“Humanity’s moral intelligence has, according to a number of authors, gradually increased over the centuries, and some scholars believe this development has been driven by the advance of science and reason,” writes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
This raises an intriguing logical problem. One person may feel that this is true, while another may be convinced of the opposite—that humanity is sinking into ever greater moral decay. The question is how such a dispute can be settled. One side will point to medieval torture or the raids of antiquity; the other will point to Hitler’s extermination camps.
Some will rightly object that the human brain cannot have undergone sufficient biological change over the past several thousand years. Human customs, however, may well have changed. If so, any moral transformation would not be irreversible, yet it could still be entirely real.
One standard, however, remains. If the history of humanity is a history of decline, then people must once have been flawless, almost angelic beings. When exactly was that? In the early Middle Ages? At the time when the Huns or the Avars swept across Europe? Or even earlier? If, on the other hand, human history is a story of moral improvement, then there must once have been dreadful, savage, merciless ages when people treated one another like wild beasts. And on this point, archaeology gives us a clear and unequivocal answer.
The one remaining exception is Islam, which has managed to remain rooted in the seventh century.