easily there, because the inner life is close to ours. It comes harder as we descend toward the arthropods, and some organisms appear to feel nothing at all. Drawing that line is hard, serious work, a matter for research and not for slogans. But the difficulty of the boundary is no argument against the enterprise. It is simply the next problem to be solved.
And the practical answer to the oldest jeer of all, that you claim to love animals yet you eat them, is already taking shape. The objection assumes there is no alternative, but the work on cultured meat has been underway for two decades and more. A major animal-rights organization once offered a large prize for the first lab-grown chicken meat brought to consumers; serious money has gone into such research in the Netherlands; Singapore has formally approved the sale of lab-produced chicken. There is resistance, of course, Italy has moved to ban the stuff outright, and the idea is not yet winning broad acceptance in a world preoccupied with more urgent fires. But I am convinced this is the direction of travel. Humanity once turned away from cannibalism, and no doubt there were people then who protested that human flesh was tasty, that eating it was simply normal. The taboo came anyway. The same arc will, I believe, eventually carry us away from killing sentient creatures for food. In the meantime, some things can change now: sport hunting, which I regard as a pure atavism, the killing of defenseless animals for pleasure, belongs in the same grave as cannibalism. Britain has already banned the cruel old ritual of fox hunting. Bullfighting is fading. These are not isolated quirks; they are the leading edge of the same advancing line.
Humanism and medicine are one process
I want to insist on something that is easy to miss: this widening of moral concern is not separable from scientific and material progress. They are two faces of a single movement. The same civilization that learned to see suffering where it had not seen it before also learned to relieve suffering it had once accepted as fate, through medicine above all. To dream, as some do, of a return to a simpler, more natural pre-industrial existence is to indulge a Rousseauian illusion. That imagined past was not gentle. It was a world of plague and early death and casual cruelty, a world without anesthesia and without the moral imagination that anesthesia, in its way, helped make thinkable. The growth of knowledge and the growth of compassion advance together, each enlarging the other.
Step back far enough and the evidence for this is simply there, waiting, if you can train your eye past the week’s headlines. Cannibalism, once a fact of human life, has vanished. Slavery, once the ordinary economic foundation of great societies, has vanished as a recognized institution. There was an age in which no system, no norm, no shared principle restrained aggressive war; and then, painfully, such restraints came into being, imperfect and frequently violated, but real. From 1945 until 2014, Europe, the continent that had twice set the world on fire, went without a major war, a gap of some seventy years. That a war has now broken that gap is a tragedy of the first order. But the existence of the war does not erase the seventy years, just as a single crash does not prove that all the cars that arrived safely never made the journey.
Justice is something we make
I should be honest about the foundation on which all of this rests, because it is not a comforting one. I do not believe there is any higher justice waiting out there in the universe, independent of us, that history is obligated to deliver. There is no cosmic ledger that guarantees the circle will keep widening, no providence underwriting our progress. Justice is not discovered; it is made. It is created by human beings, through law and through moral norms painstakingly built, defended, and handed forward. When I say humanism is the direction of history, I am not claiming it is inevitable. A catastrophe, a great enough war, could end the whole experiment and erase humanism as surely as it would erase the people who carry it.
But here is the reason I remain, against the mood of the times, an optimist about the long arc. The societies that build justice, that extend the circle, that restrain cruelty and protect the weak, tend over time to do better than the societies that do not. Humanism is not only a moral achievement; it confers something like an evolutionary advantage on the communities that practice it, which is why, across the long run and through every reversal, it has kept coming back and kept reaching further. The lords laughed, and the circle widened to include the women they laughed about. They said next it would be the animals, and now, a century on, it quietly is. The work is ours and the outcome is not guaranteed. But the direction, when you finally step back far enough to see it, is unmistakable. We are not falling. We are, slowly and at terrible cost, still climbing.