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

by Steven Pinker

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

“If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations”

“What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction.”2

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.

What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that it consists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly” submission to the “dogmas and formulas” of religious or political authority.1 Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech. “One age cannot conclude a pact that would prevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge, and purging their errors. That would be a crime against human nature, whose proper destiny lies precisely in such progress.”2

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.

For all that, not all of the Enlightenment thinkers were atheists. Some were deists (as opposed to theists): they thought that God set the universe in motion and then stepped back, allowing it to unfold according to the laws of nature. Others were pantheists, who used “God” as a synonym for the laws of nature. But few appealed to the law-giving, miracle-conjuring, son-begetting God of scripture.

The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.

Among the powers of government is meting out punishment, and writers such as Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, and the American founders thought afresh about the government’s license to harm its citizens.17 Criminal punishment, they argued, is not a mandate to implement cosmic justice but part of an incentive structure that discourages antisocial acts without causing more suffering than it deters. The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.

The Enlightenment also saw the first rational analysis of prosperity. Its starting point was not how wealth is distributed but the prior question of how wealth comes to exist in the first place.

an abundance of useful stuff cannot be conjured into existence by a farmer or craftsman working in isolation.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

heat is not an invisible fluid but the energy in moving molecules, and that a difference in temperature between two bodies consists of a difference in the average speeds of those molecules,

Now order could be characterized in terms of the set of all microscopically distinct states of a system (in the original example involving heat, the possible speeds and positions of all the molecules in the two bodies). Of all these states, the ones that we find useful from a bird’s-eye view (such as one body being hotter than the other, which translates into the average speed of the molecules in one body being higher than the average speed in the other) make up a tiny fraction of the possibilities, while all the disorderly or useless states (the ones without a temperature difference, in which the average speeds in the two bodies are the same) make up the vast majority. 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.

Since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk, and the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment.1 They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future.

“there is in the arts and humanities an exceptionless consensus about the encroaching horror of the domain of number.”

This “ideological rather than accidental innumeracy” leads writers to notice, for example, that wars take place today and wars took place in the past and to conclude that “nothing has changed”—failing to acknowledge the difference between an era with a handful of wars that collectively kill in the thousands and an era with dozens of wars that collectively killed in the millions. And it leaves them unappreciative of systemic processes that eke out incremental improvements over the long term.

Progress, The Progress Paradox, Infinite Progress, The Infinite Resource, The Rational Optimist, The Case for Rational Optimism, Utopia for Realists, Mass Flourishing, Abundance, The Improving State of the World, Getting Better, The End of Doom, The Moral Arc, The Big Ratchet, The Great Escape, The Great Surge, The Great Convergence.32

Scientist Discovery Lives Saved Abel Wolman (1892–1989) and Linn Enslow (1891–1957) chlorination of water 177 million William Foege (1936– ) smallpox eradication strategy 131 million Maurice Hilleman (1919–2005) eight vaccines 129 million John Enders (1897–1985) measles vaccine 120 million Howard Florey (1898–1968) penicillin 82 million Gaston Ramon (1886–1963) diphtheria and tetanus vaccines 60 million David Nalin (1941– ) oral rehydration therapy 54 million Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915) diphtheria and tetanus antitoxins 42 million Andreas Grüntzig (1939–1985) angioplasty 15 million Grace Eldering (1900–1988) and Pearl Kendrick (1890–1980) whooping cough vaccine 14 million Gertrude Elion (1918–1999) rational drug design 5 million

The need to explain the creation of wealth is obscured yet again by political debates within modern societies on how wealth ought to be distributed, which presuppose that wealth worth distributing exists in the first place.

Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.5 It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary, just as radical, is that we can figure out how to make more of it.

This idea would of course result in an iron clad ideology that the decisions that led to such tremendous advancement in the accumulation of wealth should, of course, continue. Because why would you inhibit the continuation of an amazing transformation of global welfare? But a continuation of a logarithmic graph of wealth accumulation, when as humans our most basic needs cease to be fulfilled past a certain stage, would by definition (assuming a non-infinite growth of human population) stop being accretive to human advancement and begin being detrimental by triggering our senses of injustice and unfairness to those that will inevitably accumulate more than others? Don’t believe we are there or necessary close to this now, but I do believe that the ability to be selective about how we grow, and sharing that growth across countries, is a worthwhile endeavour rather than continuing to protect the characteristics that allowed that growth to continue in an uninhibited way

It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.

inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty. If a person lives a long, healthy, pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant.

the majority of the human race has become much better off. The two-humped camel has become a one-humped dromedary; the elephant has a body the size of, well, an elephant; extreme poverty has plummeted and may disappear; and both international and global inequality coefficients are in decline. Now, 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.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.

