Having read The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, and currently reading through Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, I’ve come to a simple conclusion: we are a species of barbarians. The goal posts continuosly shift and the needle sometimes move in the right way. But look back only a few decades and you will find practices, customs and norms that will strike you as barbaric. Look to the present, and you may feel much the same.

Someone looking back at us will no doubt be shocked at many of the things we accept today, whether in culture, medicine, as a society, in politics, economics. No realm is safe.

And in a way, this is just one aspect of how humans are moving creatures. We keep pushing forward, onward and upward, moving together with the tools we developed that allow us to organize past a small band and as a (broken, warring, but still) collective.