Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

hominid chauvinism

and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

The potency of language as the original sharing app was multiplied by the invention of writing

This is the basic premise of Neal Stephenson's *Snow Crash*.

The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. When a wide enough circle of people confer on how best to treat each other, the conversation is bound to go in certain directions.

I didn't think this book would be so timely. Reading today, June 13, 2020. George Floyd & Police Brutality Protests

We’d be wiser to negotiate a social contract that puts us in a positive-sum game: neither gets to harm the other, and both are encouraged to help the other.

We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or

The Humanitarian Revolution is another name for the Enlightenment-era abolition of slavery, religious persecution, and cruel punishments.

readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better. In the first six months of 2016 the New York Times pulled this trick three times, with figures for suicide, longevity, and automobile fatalities.

Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever don’t”—as

Davies’s Corollary—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

In all, the control of infectious disease since 1990 has saved the lives of more than a hundred million children.

They also comprise ideas—ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which save millions of lives.

Wearing a mask, staying indoors, large spaces & barriers between people who must be in public - the hue and cry over quarantine measures has been disgusting. 2020-06-15 COVID-19

If this trend continues, the 20th century should go down as the last during which tens of millions of people died for lack of access to food.

This is why access to food, food security, is absolutely political. Famines should not happen. The only reason people die of hunger or suffer from malnutrition today is because of politics.

“You can’t stop population growth by letting poor children die.”

Chile versus Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro—the latter a once-wealthy, oil-rich country now suffering from widespread hunger and a critical shortage of medical care.

And Venezuela has famine now, too. Their economical collapse began in 2018 I think? Starvation fears began by early 2019.

Today, life expectancy in the poorest country in the world (the Central African Republic) is fifty-four, and in no country is it below forty-five.

The CAR's life expectancy has dropped to 50 as of late 2019. In the US, it's 78. Unless you're a Black man. Then it's 72. Black non-Latinx males have the lowest life expectancy in America, in spite of being a minority. The US, on average, is 75% non-Latinx white. Black males make up 13% of our total male population but have the highest mortality rates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db342.htm

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.”

Wars are just one kind of catastrophe that can generate equality by the logic of Igor and Boris. The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics.

I wonder if the George Floyd Riots & COVID-19 will level the playing field after 2020.

Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!7

the world population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070, when the population is projected to level off and then decline.

Huh. I always thought the Zero-Pop goal was an impossibility. I may see it approach in my lifetime.

as any hiker knows who has stumbled upon a stone wall incongruously running through a New England woodland.

Makes me think of *Shawshank Redemption*

Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015.

Which the current president pulled us out of. Our current president's father should have pulled out. June 16, 2020

disease outbreaks don’t become pandemics,

Heh.

The very idea of climate engineering sounds like the crazed scheme of a mad scientist, and it once was close to taboo.

Folks don't realize that we've been interfering with, and engineering, our atmospheric environment for thousands of years. Our early hominid ancestors gathered in large enough groups to create smog from their campfires. Hunters set fire to huge expanses of forest and grassland to flush game (or their enemies). Early agriculturalists used slash-and-burn farming.

warning that we must not search for extraterrestrial life lest an advanced race of space aliens discovers our existence and comes over to subjugate us.)

It's not machismo or projection. The Dark Forest is real and it stretches in every direction from our blue-green ball. There are eyes in the forest and they are always watching. We shouldn't share which tree we're hiding behind.

Starting in 1992, the American homicide rate went into free fall during an era of steeply rising inequality,

Possibly as a result of communities coming together to stop gang-related activities in the wake of the Rodney King riots.

Half of the world’s homicides are committed in just twenty-three countries containing about a tenth of humanity, and a quarter are committed in just four: Brazil (25.2), Colombia (25.9), Mexico (12.9), and Venezuela.

The Brooklyn Dodgers, before they moved to Los Angeles, had been named after the city’s pedestrians, famous for their skill at darting out of the way of hurtling streetcars.

A sign that the measures might be effective is that the number of overdoses of prescription opioids (though not of illicit heroin and fentanyl) peaked in 2010 and may be starting to come down.56

So if opioid safety measures & opioid-related incidents peaked in 2010, why the recent fury? This book was published in 2018.

Whether a worker was mutilated by a buzz saw, crushed by a beam, interred in a mine, or fell down a shaft, it was always “his own bad luck.”

Thank the Unions for your fingers!

Haiti also loses ten times as many of its citizens to hurricanes as the richer Dominican Republic, the country with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

there has been a thirty-seven-fold decline since the turn of the 20th century in the chance that an American will be killed by a bolt of lightning.

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color revolutions sent several of them packing.)

The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As

First, advances in forensic science, particularly DNA fingerprinting, have shown that innocent people have almost certainly been put to death, a scenario that unnerves even ardent supporters of the death penalty.

I heard this in Peter Thomas's voice. May he rest in peace.

social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience.

This is why Black lives matter. #BLM

she won a solid plurality of the popular vote and would have been president were it not for peculiarities of the Electoral College system and other quirks of that election year.

That's one way to put it. We're sliding into an electoral authoritarianism.

Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing forty-nine people and wounding another fifty-three.

What happened to 'don't say their names'? Another thing about mass murder & terrorist killings is the news needs to stop saying the numbers. The next killer always wants to beat the record.

Together with Dickens’s novel, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 poem “The Cry of the Children” and many journalistic exposés awakened 19th-century readers to the horrific conditions under which children were forced to work in that era.

Also Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle*. What a nightmare.

In the 17th century, for example, children put to work in a kitchen would crank a spit with a slab of meat for hours, protected from the fire only by a bale of wet hay.

If that. But they did get to drink all the beer they wanted, so they had that going for them. They could have been made to run in hamster wheels like turnspit dogs: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-cur

Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical.2 To be aware of one’s country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.

Brains are greedy organs, consuming about a fifth of the body’s energy, and they are made of fats and proteins that are demanding for the body to produce.

I'm not fat. I'm a fuel cell for my brain.

The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”

pensioners who subsisted on dog food.

Dog food is as, or more, expensive than people food anymore.

Indeed, over the course of the 20th century, typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.24 In 1924, only 45 percent of mothers spent two or more hours a day with their children (7 percent spent no time with them), and only 60 percent of fathers spent at least an hour a day with them. By 1999, the proportions had risen to 71 and 83 percent.25 In fact, single and working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home married mothers did in 1965.26

The perception given to us by the media is about hordes of latch-key kids raising themselves. Childcare is ridiculously expensive. Leaving a child home alone is risky, too. It's genetically hazardous if that's your only child. That basic insecurity leads parents into having large families. Older kids take care of their younger siblings for free. However, it can be at the cost of their own educations. One partner's job suffers from pay disparity, so their job suffers at the expense of household emergencies. Partner B's job pays more, so they can't afford for B to lose work at all, ever. For single-income homes, this is disastrous.

In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.3 Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer.

the people who have the luxury of failing to appreciate their good fortune make up a biased sample of lucky survivors.