We live in a morally superior era. Not that, as the morally superior history teacher in me would like to remind you, the present is a priori morally superior to the past. Just that we live in an age of tribalism where the all-too-human desire to assert our individual and group superiority has been amped up to become the defining zeitgeist.

(An example of this desire might be dropping a priori into the last paragraph even though I’m only 85% sure I used the term correctly.)

I just finished reading Joel Stein’s In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. I bought it because the title makes Stein seem like my kind of morally superior dick.