Steven Pinker’s case for optimism

A future perfect

“Enlightenment Now” explains why the doom-mongers are wrong

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism

and Progress. By Steven Pinker. Viking; 576 pages; $35. Allen
Lane; £25.

TO ANYONE who reads a newspaper, this can seem a miserable

world. Syria is still at war. Another lunatic has gone on a gun
rampage in an American school. The tone of political debate can
rarely have been as crass and poisonous as it is today.

Front pages are grim for the same reason that Shakespeare’s plays feature a lot of
murders. Tragedy is dramatic. Hardly anyone would read a story headlined “100,000
AEROPLANES DIDN’T CRASH YESTERDAY”. Bad things often happen suddenly
and telegenically. A factory closes; an apartment block burns down. Good things tend
to happen incrementally, and across a wide area, making them much harder to film.
News outlets could have honestly reported that the “NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN
EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY” every day for 25
years. But readers might get bored.

Negative news is one reason why people consistently underestimate the progress
humanity is making, complains Steven Pinker. To discern the true state of the world,
he says, we should use numbers. In “Enlightenment Now”, he does just that. The
result is magnificent, uplifting and makes you want to rush to your laptop and close
your Twitter account.

The world is about 100 times wealthier than 200 years ago and, contrary to popular
belief, its wealth is more evenly distributed. The share of people killed annually in
wars is less than a quarter of that in the 1980s and half a percent of the toll in the
second world war. During the 20th century Americans became 96% less likely to die
in a car crash, 92% less likely to perish in a fire and 95% less likely to expire on the
job.

Mr Pinker’s best-known previous book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, showed
that humankind has grown less violent. His new one demonstrates that steady,
cumulative progress is occurring on many fronts. For this he credits the values of the
18th-century Enlightenment, summarised by Immanuel Kant as “Dare to understand!”
By applying reason to problems, people can solve them—and move on to the next.
Trade and technology spread good ideas, allowing rich countries to grow richer and
poor ones to catch up.

Best of all possible worlds

Progress has often been stunningly rapid. The vast majority of poor Americans enjoy
luxuries unavailable to the Vanderbilts and Astors of 150 years ago, such as electricity,
air-conditioning and colour televisions. Street hawkers in South Sudan have better
mobile phones than the brick that Gordon Gekko, a fictional tycoon, flaunted in “Wall
Street” in 1987. It is not just that better medicine and sanitation allow people to live
longer, healthier lives, or that labour-saving devices have given people more free time,
or that Amazon and Apple offer a dazzling variety of entertainment to fill it. People
are also growing more intelligent, and more humane.

In every part of the world IQ scores have been rising, by a whopping 30 points in 100
years, meaning that the average person today scores better than 98% of people a
century ago. How can this be, given that intelligence is highly heritable, and clever
folk breed no more prolifically than less gifted ones? The answer is better nutrition
(“brains are greedy organs”) and more stimulation. Children are far likelier to go to
school than they were in 1900, while “outside the schoolhouse, analytic thinking is
encouraged by a culture that trades in visual symbols (subway maps, digital displays),
analytic tools (spreadsheets, stock reports) and academic concepts that trickle down
into common parlance (supply and demand, on average, human rights).”

Mr Pinker contends that this braininess has moral consequences, since people who
can reason abstractly can ask: “What would the world be like if everyone did this?”
That is consistent with the observable spread of Enlightenment values. Two centuries
ago only 1% of people lived in democracies, and even there women and
working-class men were denied the vote. Now two-thirds of people live in
democracies, and even authoritarian states such as China are freer than they once
were.

Belief in equality for ethnic minorities and gay people has shot up, as demonstrated
not only by polls (which could be biased by the knowledge that bigotry is frowned
upon) but also by internet activity. Searches for racist jokes have fallen by
seven-eighths in America since 2004. Those who enjoy them are dying out: online
searches for racial epithets correlate with interest in “Social Security” and “Frank
Sinatra”, Mr Pinker notes. Even the most conservative places are loosening up. Polls
find that young Muslims in the Middle East are about as liberal as young western
Europeans were in the early 1960s.
Many readers will find this bubbly optimism hard to swallow, like too much
champagne. We may be materially richer, some will protest, but aren’t we less happy
because we know that others have even more? We may have supercomputers in our
pockets, but aren’t they causing an epidemic of loneliness among the young? And
what about global warming or North Korea’s nuclear missiles?

Mr Pinker has answers for all these questions. In 45 out of 52 countries in the World
Values Survey, happiness increased between 1981 and 2007. It rises roughly in line
with absolute income per head, not relative income. Loneliness, at least among
American students, appears to be declining. Global warming is a big threat, but not
insurmountable. The number of nuclear weapons in the world has fallen by 85% since
its peak.

The rise of populism challenges Mr Pinker’s thesis. Supporters of Donald Trump,

Brexit and various authoritarian parties in Europe tend to believe that the old days
were golden, that experts can’t be trusted and the institutions of liberal democracy are
a conspiracy to enrich the elite. Some want to tear down these institutions and start
again—which would at the very least interrupt the incremental progress that Mr
Pinker champions.

Without downplaying the risks, he remains optimistic. The checks and balances that
populists decry are reasonably effective in most rich countries and will outlast the
current crop of demagogues. Supporters of populism will become disillusioned, or
will simply die off. Mr Pinker draws especial comfort from the decline of faith.
Worldwide, although 59% of people are religious, that share has fallen from nearly
100% a century ago. As people grow richer, he argues, they abandon the crutch of
belief and rely more on reason.

Pessimism has its place—it fosters caution. And the human instinct to focus on
problems is sound—it means they often get fixed. Nonetheless, Mr Pinker’s broad
point is surely right. Things are not falling apart. And barring a cataclysmic asteroid
strike or nuclear war, it is likely that they will continue to get better.