If there’s a core lesson to take away from the studies of psychological biases over the past two or three decades, it is this: our minds evolved for survival, not for accurate perception of the real world. We are primed for tribal conflict; we are primed to exaggerate our sense of threats; we see the world around us as full of threats and, via selective memory, think the past was somehow better than the present, by remembering the good (compared to the dangerous present) and forgetting the bad. And it is very difficult to think rationally, to draw accurate conclusions from actual evidence. Conclusions from actual evidence are, in the survival scheme of the world, almost useless. But they’re useful if you’re trying to understand the actual world.
These biases linger, instantiated over millions of years, even as the human condition has improved immeasurably in recent decades and centuries — because of science and technology (and not mysticism or religion). Yet we’re still stuck with people who think the present is worse than the past. And the only explanation they offer is: my tribe used to be dominant, and now I feel threatened that it’s not. They have no other measure of progress, or its decline.
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Yesterday President Biden gave speech before the United Nations. Here’s a report by NY Times, and a gloss by Slate, and a take by Heather Cox Richardson.
