Beyond What We Are: A Hard-Nosed Humanist’s Case for Human Possibility

Begin with the uncomfortable fact: the species that painted the Sistine Chapel also engineered Auschwitz. The civilisation that produced Newton and Darwin and Mandela produced Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide. Any honest account of human potential must start here, in the wreckage, and refuse the exits – neither the cynic’s comfortable despair nor the sentimentalist’s wilful blindness. The question worth asking is not whether humanity is good, but whether it is capable of becoming structurally better – not through wishful thinking or moral exhortation, but through the slow, painful, evidence-based mechanisms by which complex systems actually change.

I approach this as a humanist trained in classical languages and the visual arts, someone who has read the New Testament in Koine Greek and Homer in the original Ionic, and who has spent a lifetime studying the ways human cultures have simultaneously created beauty and enacted horror. My conviction is not that humans are wonderful. My conviction is that humans are unfinished – and that the evidence, looked at without flinching, is more encouraging than the twenty-four-hour news cycle allows.

I. THE BASELINE PROBLEM: WHAT WE ACTUALLY ARE

Let us dispense with flattery. Homo sapiens arrived on the evolutionary scene roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa, equipped with a brain that is, in the words of the evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers, a masterwork of self-deception as much as cognition. We are a species prone to tribalism – the in-group/out-group distinction is not a learned prejudice but a deep cognitive default, with identifiable neural correlates in the amygdala. We are prone to status competition, to short-term discounting that privileges immediate reward over long-term survival, and to motivated reasoning that allows us to construct elaborate justifications for whatever we already want to believe. The philosopher Jonathan Gottschall is correct that we are story-telling animals, but stories serve the teller first and truth second.

These are not moral failures; they are evolutionary legacies. The amygdala that fires on seeing a dark-skinned stranger was calibrated for a world of rival bands on the African savannah, not for a globalised planet of eight billion. The preference for kin over stranger was adaptive when kin were the only reliable allies you had. The tendency to discount the future made sense when the future was genuinely uncertain and the present demanded immediate action. We are, in a phrase I find both humbling and clarifying, Pleistocene hardware running Anthropocene software. The mismatch is the problem.

Acknowledging this is not pessimism. It is the prerequisite for intelligent intervention. A doctor who refuses to name the disease cannot prescribe the treatment. And the treatment – this is the hard-nosed optimist’s core claim – exists.

II. THE RECORD THAT GETS IGNORED

Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature is a controversial book, and some of its statistical methodology has been rightly challenged. But the core empirical point survives scrutiny: by most measurable indicators, organised violence has declined as a proportion of human population over the past several centuries, and dramatically so over the past eighty years. This is not a small data artefact. The interstate war death rate, the rate of homicide in Europe, the rate of judicial torture as an official state instrument – all have fallen, in some cases to fractions of their historical norms. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has collapsed from roughly 90 percent two centuries ago to under 10 percent today. Child mortality that was historically close to 40 percent in many societies is now below 5 percent globally and still falling.

None of this happened through human nature improving. Human nature did not change. What changed were institutions, norms, technologies, and the reach of moral consideration. The abolition of the slave trade did not wait for slave owners to become kinder people; it required political organisation, economic argument, legal pressure, and the sustained moral campaigning of people like William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano. The international prohibitions on chemical weapons, imperfect as their enforcement is, reflect a normative consensus that did not exist a century ago. The International Criminal Court is a flawed institution, but its existence signals something genuinely new in the architecture of global governance: the idea that state sovereignty does not confer impunity for atrocity.

The humanist tradition, rooted in classical antiquity and reborn in the Renaissance, has always insisted that human beings are self-fashioning creatures – Pico della Mirandola’s great claim in the Oration on the Dignity of Man. What the empirical record now shows is that this is not merely a philosophical aspiration but a demonstrated historical capacity. We change. Slowly, unevenly, with enormous suffering along the way, and with frequent reversals – but we change.

III. THE MECHANISMS OF CHANGE

The interesting question, then, is not whether change is possible but which mechanisms produce it reliably and which are illusory. Here the record is instructive.

