"To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Fatal Conceit
51 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Fatal Conceit →
Related Quotes
"I wish neither to deny reason the power to improve norms and institutions nor even to insist that it is incapable of …"
"Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its prod…"
"It is no accident that many abstract rules, such as those treating individual responsibility and several property, ar…"
"Information-gathering institutions such as the market enable us to use such dispersed and unsurveyable knowledge to f…"
"This evolution [of extended order] came about, then, through the spreading of new practices by a process of transmiss…"
"Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order t…"
"It is true that the greater part of our daily lives, and the pursuit of most occupations, give little satisfaction to…"
"The evolution of rules was far from unhindered, since the powers enforcing the rules generally resisted rather than a…"
"Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition s…"
"The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended…"