Because men are also humans, so some of them have empathy?

But when I look through written history I see a lot of ways things can go horribly, horribly wrong and not come out better the next time but worse.

Islam never recovered from the end of the Islamic Golden Age. The Romans went backwards in many ways from the Greeks, and Charlemagne backwards farther yet.

Planting seeds for the future is a nice idea for fiction, but a viable policy agenda it's not.