Sam Keller

Enlightenment Now

The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Steven Pinker

In In the memories of many readers of this book -- and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of the world -- war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril
If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts
In this way of thinking, government is not a divine fiat to reign, a synonym for “society,‟ or an avatar of the national, religious, or racial soul. It is a human invention, tacitly agreed to in a social contract, designed to enhance the welfare of citizens by coordinating their behavior and discouraging selfish acts that may be tempting to every individual but leave everyone worse off.
Public opinion researchers call it the Optimism Gap. For more than two decades, through good times and bad, when Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country's economic situation, more of them said it would get worse... In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that “the world is getting worse,‟ and in most of the last forty years a solid majority of Americans have said that the country is “heading in the wrong direction.‟
Thrillingly, the gift of longevity is spreading to all of humankind, including the world's poorest countries, and at a much faster pace than it did in the rich ones. “Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013,‟ Norberg writes. “After having lived, loved, and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.‟
The loss of a child is among the most devastating experiences. Imagine the tragedy; then try to imagine it another million times. That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier. Now repeat, two hundred times or so, for the years since the decline in child mortality began.
For most of human history, the strongest force of death was infectious disease, the nasty feature of evolution in which small, rapidly reproducing organisms make their living at our expense and hitch a ride from body to body in bugs, worms, and bodily effluvia. Epidemics killed by the millions, wiping out entire civilizations, and visited sudden misery on local populations.
Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food. Another way of stating the bounty is that between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent. In addition to beating back hunger, the ability to grow more food from less land has been, on the whole, good for the planet. Despite their bucolic charm, farms are biological deserts which sprawl over the landscape at the expense of forests and grasslands.
In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.
Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don't need to be shown with number.s They can literally be seen from space. A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant. Other matched pairs with an experimental group and a control group lead to the same conclusion: West and East Germany when they were divided by the Iron Curtain; Botswana versus Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe; Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro -- the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.
Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty. If a person lives a long, healthy, pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant. Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.‟
Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief. It's not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms; they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. A much smaller portion: from the Renaissance through the early 20th century, European countries spent an average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on poor relief, education, and other social transfers. In many countries and periods, they spent nothing at all.
Now, it's true that the world's poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it. But even in the lower and lower middle classes of rich countries, moderate income gains are not the same as a decline in living standards.
Income is just a means to an end: a way of paying for things that people need, want, and like, or as economists call it, consumption. When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent.
Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines. Compared with nuclear power, natural gas kills 38 times as many people per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, biomass 63 times as many, petroleum 243 times as many, and coal 387 times as many -- perhaps a million deaths a year.
It's not just the great powers that have stopped fighting each other. Wawr in the classic sense of an armed conflict between the uniformed armies of two nation-states appears to be obsolescent. There have been no more than three in any year since 1945, none in most years since 1989, and none since the American-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, the longest stretch without an interstate war since the end of World War II. Today, skirmishes between national armies kill dozens of people rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions who died in the all-out wars that nation-states have fought throughout history.
... since 1980, about 650,000 Americans have lived who would have died if traffic death rates had remained the same.
... in 2015, an American was more than 350 times as likely to be killed in a police-blotter homicide as in a terrorist attack, 800 times as likely to be killed in a car crash, and 3,000 times as likely to die in an accident of any kind.
The world's 103 democracies in 2015 embraced 56 percent of the world's population, and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world's population living in free or relatively free societies, compared with less than two-fifths in 1950, a fifth in 1900, seven percent in 1850, and one percent in 1816. Of the people living in the 60 nondemocratic countries today (20 full autocracies, 40 more autocratic than democratic), four-fifths reside in a single country, China.
Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but world-wide. In 1950, almost half of the world's countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth ddi, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.
With women's rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City. Women make up almost 40 percent of the labor force worldwide and more than a fifth of the members of national parliaments. The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have each found that more than 85 percent of their respondents believe in full equality for men and women, with rates ranging from 60 percent in India, to 88 percent in six Muslim-majority countries, to 98 percent in Mexico and the United Kingdom.
So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don't look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don't. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence.
Figure 16-1 shows that before the 17th century, literacy was the privilege of a small elite in Western Europe, less than an eight of the population, and that was true for the world as a whole well into the 19th century. The world's literacy rate doubled in the next century and quadrupled in the century after that, so now 83 percent of the world is literate.
Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter? Might people be increasingly adept at learning new skills, grasping abstract ideas, and solving unforeseen problems? Amazingly, the answer is yes. Intelligence Quotient (IQ) score shave been rising for more than a century, in every part of the world, at a rate of about three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade.
Today an average American worker with five years on the job receives 22 days of paid time off a yer (compared with 16 days in 1970), and that is miserly by the standards of Western Europe. The combination of a shorter workweek, more paid time off, and a longer retirement means that the fraction of a person's life that is taken up by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960.
Figure 17-3 shows that as utilities and appliances penetrated American households during the 20th century, the amount of life that people lost to housework -- which, not surprisingly, people say is their least favorite way to spend their time -- fell almost fourfold, from 58 hours a week in 1900 to 15.5 hours in 2011. Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.
Figure 17-4 shows that the inflation adjusted price of a million lumen-hours of light (about what you would need to read for two and a half hours a day for a year) has fallen twelve thousandfold since the Middle Ages (once called the Dark Ages), from around £35,000 in 1300 to less than £3 today.
It's hard for us to reconstruct the gnawing boredom of the isolated rural households of yesteryear. In the late 19th century, there was not only no Internet but no radio, television, movies, or musical recordings, and for the majority of households not even a book or newspaper... A country-dweller today can choose from among hundreds of television channels and half a billion Web sites, embracing every newspaper and magazine in the world (including their archives going back more than a century), every great work of literature that is out of copyright, an encyclopedia more than seventy times the size of Britannica without about the same level fo accuracy, and every classic work of art and music.
The trends over time close the books on the Easterlin paradox: we now know that richer people within a country are happier, that richer countries are happier, and that people get happier as their countries get richer (which means that people get happier over time).
The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: “What do you have to lose?‟ If the media and intellectuals instead put events into statistical and historical context, they could help answer that question. Radical regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela and Turkey show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when charismatic authoritarians responding to a “crisis‟ trample over democratic norms and institutions and command their countries by the force of their personalities.
In a revolutionary analysis of reason in the public sphere, the legal scholar Dan Kahan has argued that certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are. We all identify with particular tribes or subcultures, each of which embraces a creed on what makes for a good life and how society should run its affairs.
A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not a belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not. The lifeblood of science is the cycle of conjecture and refutation: proposing a hypothesis and then seeing whether it survives attempts to falsify it.
The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it's an inescapable feature of the human condition that we're all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other.
If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case. It's long been known that churchgoers are happier and more charitable than stay-at-homes, but Robert Putnam and his fellow political scientist David Campbell have found that these blessings have nothing to do with beliefs in God, creation, heaven, or hell.
The first step towards wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don't care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless, because people care about you, and vice versa. You care about yourself, and you have a responsibility to respect the laws of the universe that keep you alive so you don't squander your existence.
American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well=being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death. The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens' lives. Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it's plausible that in democratic countries, seculrism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off.