Progress

"The reason there wasn't thermonuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis was because a single deputy commander of a Soviet submarine refused to take orders. One human being. If he hadn't done that, how many people would have perished? If that had happened, Steven Pinker's numbers [on the worldwide decline of violence] would be rather different, wouldn't they? A hundred million people down the tubes pretty quickly, and then the breakdown of production and distribution, illness, horrible death. Multiply Hiroshima or Nagasaki by a hundred or two hundred and that's what you'd get. That was one human being. So where is the great inexorable progression toward peace coming from?"—John Gray (45:00)

"Eugenicist ideas and racist forms of biology were strong right up until the start of the second World War, and not only in Nazi Germany in the interwar period, but in Britain and the whole of Europe in the latter part of the 19th century. Some of these ideas, such as craniometry, even entered into law. These ideas about improving the stock of humanity by eliminating inferior elements were not defeated within the context of science, they were only defeated by the military defeat of Nazism. They didn't go away completely, of course, but they were set back. Were they set back by meritocracy in science? No. They were set back by a military defeat. If the defeat didn't happen, I bet you they would still be around."—John Gray (50:00)

"Growth of knowledge is very powerful, but what it produces is new forms of civilization and new forms of barbarism. […] Although science is an embodiment of rationality, the long-run impact of science on society is not to make human beings more reasonable, it simply enables them do what they want to do with greater effectiveness. It gives human beings more power."—John Gray (16:15)