Animal Rights

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. ...