Time & Perspective Quote by Simon Conway Morris

History doesn’t become “meaningful” by sanding down its uglier edges; it becomes legible by naming them. Simon Conway Morris, a scientist known for arguing that evolution has direction-like constraints, smuggles a moral demand into what looks like a sober epistemic claim. “Make no sense” isn’t just about interpretation in the archive. It’s about refusing the comforting narrative hack where atrocities are reframed as inevitable stepping-stones to progress, as if the universe were quietly auditing our suffering into an eventual net gain.

The line has two tight hinges. First, recognition: “evil doings” must be “recognized for what they are.” That phrase rejects the evasions people reach for when they want history without accountability: euphemism (“excesses”), relativism (“different times”), or systems-talk that explains everything until nothing is anyone’s fault. Conway Morris isn’t denying complexity; he’s insisting complexity can’t be a moral solvent.

Second, bearability: evil becomes livable only if it “may be redeemed.” That’s where the subtext gets thorny. Redemption can read as theological, but it also functions as a cultural technology: truth commissions, reparations, memorials, trials, art, the public work of repair. He’s diagnosing a psychological fact about collective memory: societies either metabolize trauma through some form of moral reckoning or they mythologize it, which lets the harm replicate.

Coming from a scientist, the provocation is deliberate. He’s pushing against the posture that history (and by extension, human nature) can be treated as a morally neutral dataset. The intent is to argue that explanation without judgment doesn’t equal clarity; it’s just anesthesia.