Moral exhortation alone does not work. The history of preaching, from the Hebrew prophets to the papal encyclicals to the secular moralising of the liberal press, offers little evidence that telling people to be better causes structural improvement. What does work, repeatedly and measurably, is the redesign of incentive structures. When the cost of a behaviour changes, the behaviour changes – not because human nature has improved but because the calculation has shifted. This is not a counsel of cynicism; it is a counsel of realism. Rome did not abolish gladiatorial combat because Romans stopped enjoying violence; it abolished it because Christianity reshaped the political incentives around state-sponsored spectacle. Modern democracies reduced corruption not by producing more virtuous politicians but by creating audit trails, freedom of information laws, and independent investigative journalism.

Education is a mechanism, but not in the naive sense that more schooling produces better people. The evidence on education and civic behaviour is mixed. What education demonstrably does is expand the circle of imaginative identification – the capacity to conceptualise the experience of people unlike oneself. This is what the humanities, at their best, have always offered. When I read the Iliad in the original Greek, I am not receiving moral instruction; I am inhabiting the perspective of a Bronze Age warrior and a grieving Trojan father simultaneously. That cognitive exercise – the literary scholar Martha Nussbaum calls it the ‘narrative imagination’ – is trainable, and it correlates with reduced dehumanisation of out-groups. The mechanism matters: it is not sentiment but cognition.

Deliberative democracy, when it functions, is another genuine mechanism. The evidence from citizens’ assemblies – the Irish model on abortion and same-sex marriage, the UK Climate Assembly, numerous experiments across Europe – shows that ordinary people, given access to expert evidence and structured deliberation across difference, consistently arrive at positions more nuanced, more far-sighted, and more equitable than those produced by conventional electoral politics. This is not because the citizens were unusually wise; it is because the process was designed to counteract the cognitive distortions – tribalism, short-term thinking, motivated reasoning – that ordinary political environments amplify. Good institutional design can partially compensate for Pleistocene hardware.

Law, finally, is underestimated as a mechanism of moral change. Contrary to the conservative view that law merely reflects social consensus, the historical record shows that law routinely leads it. Anti-discrimination legislation in the United States preceded social acceptance of racial equality by decades, but it materially changed behaviour and, over time, contributed to changing norms. Same-sex marriage legislation in country after country preceded majority support for it, and in most cases accelerated that support. Law creates facts on the ground that reshape the landscape in which attitudes evolve. This is not social engineering in the pejorative sense; it is the deliberate use of institutional authority to extend the reach of principles – equal dignity, equal protection – that the humanist tradition has long identified as non-negotiable.

IV. THE NEW CHALLENGES: WHY THIS MOMENT IS DIFFERENT

Hard-nosed optimism cannot proceed by extrapolating past trends. The challenges now before the species are qualitatively different from those that have been successfully navigated before, and this demands acknowledgment.

Climate change is not a problem of the kind that institutions have handled previously. It is a collective action problem at planetary scale, with diffuse causes, concentrated effects on the most vulnerable, and time horizons that exceed any democratic electoral cycle. The incentives are structurally misaligned: the costs of action are immediate and visible; the benefits are distant and probabilistic. This is precisely the profile of problem at which Pleistocene-calibrated cognition fails most catastrophically. We know this. The scientific consensus has been unambiguous for thirty years, and political action has been correspondingly inadequate.

Artificial intelligence presents a different order of challenge. The systems being developed now are not tools in the conventional sense; they are cognitive amplifiers whose effects on the architecture of human decision-making, human employment, human social interaction, and eventually human self-understanding are genuinely unpredictable. The question of who controls these systems, under what constraints, and for whose benefit is the defining political question of the coming decades. If the answer is left to market forces and the preferences of a small number of corporations, the probable result is an acceleration of existing inequalities that will make the last century’s disparities look modest.

And there is the deeper, slower challenge that the philosopher Peter Singer has called the expanding circle – the question of whether the moral consideration that has been extended, however incompletely, to women, to non-European peoples, to sexual minorities, can be extended further still: to animals, to future generations, to non-human entities whose capacity for experience we are only beginning to understand. Each previous expansion of the circle faced fierce resistance from those whose interests were protected by its existing limits. There is no reason to suppose the next expansion will be easier.

These are not reasons for despair. They are the specific terrain on which the next phase of human development must be fought. The optimism I am defending is not optimism that it will be easy, or that the right side will automatically prevail, or that progress is inevitable. History does not have a guaranteed direction. Athens executed Socrates. The Enlightenment produced the guillotine. The century of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was also the century of the gulag. The optimism I am defending is optimism that the mechanisms exist, that the human capacity for structural self-transformation is real and evidenced, and that the alternative – fatalism – is both factually wrong and politically paralysing.

