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

by Steven Pinker

The Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live.

The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge.

The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.

It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly.

With the exception of fruit, everything we call “food” is the body part or energy store of some other organism,

Nature is a war, and much of what captures our attention in the natural world is an arms race.

Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy—as the ingredient that distinguishes an orderly, structured system from the vast set of random, useless ones.

Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.17 Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judea, and classical Greek philosophy and drama emerged within a few centuries of one another. (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.) Recently an interdisciplinary team of scholars identified a common cause.18 It was not an aura of spirituality that descended on the planet but something more prosaic: energy capture. The Axial Age was when agricultural and economic advances provided a burst of energy: upwards of 20,000 calories per person per day in food, fodder, fuel, and raw materials. This surge allowed the civilizations to afford larger cities, a scholarly and priestly class, and a reorientation of their priorities from short-term survival to long-term harmony.

A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. In this primitive but ubiquitous understanding, everything happens for a reason, so when bad things happen—accidents, disease, famine, poverty—some agent must have wanted them to happen. If a person can be fingered for the misfortune, he can be punished or squeezed for damages. If no individual can be singled out, one might blame the nearest ethnic or religious minority, who can be lynched or massacred in a pogrom. If no mortal can plausibly be indicted, one might cast about for witches, who may be burned or drowned. Failing that, one points to sadistic gods, who cannot be punished but can be placated with prayers and sacrifices. And then there are disembodied forces like karma, fate, spiritual messages, cosmic justice, and other guarantors of the intuition that “everything happens for a reason.”

Awareness of the indifference of the universe was deepened still further by an understanding of evolution. Predators, parasites, and pathogens are constantly trying to eat us, and pests and spoilage organisms try to eat our stuff. It may make us miserable, but that’s not their problem.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth.

Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence;

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it.

Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time. That would be magic, and progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.

If agricultural efficiency had remained the same over the past fifty years while the world grew the same amount of food, an area the size of the United States, Canada, and China combined would have had to be cleared and plowed.26 The environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel has estimated that the world has reached Peak Farmland: we may never again need as much as we use today.

Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”

In a world governed by entropy and evolution, the streets are not paved with pastry, and cooked fish do not land at our feet. But it’s easy to forget this truism and think that wealth has always been with us.

In 1800, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, most people everywhere were poor. The average income was equivalent to that in the poorest countries in Africa today (about $500 a year in international dollars), and almost 95 percent of the world lived in what counts today as “extreme poverty” (less than $1.90 a day). By 1975, Europe and its offshoots had completed the Great Escape, leaving the rest of the world behind, with one-tenth their income, in the lower hump of a camel-shaped curve.20 In the 21st century the camel has become a dromedary, with a single hump shifted to the right and a much lower tail on the left: the world had become richer and more equal.

The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works.

So what is the world doing right?

“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”

The first is the decline of communism (together with intrusive socialism). For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine. Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.

Radelet’s second explanation of the Great Convergence is leadership.

A third cause was the end of the Cold War.

A fourth cause is globalization, in particular the explosion in trade made possible by container ships and jet airplanes and by the liberalization of tariffs and other barriers to investment and trade.

The last, and in many analyses the most important, contributor to the Great Convergence is science and technology.

Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing, as we will repeatedly see in the chapters to come. Most obviously, GDP per capita correlates with longevity, health, and nutrition.57 Less obviously, it correlates with higher ethical values like peace, freedom, human rights, and tolerance.

Richer countries, on average, fight fewer wars with each other (chapter 11), are less likely to be riven by civil wars (chapter 11), are more likely to become and stay democratic (chapter 14), and have greater respect for human rights (chapter 14—on average, that is; Arab oil states are rich but repressive). The citizens of richer countries have greater respect for “emancipative” or liberal values such as women’s equality, free speech, gay rights, participatory democracy, and protection of the environment (chapters 10 and 15). Not surprisingly, as countries get richer they get happier (chapter 18); more surprisingly, as countries get richer they get smarter (chapter 16).59

Kelley and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory that inequality causes unhappiness “comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.”

People are content with economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn’t.

The rise and fall in inequality in the 19th century reflects Kuznets’s expanding economy, which gradually pulls more people into urban, skilled, and thus higher-paying occupations. But the 20th-century plunge—which has been called the Great Leveling or the Great Compression—had more sudden causes. The plunge overlaps the two world wars, and that is no coincidence: major wars often level the income distribution.

As we have seen, a market economy is the best poverty-reduction program we know of for an entire country. It is ill-equipped, however, to provide for individuals within that country who have nothing to exchange: the young, the old, the sick, the unlucky, and others whose skills and labor are not valuable enough to others for them to earn a decent living in return.

Those who condemn modern capitalist societies for callousness toward the poor are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief. It’s not just that they had less to spend in absolute terms; they spent a smaller proportion of their wealth. A much smaller proportion: from the Renaissance through the early 20th century, European countries spent an average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on poor relief, education, and other social transfers. In many countries and periods, they spent nothing at all.

Figure 9-4 shows that social spending took off in the middle decades of the 20th century (in the United States, with the New Deal in the 1930s; in other developed countries, with the rise of the welfare state after World War II). Social spending now takes up a median of 22 percent of their GDP.

The explosion in social spending has redefined the mission of government: from warring and policing to also nurturing.32 Governments underwent this transformation for several reasons. Social spending inoculates citizens against the appeal of communism and fascism.

IDon't Agree with this. It Just doesn't do that.

But as they get richer they become more munificent, a phenomenon called Wagner’s Law.36 Between 1985 and 2012 Mexico quintupled its proportion of social spending, and Brazil’s now stands at 16 percent.37 Wagner’s Law appears to be not a cautionary tale about overweening government and bureaucratic bloat but a manifestation of progress.

evaluate the claim that the growing inequality of the past three decades means that the world is getting worse—that only the rich have prospered, while everyone else is stagnating or suffering.

Most obviously, it’s false for the world as a whole: the majority of the human race has become much better off.

it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it.

Economists point to four ways in which inequality statistics can paint a misleading picture of the way people live their lives,

The first is the difference between relative and absolute prosperity.

Between 1979 and 2014, the percentage of poor Americans dropped from 24 to 20, the percentage in the lower middle class dropped from 24 to 17, and the percentage in the middle class shrank from 32 to 30. Where did they go? Many ended up in the upper middle class ($100,000–$350,000), which grew from 13 to 30 percent of the population, and in the upper class, which grew from 0.1 percent to 2 percent.

The second confusion is the one between anonymous and longitudinal data.

the Optimism Gap (the “I’m OK, They’re Not” bias): a majority of Americans believe that the standard of living of the middle class has declined in recent years but that their own standard of living has improved.

A third reason that rising inequality has not made the lower classes worse off is that low incomes have been mitigated by social transfers.