Steven Pinker says the world is getting better: why it’s a call to arms for progressives, not a cause for complacency
It’s easy to get sucked into a dystopian mindset when the news media has become a highly optimised machine for the partisan delivery of bad news, hyperbolised beyond its true value.
Psychologist Steven Pinker has trying for more than a decade now to remind us that the world is actually getting better: people are consistently living longer, getting more educated, healthier, wealthier, enjoy more freedom and suffer less violence — and crucially, we’re happier — than we have ever been. Pinker is often attacked for his optimistic narrative, as if the world hasn’t seen any progress in the past 200 years, let alone the last 20 years, or because some progressives fear it will encourage complacency.
In April he updated the evidence, first presented in 2011’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. It’s a welcome balm to the soul when it doesn’t look like 2018 will even deliver a Spring, let alone a better world.
Enlightenment Now, argues that we should celebrate the success of The Enlightenment, which made rational liberalism and the social democracies it inspired into the engine of progress. It doesn’t stop there, though: he calls for The Enlightenment to be rekindled to ensure our progress doesn’t halt or go into reverse.
Here are my recommendations for the new Enlightenment (I’ll see how they compare to his when I read the book). And even if you get no further than this, watch the TED Talk.
1 The low-hanging fruit is gone. Many of Pinker’s progress graphs have a common shape: a steep incline followed by a gradual flattening off. That’s the result of relatively simple interventions in human life which seem obvious now, such as vaccinations; medical and personal hygiene; clean water and sewage treatment; widespread education, emancipation, and suffrage; better nutrition; street lighting; universal communications; greater media freedom.
Some of the achievements are so complete that we only need to stop them going into reverse, and there are other places like universal education and emancipation where there are clear gains to be made, and access to basic healthcare and hygiene is still far from universal. In other areas, where there’s progress to be made it’s in hard tasks like fighting influenza, malaria and antibiotic resistance. Autocracy has taken root in two of the world’s superpowers and populism has metastasised into mainstream political parties.
2 The enemies of progress are shifty fuckers. Progress — broadly the idea of making the world a better place for everyone to live in — has never been universally welcomed, but it’s been winning at a steady pace all the same. Maybe there were a few decades in postwar Europe where people were so sickened by the excesses of the early 20th Century that even conservatives wanted a better world, but by the 1980s they’d rallied against the urge to do good things and they’ve been fighting progress ever since. Conservatism is, inherently, the enemy of progress.
The difference is that they’ve got a lot smarter at generating lies and misdirections to justify themselves. Thatcherites dreamed up the ‘trickle-down effect’, which had no evidence to support it and turned out to be as effective for distributing wealth through society as a trickle of piss down your leg is for keeping your socks dry. The tobacco industry created Sick Building Syndrome to disguise the effect of smoking on public health. Far from being a warning, George Orwell’s 1984 has become a manual for how to reinvent language and history to justify your actions, used and abused throughout business and government worldwide.
They’ve also become more brazen, in the realisation that if you keep lying it becomes impossible to keep track of the truth, and you can’t engage with someone who won’t establish a common ground. Amber Rudd didn’t resign because she’d implemented Theresa May’s xenophobic policies, but because she was caught out in so many lies that she exhausted her value as May’s human shield. But the story became about the numbers, not the policy.
The EoPs are also adept at astroturfing their by co-opting the ill-informed, desperate or merely witless into apparently grassroots campaigns that support their goals, whether its medical quacks encouraging anti-vaxxers or the Tea Party movement.
3 We’re in danger of outsmarting ourselves. A great deal of progress goes hand in hand with improvements in science and technology.
The Industrial Revolution enabled many of The Enlightenment’s early successes, and the Information Age has allowed democracy and accountability to flourish, but they have created their own problems.
Industrialised society delivered climate change, international travel allows emerging diseases to spread faster, and social networking has allowed extremists and radicalism to organise internationally. Few of this class of problem can be solved by simply turning back the clock without reversing other successes. So climate change demands new forms of clean energy as well as simply using less of it, health watchdogs must work internationally and social networks must take greater responsibility in exchange for their commercial success.
The silver lining is that we’re often more aware of the dangers that could arise from new technologies and how we could mitigate them. It sometimes makes progress harder, but it’s better than blundering blindly into the future.
4 There may be some tough choices. Some successes have come at a cost which is too high, and we’re already learning that plastics need to be used far less if we’re going to prevent catastrophic damage to the world’s oceans. It’s just another problem where we will have to get rid of things we now take for granted.
Energy efficiency alone won’t prevent climate change, but it will reduce our dependence on dodgy regimes for our fossil fuels, and as I sit in a chilly single-glazed room I can tell you it might help in more direct ways.
Eating less meat won’t prevent climate change entirely, but it might slow it and it might also combat some of industrial agriculture’s most damaging habits, like using antibiotics to promote growth or cutting down rainforests for cattle.
Abandoning palm oil might make chocolate and many other foods a bit more expensive, but do you want be killing off orangutans just for the buttery spread on your morning toast, your lunchtime pasta salad, or the biscuits on your afternoon break? Were you even asked?
OK, these aren’t even tough choices. There may be some choices.
5 Populism is a disease. Populism is a lot like smoking: most people get into it because of peer pressure, it’s attractive to the young, it feels good at first, it’s hard to give up, it stinks the place out for everyone else, and in the long term it causes huge personal damage at a high cost to society.
Most of the problems we need to fix in the world can’t be fixed by the easy answers of populist agitators. Unfortunately, populism is a cancer that starts in the political extremities and spreads the core of the body politic through vectors including a 24-hour news media that’s hopelessly in hock to its owners’ agendas, and social media that hijacks our need to share while refusing to check the spread of misinformation.
Like cancer, populism is often hard to root out, but in many ways it’s also the religion of the secular age. There’s a deep irony that secularism is a triumph of The Enlightenment, but there’s also hope that if the rationalism and hope provided by The Enlightenment could overcome the fairy tale answers of religion, they can overcome the equally childish demands of populist politics.