V. THE DEEP STRUCTURE: WHAT BIOLOGY ACTUALLY OFFERS

The strongest case for hard-nosed optimism comes, perhaps surprisingly, from evolutionary biology and neuroscience – the very fields most often cited in support of a pessimistic view of human nature.

The primatologist Frans de Waal spent four decades studying chimpanzees, bonobos, and other great apes, and his findings substantially complicate the ‘selfish gene’ framework that dominated popular evolutionary thinking for a generation. Empathy, reciprocity, fairness, consolation, and what he calls ‘community concern’ – the tendency of high-status individuals in stable primate groups to intervene in conflicts to restore social equilibrium – are not uniquely human. They are deeply rooted in primate sociality, which is to say they are part of our evolutionary inheritance as surely as tribalism and aggression. The human capacity for altruism is not a thin cultural veneer over a bestial core; it is as biologically real as competition.

More significantly, the human brain is characterised by a degree of plasticity that has no parallel in the animal kingdom. Neuroplasticity – the ability of neural architecture to be reshaped by experience, culture, and deliberate practice – means that the cognitive habits most destructive to human flourishing are not fixed. Dehumanisation can be learned; it can also be unlearned. The systematic research on implicit racial bias shows not only that it exists but that it is modifiable through sustained exposure and deliberate practice. This does not mean it is easy to change, or that individual willpower is sufficient. It means the biological substrate is not deterministic.

The great biologist E. O. Wilson, before his death, argued that humanity is in the grip of an ‘Epipalaeolithic’ dilemma – our instincts are ancient, but our technology is modern, and the lag between them is the source of most of our collective dysfunction. But Wilson also believed that understanding this dilemma is itself a form of progress. The moment a species becomes capable of analysing its own evolutionary constraints, it acquires the theoretical capacity to compensate for them. We are not the first generation to possess this understanding, but we are the first to possess it with the precision that molecular biology, cognitive science, and global data systems now make possible.

VI. STARDUST WITH AGENCY

I have spent a lifetime with the classical texts – the rage of Achilles, the moral electricity of the Sermon on the Mount, the philosophical rigour of Plato’s Republic, the radical egalitarianism of the Stoics who insisted, seventeen centuries before Jefferson, that all human beings share in reason and are therefore equal in dignity. What these traditions share, across their profound differences, is a refusal to accept the given as the necessary. The Stoics did not believe human society was good; they believed it could be made more rational. Jesus did not celebrate the world as he found it; he proclaimed a kingdom that stood it on its head. Plato’s philosopher-king is a ridiculous figure in many ways, but the underlying intuition – that politics ought to be governed by something better than appetite and faction – remains one of the most demanding and important ideas in the history of thought.

The modern cosmological picture, which I find genuinely moving without finding it consoling in any easy sense, adds a further dimension. We are, as Carl Sagan put it, the universe’s way of knowing itself. The calcium in our bones was forged in a supernova. The iron in our blood is stellar debris. From this perspective, the emergence of consciousness – of creatures capable of asking why, of building telescopes to look back at the light from the beginning of time, of writing poetry about mortality – is the most extraordinary development in thirteen billion years of cosmic history. That we should squander this inheritance on tribalism and short-termism is not just morally wrong; it is cosmically wasteful in a way that I find almost aesthetically offensive.

But stardust, it turns out, has agency. This is the hard-nosed optimist’s central claim. Not providence. Not teleology. Not the Whig history that sees human progress as inevitable. Agency: the capacity, demonstrated repeatedly in the historical record, to analyse the forces that constrain us, to design institutions that partially overcome our cognitive defaults, to extend moral consideration beyond the boundaries our Pleistocene brains would naturally draw, and to do so collectively, through the difficult, contentious, imperfect machinery of democratic deliberation, legal reform, education, and cultural change.

The objection will come: but look at the world now. Look at the rise of authoritarian nationalism, the rollback of democratic norms, the catastrophic inadequacy of the global response to climate change, the widening gap between the obscenely wealthy and the chronically poor. These are real. Every one of them is real, and the humanist who looks away from them is not a humanist but a fantasist. But they are not evidence against the possibility of progress. They are evidence that progress is not automatic – that it requires sustained, organised, intelligent effort, and that when that effort flags, the countervailing forces, which are also deeply embedded in human nature, reassert themselves.

