M.’s Reviews > The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality > Status Update

"A desire for justice can bring about peace and solidarity; raging thought, however, intoxicated by longing for a perfect society, leads to 'slave camps under the flag of freedom [and] massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman"

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy is unhappy in it's own way. According to Diamond, this is because there is only one way to be happy, namely by not having a single one of all the possible problems that could cause unhappiness..."

"the clever way out of this dilemma that the Church quickly had to offer was to promise rich people access to paradise if they kept their wealth in the here and now and enjoyed it, as long as they were willing to bequeath it to the Church after their deaths.

... contributing to the weakening of existing family structures by ethically blocking the transfer of wealth within families."

"WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) people see their identity as impersonal and abstract, while most other people have a concrete self-conception shaped by complex social relationships and roles."

"There are no atheists in foxholes is said to have been an aphorism widespread among US soldiers during the Second World War, and Marx was also correct in his diagnosis when he described religions as the 'sigh of the oppressed creature' and suspected their function to be a primarily palliative comfort."

"Whether hunter-gatherers were on average happier than some modern humans is a controversial question. Still, an incredibly large number of people have undeniably suffered catastrophic consequences as a result of exchanging the original way of life for a life bordering on modernity. Millions of child labourers would undoubtedly have been much better off under pre- Neolithic conditions."

"But were we merely swapping one injustice for another? The geographer and historian Jared Diamond refers to the invention of agriculture as the worst mistake in human history

"If you are trying to investigate whether coexistence with a central monopoly on the use of force and the wielding of political authority is at all justifiable, it stands to reason that you would compare this with the anarchical alternative."

"Our cumulative culture even made our brain so large that our two cranial hemispheres ultimately only grow together after birth, so a fetus can survive its head being compressed in a birth canal that is actually too narrow for it."

"Yesterday's geniuses - on whose shouldera, of course, we stand - become today's average, through cultural evolution."

(i also think this applies to societies that are on different levels of modernism)

"The quest for what makes us unique was eventully declared futile. Humans are the animals that seek their own essence - and never find it."