More On “Is The World Better Than Ever?”
[image error]By Anton Alterman
[Note. This is a follow-up essay to my many recent posts about human progress.]
Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times publishes a column at the end of every year with the same idea as Pinker’s book … and a lot of the same data points. It always seems spurious to me. I appreciate having someone take a crack at saying just what’s wrong with it, but there is much more to be said. For example, progress in income levels and education in China and India alone may account for a good deal of the perceived progress, and though they really do constitute progress, it may obscure other much more negative phenomena, like the fact that more than 1% of the world’s population are now internally or externally displaced refugees, whose level of economic, medical and educational well-being is off the charts in the other direction.
I am also not sure how you would graph the progress in civil liberties when so many putative democracies have veered towards authoritarianism, when torture is still regularly employed across wide swaths of the world, and religious fundamentalism has if anything tightened its grip over the last 50 years.
But while I appreciate the critique of the quasi-laissez-faire approach to progress attributed to Pinker, I think Lent may be too hasty in dismissing Pinker’s centrism, as we do not currently have a single example of really radical change that has ended up well. Or, if we do, it is changes that have tended towards the mean of liberal democracy.
In fact, where the author appears to endorse Pinker’s position, I rather disagree:
“Global shaming campaigns,” he explains, “even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.”
No, I don’t think any of this has been due to “global shaming”, nor does any of it suggest more than a movement toward basic democratic norms. The only “dramatic reduction” in slavery or Apartheid was the result of bloody civil wars. Nuclear testing was reduced by the Test Ban Treaty which was not a result of shaming but of recognition that nuclear radiation anywhere was a global threat. Foot-binding was terminated after the spread of education and a series of government bans, accompanied by other economic, social and political changes. Etc.
The point is, Lent wants to credit Pinker with recognizing the role of what amounts to cancel culture – pointing out, too, that he has also re-tweeted BLM and #MeToo posts, and also defending “identity politics” as something progressive – but I see no evidence that any of this has played a positive role in whatever social progress there has been. Progress is something you have to fight for, and not in the divisive way that these Tweet-based identity movements do, but in ways that can unite very large groups of people – the civil rights and women’s movements, the labor movement, the vast network of environmental organizations, as well as broad-based movements in science, education and jurisprudence.
Philosophy, especially ethics, plays a bigger role than “shaming” or identity politics, which, if anything, turns off so many people that it generates a regressive backlash that impedes progress. Occupy Wall Street, short-lived though it was, had a more positive impact than all the shaming and identity politics of recent years. A mass movement to reign in and break up the technopolies of Silicon Valley would do more to defend democracy than a lot of the nonsense that litters the current political landscape.
