human being?” He shot back, “Now that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Who ever heard of a man’s skin turning black overnight?”253
Like the Russian peasant considering the color of bears, Flynn’s father was stuck in a concrete, prescientific mode of thinking. He refused to enter a hypothetical world and explore its consequences, which is one of the ways people can rethink their moral commitments, including their tribalism and racism.
Or consider the high school test question about the water usage in a particular town, which requires, among other things, thinking about proportions. Flynn notes that proportionality questions are surprisingly difficult for many adolescents, and are among the skills that rose as part of the Flynn Effect.254 As we have seen, the mindset of proportionality is essential to calibrating the just use of violence, as in criminal punishment and military action. One has only to replace “manage their water resources” with “manage their crime rate” in the test question to see how an increase in intelligence could translate into more humane policies. A recent study by the psychologist Michael Sargent showed that people with a high “need for cognition”—the trait of enjoying mental challenges—have less punitive attitudes toward criminal justice, even after taking into account their age, sex, race, education, income, and political orientation.255
Before we test the idea that the Flynn Effect accelerated an escalator of reason and led to greater moral breadth and less violence, we need a sanity check on the Flynn Effect itself. Could the people of today really be that much smarter than the people of yesterday? Flynn himself, in an early paper, noted incredulously that in some countries, if earlier scoring norms were applied today a quarter of the students should now be classified as “gifted,” and the number of certifiable “geniuses” should have increased sixtyfold. “The result,” he said skeptically, “should be a cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked.”256 But of course there has been an intellectual renaissance in recent decades, perhaps not in culture but certainly in science and technology. Cosmology, particle physics, geology, genetics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have made vertiginous leaps in understanding, while technology has given us secular miracles such as replaceable body parts, routine genome scans, stunning photographs of outer planets and distant galaxies, and tiny gadgets that allow one to chat with billions of people, take photographs, pinpoint one’s location on the globe, listen to vast music collections, read from vast libraries, and access the wonders of the World Wide Web. These miracles have come at such a rapid pace that they have left us blasé about the ideas that made them possible. But no historian who takes in the sweep of human history on the scale of centuries could miss the fact that we are now living in a period of extraordinary brainpower.
We tend to be blasé about moral progress as well, but historians who take the long view have also marveled at the moral advances of the past six decades. As we saw, the Long Peace has had the world’s most distinguished military historians shaking their heads in disbelief. The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.
The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them.
Lest you think this judgment a slander on our forebears, consider some of the convictions that were common in the decades before the effects of rising