If you were listening to NPR a couple of nights ago while making dinner or driving home from work, you might have heard a segment about "slut shaming." Which is what some young people do to other young people via facebook and simliar social media platforms.

And you might have thought you were living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, when adulterous women were branded with scarlet A's while adulterous men went scot free.

And you might have gotten scared out of your wits.

Because we are still living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, psychologically. Just with far deadlier tools.

What's new and scary is not how awfully and abominably some people treat other people. That's as old as evolution, and presumably not any worse today than it was in ancient times.

What so new and so scary about the times we live in are the devastatingly disasterous ways we've developed for treating one another awfully and abominably.

The bell curve of human intelligence hasn't changed. What's different is our access to one another, our ability to do everlasting harm to others in brief thoughtless minutes.

These days, the meanest, stupidest person in the US probably has several credit cards and an arsenal of guns. Not to mention the ability to say anything about anybody in wildly public ways with no fear of retribution.

Our technology is outrunning our consciousness — by leaps and bounds and laps and laps.