Brian Burt's Blog: Work in Progress - Posts Tagged "enlightenment-now"

I confess I'm struggling to maintain a positive outlook these days, given the political and social climate. The news often buries us beneath an avalanche of stories hell-bent on crushing the last breath of hope. Still, I keep searching for the mood-lifters... and I feel obliged to share the wealth when I find such treasures. So I'm happy to tell you about two books I recently read that can inoculate the most jaded among us against cynicism and despair.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress chronicles the key trends measuring human progress since the Age of Enlightenment. Author Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who seems determined to remind us all how many reasons we have to celebrate how far we've come as a species in the past several centuries. He doesn't just evangelize the value of science, reason, and humanism with generalities; he presents actual statistics, charted for easy visualization, across a variety of criteria. I take some of this with a grain of salt. We all know that statistics can be used creatively to distort the landscape and justify questionable conclusions. But this book presents, overall, a highly compelling case for optimism, despite our polarizing times. We've lifted millions (or billions) of people out of extreme poverty world-wide, have improved education, increased tolerance toward those of us who belong to groups that have historically faced dreadful persecution, and expanded the level of comfort, happiness, and leisure. Deaths from war, violence, and disease per capita have plunged dramatically.

Bottom line: the rise of science, technological advancement, rationalism, and evidence-based decision-making have transformed the standard of living for most of the people on this planet. The rise of humanistic moral and ethical codes, woven into maturing social structures, have reduced our tendency to distrust, demonize, and torment anybody we can brand as "other." Things are far from perfect. We can't be complacent, as Dr. Pinker points out. But it's toxic for our individual and collective mental health to consistently ignore the good news and dwell only on the bad.

The second antidote to depression and disillusionment is Jon Meacham's new book The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. For those of us in the U.S. it's easy to feel like the political divide is wider than it's ever been, that polarization and tribalism have plunged us into the abyss. Mr. Meacham retraces key moments in American history to remind us that this assumption is dead wrong. We, as a nation, have been here many times before. We've faced chaotic, disruptive events that have threatened to shred our social fabric: in the formative decades of our republic, in the face of slavery and civil war, the rise of the KKK, the misery of the Great Depression and two world wars, the dark stain of McCarthyism, and the cultural upheavals during the Civil Rights movement. We've struggled against our darkest instincts, as a country... and in every case, our better angels eventually won out. Meacham cites historical precedent in illuminating detail to convince us that this troubling era, too, shall pass.

Both of these books buoyed my spirits when I really needed a lift. They dispelled the media gloom with sensible, well-reasoned cause for optimism. I don't know about you, but I need that these days. We all benefit from realizing that the trends of recent human history, writ large, continue to climb. Our politics, while sometimes turbulent enough to obscure the barest glimmer of light, do eventually settle into calmer seas and clearer, sunlit skies. We can't rest on our laurels or take past human progress for granted. But we can remind ourselves that human progress is real, and (by all objective measures) moving pretty steadily in the right direction.

I'm grateful for the dose of enlightenment. It's precious salve for this American soul; I hope it soothes yours, too!

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