Episode Details

Humans have been developing the toolkit needed to fulfill the Divine command: “learn to get along and take care of the planet”!

Martin Luther King famously said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”   The popular political commentator and TV host Jon Stewart added something poignant to those immortal words: “That arc may bend towards justice … but someone has to bend it … while other people are pushing it back.”

This week’s episode is all about humans climbing up the evolutionary ladder … not just biologically, cognitively, technologically, and spiritually/religiously, but also in the moral/ethical sense … and in the process growing into a role of responsibility: fulfilling the Divine command to “learn to get along, and take care of the planet.” We had a conversation about this with Rabbi Doctor Bradley Shavit Artson, a supremely qualified expert on the evolution of human morality and ethics, taking a whirlwind tour through more than ten thousand years of human history, looking for evidence of the appearance and development of our morality.

During the prehistoric part of our history (before 5000 years BCE), humans were hunter-gatherers, migrating in bands of roughly fifty.  As is the case for all hunter-gatherer societies, they were probably mistrusting of outsiders (the precursor of our modern racism) even to the point of murdering and killing any strangers, and probably had a might-makes-right way of thinking (which kept women subservient and males competing for dominance), but with the potential for occasional acts of compassion.

Stepping into our ancient historical period (roughly 3000 or 2000 BCE), we find various empires (Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian) developing their religions and societies in the Near East, as well as Chinese and Vedic peoples in the Far East.  The development of writing enabled the progressive accumulation of knowledge … as well as of morality and values.  Nonetheless, there was still a might-makes-right mentality, a lot of killing and warring, women were still subservient, and slavery was everywhere and completely accepted.  There are no written records of any opposition against any of these.