The abolitionists knew this. The suffragists knew this. The architects of the post-war international order, who had lived through the worst that human beings could do to one another, and who nevertheless sat down to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention and the framework of international humanitarian law – they knew this better than anyone. They were not optimists in any sentimental sense. They were realists who had concluded that the alternative to building better institutions was submitting to the worst of what we are.

VII. GOD WITHOUT RELIGION: A PERSONAL RECKONING

I have argued so far in the language of science, history, and philosophy, and I should be honest about something that sits alongside all of it: I believe in God. Not in any form I can fully articulate, and not in the form prescribed by any institution. But the reality of God – of something that exceeds and underlies the material order, something that the word ‘God’ gestures toward however inadequately – is, for me, not a proposition to be argued but a bedrock experience. I do not pretend to know what God is. I resist, emphatically and on principle, any claim to know what God is. But I accept the reality.

This puts me in an unusual position, and I own it without embarrassment. I am a humanist who believes in God, and I find no contradiction in that. The contradiction only arises if one accepts the claim – made with equal confidence by certain religious authorities and certain militant atheists – that God belongs exclusively to one tradition or another, that to believe in God is necessarily to sign up to a creed, a liturgy, a set of metaphysical propositions about the afterlife, the nature of sin, or the exclusive path to salvation. I do not accept that claim. It is, in my view, a category error: mistaking the map for the territory, the institution for the reality the institution purports to serve.

I am a Jew by birth, and I carry that inheritance with full awareness of what it means – historically, culturally, ethically. The Hebrew Bible is one of the great literary and moral achievements of human civilisation. The tradition of Jewish argumentation, the willingness to wrestle with God that is encoded in the very name Israel, the ethical seriousness of the prophetic tradition – these are gifts I did not choose but have received. The rabbinic injunction to argue with God, to hold God to God’s own standards of justice, strikes me as one of the most sophisticated theological positions ever articulated. Jacob wrestles with the angel and demands a blessing. That is my kind of religion.

But I do not embrace Judaism as a confessional system, any more than I embrace Christianity or Islam or any other organised tradition. I have read the New Testament in Koine Greek and been genuinely moved by the moral electricity of the Sermon on the Mount, not as divine revelation but as a human encounter with something that exceeds the merely human. I have read Rumi and found in his ecstatic dissolution of the boundary between lover and beloved a language for the inexpressible that no systematic theology has matched. I have sat with Indigenous Australian elders and understood that their relationship to Country – the land as a living, speaking, spiritually charged reality – points toward a dimension of existence that Western modernity has largely trained itself to ignore. None of this has made me a Sufi or a Christian or a follower of any specific path. All of it has deepened my sense that the reality we are pointing at when we use the word ‘God’ is genuinely there and genuinely exceeds every tradition’s capacity to contain it.

My position, stated plainly, is this: whether to believe in God is a personal choice, and every person should be free to find their own path – or to find no path at all. The atheist who concludes, honestly and after reflection, that the universe contains no transcendent dimension deserves the same respect as the mystic who finds God in every blade of grass. What I will not accept is the claim, made by dogmatists of every stripe, that certainty is available, that the question is settled, that one tradition or one absence of tradition holds the exclusive truth. The God I am pointing at – if God is the right word, and I use it for want of a better one – is not the property of any church, synagogue, mosque, or secular ideology.

Where does this sit within a humanist framework? Comfortably, I think – more comfortably than either the religious traditionalist or the secular humanist might suppose. Humanism, properly understood, is a commitment to human dignity, to reason, to the expansion of moral consideration, and to the rejection of dogmatic authority over the life of the mind. It does not require atheism. The greatest humanists of the Renaissance were, almost without exception, believers. Erasmus was a priest. Thomas More died for his faith. Pico della Mirandola, who wrote the founding document of Renaissance humanism, was a Christian Platonist who believed that the human capacity for self-fashioning was itself the image of the divine. The secular turn in humanism came later, and for good historical reasons – the wars of religion, the authority of the church deployed against science and free inquiry – but it was never a logical necessity of the position.

