richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

270 i H r c; o !) i) 1; i. u s i o x
the ethical system which will dominate the world state,
will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what
is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful
and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds . . . And the
method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping
of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from
propagating weakness ... is death . . . The men of the
New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make
the killing worth the while.
That was written in 1902, and Wells was regarded as a progressive
in his own time. In 1902 such sentiments, while not widely agreed,
would have made for an acceptable dinner-party argument.
Modern readers, by contrast, literally gasp with horror when they
see the words. We are forced to realize that Hitler, appalling though
he was, was not quite as far outside the Zeitgeist of his time as he
seems from our vantage-point today. How swiftly the Zeitgeist
changes - and it moves in parallel, on a broad front, throughout the
educated world.
Where, then, have these concerted and steady changes in social
consciousness come from? The onus is not on me to answer. For my
purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from
religion. If forced to advance a theory, I would approach it along
the following lines. We need to explain why the changing moral
Zeitgeist is so widely synchronized across large numbers of people;
and we need to explain its relatively consistent direction.
First, how is it synchronized across so many people? It spreads
itself from mind to mind through conversations in bars and at
dinner parties, through books and book reviews, through newspapers
and broadcasting, and nowadays through the Internet.
Changes in the moral climate are signalled in editorials, on radio
talk shows, in political speeches, in the patter of stand-up
comedians and the scripts of soap operas, in the votes of parliaments
making laws and the decisions of judges interpreting them.
One way to put it would be in terms of changing meme frequencies
in the meme pool, but I shall not pursue that.
Some of us lag behind the advancing wave of the changing moral
Zeitgeist and some of us are slightly ahead. But most of us in the