There’s a huge body of literature on human moral instincts and intuitions, so I’m completely on board with the idea that we are by nature good, and evil acts are abnormal.

But here’s the rub: in small scale societies, where everyone knows everyone else, you actually find more violence than in large scale societies. A lot more.

You’d think it would be the opposite. Our moral instincts make us more empathetic towards family, friends and people we know, and yet we’re more pacifistic in societies where we don’t know most people.

That to me is the miracle. Benedict Anderson talked about modern societies as “imagined communities.” We take the relative peacefulness of our society for granted, but sustaining an imagined community as large and diverse as ours takes a lot of institutions working day and night to foster trust.

Woe to us if we forget that, and allow trust to be eroded.