What humanism and a non-dogmatic belief in God share is, I think, this: a refusal of premature closure. The humanist refuses to accept that human possibility is exhausted by what we currently are. The non-dogmatic believer refuses to accept that the human capacity for the transcendent is exhausted by any particular tradition’s formulation of it. Both positions require intellectual honesty about what we do not know. Both require a tolerance for uncertainty that is, in my experience, harder to sustain than either dogmatic religion or dogmatic atheism. Both, at their best, produce a certain quality of attention to the mystery of existence – an attention that I find not opposed to the hard-nosed argument I have been making throughout this essay, but continuous with it. If every human life is of equal and infinite value, that conviction rests on something that reason alone cannot entirely supply. Call it what you will.

VIII. WHAT EVOLUTION TOWARD WHAT

The title of this essay raises a question that requires a direct answer: toward what, precisely, might humanity evolve, and what would it mean to be something more than we currently are?

Not transhuman fantasy – not the merger with machines that Silicon Valley prophets have sold as liberation but which, on examination, tends to mean the augmentation of already-powerful individuals at the expense of the rest. The evolution I am describing is not biological but institutional, cultural, and moral – the same kind of evolution that has already occurred, unevenly and incompletely, over the past several centuries.

It means, concretely: societies in which the cognitive and institutional mechanisms that generate cooperation outweigh those that generate conflict. Societies in which the circle of moral consideration is wide enough to include future generations, non-human animals, and the ecological systems on which all life depends. Societies in which the concentration of power – economic, political, technological – is constrained by genuine accountability structures rather than by the good intentions of those who hold it. Societies in which education trains not passive consumers of information but active, critical, narratively imaginative citizens capable of recognising manipulation, sitting with complexity, and deliberating in good faith across difference.

None of this is utopia. Utopia is a Greek word meaning ‘no place’, and its etymology is honest. What I am describing is not a destination but a direction – a vector along which the empirical evidence suggests human societies are capable of moving, have moved, and will move if the institutional and cultural conditions that enable movement are constructed and maintained.

The classical tradition understood this better than we sometimes credit. The Stoics did not expect to achieve the perfect city of reason; they expected to make the actual city somewhat more reasonable. The Sermon on the Mount does not promise the kingdom of heaven on earth; it commands behaviour as if that kingdom were the relevant reference point. Aristotle’s Politics does not describe the ideal polis but investigates which forms of government, given actual human material, tend toward justice rather than away from it. These are pragmatic, hard-nosed intellectual projects dressed in idealist language. The idealism is the engine; the pragmatism is the steering.

IX. THE PRACTICE OF HARD-NOSED HOPE

I am aware that this essay has not offered comfort in the conventional sense. It has not told the reader that things will be all right, that history is on the right side, that love will conquer fear, or that the arc of the moral universe bends automatically toward justice. Martin Luther King’s version of that claim – which he borrowed from the nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker – was always a statement of commitment, not of prophecy. The arc bends because people bend it, at cost to themselves, against resistance.

What I have tried to offer instead is something more useful than comfort: a realistic account of human capacity grounded in evidence, and a clear-eyed diagnosis of the obstacles that evidence also reveals. We are a species capable of both extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary moral imagination. We have built institutions that partially constrain the former and amplify the latter, and those institutions, though fragile and imperfect and always under pressure, are real achievements. We have demonstrated a capacity for extending moral consideration beyond the limits our evolutionary heritage would naturally impose. We have shown, in specific circumstances, that good institutional design can partially compensate for the cognitive defaults that generate catastrophe.

That is not nothing. In the long view – the view from stardust, from 300,000 years of Homo sapiens and 13.8 billion years of cosmic history – it is extraordinary. Creatures made of the debris of dead stars, shaped by selection pressures for a world that no longer exists, have nonetheless managed to create law, art, science, democratic deliberation, and a global framework of human rights that, however imperfectly observed, represents a genuine moral achievement.

The humanist’s task, in this light, is neither to celebrate that achievement uncritically nor to despair at the gap between aspiration and reality, but to understand the mechanisms by which the gap has been narrowed in the past and to work, with discipline and without illusion, on narrowing it further. Latin and Greek taught me that the people who built the Parthenon and wrote the Antigone and argued about the good life in the Academy were recognisably us – flawed, brilliant, capable of the best and the worst. The distance between their world and ours is the distance that organised human effort, over time, has made.

From stardust we came. To stardust we will return. In the interval, what we make of ourselves is, to a degree larger than either the pessimist or the sentimentalist allows, genuinely up to us.