So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken the idea a step further and laid out a set of “fundamental capabilities” that all people should be given the opportunity to exercise.3 One can think of them as the justifiable sources of satisfaction and fulfillment that human nature makes available to us. Her list begins with capabilities that, as we have seen, the modern world increasingly allows people to realize: longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, and political participation. It goes on to include aesthetic experience, recreation and play, enjoyment of nature, emotional attachments, social affiliations, and opportunities to reflect on and engage in one’s own conception of the good life.

If the vast majority of the planets energy sources are from fossil fuels, then wouldn’t the most direct material impact to reduce emissions be efforts to reduce the pollution from those same energy sources? So reducing emissions from energy plants, extraction, processing and transportation of oil by 5-10% (which I suspect is more than doable) would have a greater net benefit than a strategy of helping by campaigning against fossil fuels, disinvesting, or inefficiently allocating capital to sources of energy that might not pan out.

The big difference lies in what we don’t see because it’s been made obsolete by tablets and smartphones, together with new wonders like streaming video and Skype. In addition to dematerialization, information technology has launched a process of demonetization.22 Many things that people used to pay for are now essentially free, including classified ads, news, encyclopedias, maps, cameras, long-distance calls, and the overhead of brick-and-mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.

they called for greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).

a faction of academic culture composed of hard-left faculty, student activists, and an autonomous diversity bureaucracy (pejoratively called social justice warriors) has become aggressively illiberal. Anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.63 Non-leftist speakers are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs.64 A student may be publicly shamed by her dean for a private email that considers both sides of a controversy.65 Professors are pressured to avoid lecturing on upsetting topics, and have been subjected to Stalinesque investigations for politically incorrect opinions.

in political debates the stakes are unlimited, including the future of the planet. Politicians, unlike professors, pull the levers of power.

social Darwinism, though it was advocated not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, who laid it out in 1851, eight years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Spencer did not believe in random mutation and natural selection; he believed in a Lamarckian process in which the struggle for existence impelled organisms to strive toward feats of greater complexity and adaptation, which they passed on to later generations. Spencer thought that this progressive force was best left unimpeded, and so he argued against social welfare and government regulation that would only prolong the doomed lives of weaker individuals and groups. His political philosophy, an early form of libertarianism, was picked up by robber barons, advocates of laissez-faire economics, and opponents of social spending.

No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.53 A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened.

The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change.

An interesting philosophical exercise is to keep our current ideological tendencies or opinions (keeping them general and not issue-specific), and try to project where in a political issue that appeared legitimate at the time we would have landed. For example, if your current tendencies and opinions would have led you to justify slavery on the grounds of a weak federal state/strong state liberties under constitutional arguments, or to allow corporations freedom from labour laws and safety in the workplace under arguments of freedom of enterprise and removal of red tape and likely economic slowdown with govt policies and supervision. If these issues now seem like common sense laws and policies, then wouldn’t having a mindset and ideology that ties yourself to positions such as these in the present time, themselves be flawed, and a constant vigilance at an issue level be needed to avoid falling trap to being ‘on the wrong side of history’ (to flip the title of one of Ben Shapiro’s recent books) on current issues that in the future will appear obvious in retrospect what the right approach was ?

Classical liberalism came late in human history, and traditional cultures believe that what consenting adults do in private is very much their concern.

The philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.

A viable moral philosophy for a cosmopolitan world cannot be constructed from layers of intricate argumentation or rest on deep metaphysical or religious convictions. It must draw on simple, transparent principles that everyone can understand and agree upon. The ideal of human flourishing—that it’s good for people to lead long, healthy, happy, rich, and stimulating lives—is just such a principle, since it is based on nothing more (and nothing less) than our common humanity.