The real problem with the myth of progress is, as I just hinted, that it cannot deal with evil. And when I say “deal with,” I don’t just mean intellectually, though that is true as well; I mean in practice. It can’t develop a strategy that actually addresses the severe problems of evil in the world. This is why all the evolutionary optimism of the last two hundred years remains helpless before world war, drug crime, Auschwitz, apartheid, child pornography, and the other interesting sidelines that evolution has thrown up for our entertainment in the twentieth century. We can’t explain them,
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