A Proven Recipe for Success !

Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress

By Steven Pinker

Viking Press, 2018

During the spring of 2020 one may perhaps be justified for feeling doubtful about humanity’s trajectory.

As if living through pandemic, economic disruption and social upheaval weren’t evidence enough.  Any newspaper supplies daily reminders of crime, extremism, abuse, displacement, racism, environmental degradation, and endless examples of humans as their own worst enemy.  For years truth, expertise, science and knowledge have been demeaned, ignored and dismissed.  Government and other institutions endure both attack and neglect, assertions of corruption and impotence, creating self-fulfilling prophecies and leaving us ill-prepared for the current calamity.  Modernity is superficial and soul-killing according to critics from left and right, the cause of both moral decline and consumption-driven anomie, and some look forward expectantly to an inevitable apocalypse and well-deserved downfall.  Moore’s latest documentary film portrays environmental projects as both mis-guided and counter-productive, our would-be saviors as deluded, purchased creatures of the very industrial overlords who are leading us all to destruction.  The list goes on.  Everything, it might appear, is going wrong or about to.  Pessimism indeed, who could be blamed?  In fact wouldn’t it be naive or utterly tone deaf to think otherwise given what is currently happening in this country and around the world?

But that view is incorrect or at least incomplete, according to Pinker.  In fact, the past 250 years have witnessed profound progress in nearly every facet of human experience.  Compared to the prospects of their forebears, nearly anyone alive today enjoys much greater health, freedom, wealth, education, happiness and longevity.  The daily bombardment of injustice, inequity and failure cannot be ignored or explained away, but in Pinker’s estimation they represent neither the majority experience nor the trend.  Contrary to what he calls ‘progressophobes’ or ‘declinists’, who regularly exhibit Availability, Negativity and other intellectual biases, Pinker prefers instead to count, to survey aggregate and widely representative data.  And what he finds seems quite conclusive.  This isn’t to replace one extreme with its mirror image—no, not everything is awesome—but according to the numbers, and in almost every category the positive changes are undeniable.

For example, life expectancy has skyrocketed.  In the eighteenth century, and likely for most of human history, average longevity hovered around 30-35 years.  The contrast with 2015 is stark, coming in at a global average of 71.4 years, more than double.  Exponential reductions in childhood and maternal mortality explain much of this, produced in part by scientific public health practices as well as the development of vaccines and vast improvements to medical methods.  Food security has also played a role.  Worldwide, agriculture is capable of delivering between 2,500 and 3,000 calories per day per person, compared to fewer than 1500 (and frequently far less) prior to the eighteenth century.  World economic output has also risen dramatically in the past 200 years along with distribution of the resultant wealth.  The number of people living in extreme poverty decreased from approximately 90% in 1820 to something under 20% by 2015, despite an exponential rise in population.  Growth has combined with a relentless reduction in the price of nearly everything to produce this result—the cost to purchase one hour of artificial light has fallen more than 40,000 times since 1800.  Ultimately, according to Pinker and others in similar camps, over the past two centuries human society has orchestrated an escape from poverty, disease, starvation and early death, and is now witnessing a convergence in which the benefits of wealth, health, food and longevity are enjoyed by a rapidly increasing majority.  In spite of all our problems—and they remain legion—something appears to be going right.

Proving the world is becoming better (for humans at least) is not, however, Pinker’s principal objective.  He’s more interested in why and how things improved in the first place, and even more importantly whether those trends can continue.  How did humans arrest and sometimes even prevail against both entropy and evolution, fundamental forces that ruled since before we descended from the trees?  Put as simply as possible, the advances resulted from the reasoned application of scientific concepts in the service of humanistic ends.  In other words, the broad based employment of human ingenuity to “...enhance flourishing and reduce suffering”.  Reason, science and humanism, ideals generated or accelerated by the 18th-Century Enlightenment, combined to produce the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the proliferation of pragmatic, science-based problem-solving and the creation of enormous wealth.  They contributed to a growing realization that progress was possible, and spread benefits far more widely than ever before, resulting in a snow-balling profusion of innovation and accelerating improvement.  Many if not most of the institutions and ideals of modernity—limited government, human rights, the scientific establishment, the UN, free trade—trace their origins directly to the Enlightenment.

