Happy belated birthday to Charles Darwin, and happy belated bicentennial! Two hundred years ago, Charles Darwin wrote a less famous treatise on morality titled The Moral Sense of Man.
Most striking to me, from a political standpoint, are these lines: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races...as man gradually advanced in intellectual power...so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher."
What Darwin argues in this treatise is that there are two types of moral instincts in men. The lower instinct is that which relates to self-preservation; this is the self-interest that Smith capitalized on (pun intended). The higher instinct is that which relates to man's care for his fellow man, his community, and to humanity. Darwin argues that a finer mind would lead to a more compassionate heart.
This is all very interesting from the standpoint of an educator: if you're training the "leaders of tomorrow," how do you help your students "advance in intellectual power" in a way that will rise their "standard of his morality higher and higher?" A later post will explore that.
From the international relations stand-point, Darwin's prediction that the march of civilization will be marked by increasing cooperation has been accurate thus far. While he was writing, the West practiced a very pure form of realpolitik - statecraft based solely on self-interest. We now associate our own self-preservation with the good of the human race or at least a large slice of it. The EU is a prime example of it.
