Francis Fukuyama on why we’re better than our ancestors

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed History and SocietySociologyEthicsCultural EvolutionPolitical Philosophy In 1675, Madame de Sévigné wrote a letter to her daughter about a musician “broken on the wheel.” This meant being strapped to an X-shaped cross, where an executioner would systematically break the victim’s bones, leaving him to die slowly from blood loss or dehydration. And then, within a few lines, she’s talking about her neighbor Madame de Tarente enjoying the woods in enchanting weather. In 1849, Charles Dickens recounted how he witnessed thousands of people gathered in Southwark to watch a husband and wife being hanged.

And the crowd started singing a song. They took a popular tune — “Oh! Susanna” — and swapped out the words for the condemned prisoners.

Like a crowd in a football stadium, drunk on beer and mass suggestion, everyone made a game of the hanging. Thomas Thistlewood was an overseer and later a planter in Jamaica between 1750 and 1786, and his diary, more than 14,000 pages, records the torture of the people he enslaved and his sexual assaults of more than 100 women. Alongside it sit 34 years of weather journals and notes on one of the finest gardens in western Jamaica.

This week, I interviewed Francis Fukuyama about his new book, _In the Realm of the Last Man_. According to Fukuyama, stories like this reveal to us that we are making progress as a society. They show that we are getting better.

But what exactly is going on? It’s a rare joy to have two Mini Philosophy guests within a single month disagree with each other. Oh, to have them side by side.

A few weeks ago, I explained John Gray’s theory that we never make progress in ethics and politics because any advancement we make is short-lived and forever reversible. Technology and science accumulate over millennia. Well, we’re no less brutal than we ever were.