Bringing Fire
How Innovation Helps Us Change and Makes Us Fight

Imagine a people divided in faith. On one side are those with a new vision of right and wrong, who believe their world should change. On the other side are those who think that vision is misguided, potentially disruptive, maybe dangerous. Both sides have their internal squabbles, but each is united by its horror at the other. Sometimes someone tries to reach across the aisle. Maybe they’re hoping for a compromise, or maybe they want to convince the other side to switch over. But these efforts just stoke the flames. Words become missiles, literary offensives against the opposition. Tensions increase; mistrust grows. The other side is called stupid, then untrustworthy, then the enemy. Emotions escalate from annoyance to anger to rage. Meanwhile, most people are just stuck in the middle, people who want peace more than anything else. But they feel helpless as the fighting ratchets up. Civil dialogue collapses, arguments sometimes turn physical. Family members stop talking to each other. Community fractures. Trust in leaders who are incapable of resolving the conflict or who favor one side over the other deteriorates. It looks more and more like the only solution may be violence.

You might think I’m talking about the United States right now, or maybe some other place in the world where conflict over beliefs seems to be out of control. But you would be wrong. In fact, I wrote that paragraph about events 500 years ago, when struggles very similar to those we’re experiencing today tore a society apart.

It started in 1517. That was the year a priest named Martin Luther in the city of Wittenberg Germany wrote a list of 95 disagreements with the Catholic Church in Rome. There’s a legend he nailed them to the door of a local church, though no one knows for sure how he distributed them. Either way, the response was completely unexpected. All hell broke loose in what we now call the Protestant Reformation. In a matter of just a few years, whole regions of Europe deserted the Church in favor of new religions.

That’s when the real fighting began. For more than a century, people fought. The ultimate result was the Thirty Years War, the most destructive war Western Europe had ever seen until that time. Even after the peace treaties were signed, fighting continued to break out sporadically.

At the same time, the Reformation gave people permission to explore all sorts of new ideas. What’s the true job of government? Who should rule? How do we make a juster society? Do people have inherent rights? What are the best ways to learn about nature? It was the beginning of a complete restructuring of our world, in ways that have enriched our lives in ways the people of that time could never have predicted.

There are two points I want you to take from this story that give you the starting point for this book. The kinds of conflicts of belief we’re experiencing today are nothing new; we’ve struggled with them before, and we will continue to struggle with them. Second, these conflicts are distressing and destructive, but they’re also an unavoidable part of human progress in the modern world. That doesn’t make our current struggles any less troubling. But it does say we are likely to overcome them as we have in the past, and perhaps become better people in the process. That’s this book in a nutshell.

For the last 10 years, I’ve been thinking about the question of how humans become better people. Ten years ago, I started doing research with an organization called the VIA Institute on Character. That word, character. has multiple meanings, but when I talk about it, I mean those elements of our personality that are likely to be perceived as admirable or valuable, the good in us. It includes qualities like fairness, perseverance, and curiosity.

As I thought more and more about the question of how character grows, I started to think about that question in a new way. Psychologists, educators, and self-help gurus tend to focus on human growth as a personal journey, something you or I do for ourselves or with a small group. But I became interested in growth as a communal journey. Looking back on human history as someone interested in human growth, I saw periods where whole societies made dramatic leaps forward in what it meant to be a person of character. By nature, we humans can be selfish, lazy, emotionally driven, status conscious, gossiping apes. Yet somehow, we’ve also reached a point where we may act for the benefit of people living thousands of miles away. Where we pursue communal goals not to be achieved in our lifetimes. Where we think about questions like the nature of thinking. We craft international treaties, worldwide relief efforts, multinational corporations, explorations of space, and inquiries into the laws of the universe. This is remarkable progress from where we were four thousand years ago. How did it happen?

The more I thought about this question, the more it also got me thinking about how it is that at times things fall apart, when societies start to fracture. All this talk about improving ourselves started to feel one-sided and incomplete, especially when our whole culture seems to be in crisis. Over time, I began to see the times of growth and the times of fighting as part of a single historical process of psychological change.

This book is an attempt to lay out that process, the good and the bad of it. The case I want to make is that we have slowly become better, more effective people over the course of human history. But that process of positive change creates social tensions leading to much of the conflict and bad behavior we’ve seen along the way.