Not everyone has been on board, to be sure, and counter enlightenments have emerged periodically, most notably with the advent of Romanticism during the nineteenth century.  One of numerous rebellions against what they saw as a saccharine and technocratic scientism, Romantics variously indulged their fascination with passion and unreasoning will, magical power, untamed natural forces and folk identity.  The resurgence of Dionysus versus Apollo.  In some cases, their rebellion produced transcendent art and introspective insight, valuable reminders of what it means to be human, but in others they elaborated and advanced ideas that spiraled into genocide, world war and oblivion for millions of innocents.

Other critiques draw attention to the defects of individuals, their blind spots and hypocrisies, to discredit their ideas or to call the entire project into question.  Some propose that enlightenment ideals are merely another form of western cultural imperialism.  Indeed it is hard to rationalize or accept that the author of the American Declaration of Independence—”...all men are created equal...with certain unalienable Rights…”—happened to own hundreds of human beings, and continued to do so even after writing those words.  Likewise, the past two centuries of supposed progress have also seen many continuing examples of misconduct, ethical failure and cultural insensitivity perpetrated by the very democracies who present themselves as bearers of enlightenment values.  There is no satisfactory resolution, little that absolves the hypocrisy of a Jefferson or other prominent figures.  So we are left to focus on results, however delayed or uneven, recalling that the point of the project in the first place was to transcend individual and collective failure.  Despite the continued persistence of ignorance, myopia and prejudice in the present, Pinker’s account shows that life improved in the past when society rejected them in favor of the ideals, however imperfectly.  Somewhat weak tea, but the accounting underscores a subtle and important point.  Humans are of course capable of behaving rationally and equitably, and yet evolutionary history suggests that neither may be innate or natural.  It is chilling to learn that some of our worst attributes as a species might have been crucial to our survival, the dark legacy of our ancestral past.  Ultimately, Pinker reminds us that reason is unique to no culture, and similar ideals have been developed around the world at different points in human history.  However and whenever deployed, they deliver an escape from human weakness and stupidity, though failure remains distressingly common.

Which may not explain entirely but certainly adds color to the counter enlightenment through which we are passing at present.  In addition to the daily assault on truth by willful know-nothings, a consistent presence in this country at least, many also call for return to a mythical golden age, when things were more pure, simple and ordered, and life was better.  Not only are such notions objectively false and misguided, as Pinker’s rehearsal demonstrates, they also come with overtones of tribalism, suspicion of outsiders and an apparent thirst for autocracy.  In effect a flat rejection of reason, science and humanism, and harbingers of return to a past that they fail to realize wasn’t really so great.

Pinker’s book is a reminder that we are making choices as a global society, and the path we follow matters greatly.  In spite of the many successes he cites, we still face disease, inequality, institutional racism and xenophobia, poverty, and other persistent challenges.  We are beset by global climate change, potentially an existential threat, brought about largely by the very progress from which we all benefit.  Pinker is neither Pollyanna norPangloss, though some prefer to caricature him that way.  The good news is that through enlightenment values humans have successfully addressed similar problems in the past, however imperfectly or incompletely.  Written constitutions, free markets, scientific method, clean water systems, regulation of air quality and working conditions, rule of law, vaccines.  Tolerance, reasoned debate, free speech. This is also a long list.  Whether we admit it or not, most of us alive today are direct beneficiaries of enlightenment institutions and policies doggedly implemented over decades and centuries.  Without them in truth many of us would not exist to argue about it—never born or never survived.  Pinker encourages realistic optimism combined with clear understanding of what worked in the past as we address ourselves to existing and new challenges in the future.