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March 6 - March 15, 2021
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.
Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.
What is the Enlightenment?4 There is no official answer, because the era named by Kant’s essay was never demarcated by opening and closing ceremonies like the Olympics, nor are its tenets stipulated in an oath or creed.
The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable.
It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient—who feel pleasure and pain, fulfillment and anguish. Whether it is framed as the goal of providing the greatest happiness for the greatest number or as a categorical imperative to treat people as ends rather than means, it was the universal capacity of a person to suffer and flourish, they said, that called on our moral concern.
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.
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.
The first keystone in understanding the human condition is the concept of entropy or disorder, which emerged from 19th-century physics and was defined in its current form by the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
With the exception of fruit, everything we call “food” is the body part or energy store of some other organism, which would just as soon keep that treasure for itself. Nature is a war, and much of what captures our attention in the natural world is an arms race.
Evolution left us with another burden: our cognitive, emotional, and moral faculties are adapted to individual survival and reproduction in an archaic environment, not to universal thriving in a modern one.
Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets.
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.
A second counter-Enlightenment idea is that people are the expendable cells of a superorganism—a clan, tribe, ethnic group, religion, race, class, or nation—and that the supreme good is the glory of this collectivity rather than the well-being of the people who make it up.
Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.
Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religious rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible.
A large majority of Britons think that immigration, teen pregnancy, litter, unemployment, crime, vandalism, and drugs are a problem in the United Kingdom as a whole, while few think they are problems in their area.5 Environmental quality, too, is judged in most nations to be worse in the nation than in the community, and worse in the world than in the nation.
A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.
The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise.
If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you’re in no position to turn your nose up at these values—or to deny that other people should share your good fortune.
As the economist Nathan Rosenberg and the legal scholar L. E. Birdzell Jr. point out, “We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”
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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.
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.
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.
Economic inequality is usually measured by the Gini coefficient, a number that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and 1, when one person has everything and everyone else has nothing.
Igor and Boris are dirt-poor peasants, barely scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day a fairy appears to Igor and grants him a wish. Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should die.”
The Spirit Level theory has been called “the left’s new theory of everything,” and it is as problematic as any other theory that leaps from a tangle of correlations to a single-cause explanation.
“There is no evidence so far,” the authors conclude, “that children or adults possess any general aversion to inequality.” 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.
I have seen a lot of evidence that this is not true
According to a famous conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of work while the rest stay in rural squalor. But eventually a rising tide lifts all the boats. As more of the population gets swept into the modern economy, inequality should decline, tracing out an inverted U. This hypothetical arc of inequality over time is called the Kuznets curve.
The pattern remains—globalization helped the lower and middle classes of poor countries, and the upper class of rich countries, much more than it helped the lower middle class of rich countries—but the differences are less extreme.
In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)
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.
In some ways the world has become less equal, but in more ways the world’s people have become better off.
If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they’ll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they’ll spring for the clean air.
A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”
Faced with such facts, climate justice warriors reply that rather than enriching poor nations, we should impoverish rich ones, switching back, for example, to “labor-intensive agriculture” (to which an appropriate reply is: You first).
The graph shows that at the dawn of the modern era the great powers were pretty much always at war. But nowadays they are never at war: the last one pitted the United States against China in Korea more than sixty years ago.
It also saw practical suggestions for how to reduce or even eliminate war, particularly Kant’s famous essay “Perpetual Peace.”19 The spread of these ideas has been credited with the decline in great power wars in the 18th and 19th centuries and with several hiatuses in war during that interval.
As we saw in chapter 1, many Enlightenment thinkers advanced the theory of gentle commerce, according to which international trade should make war less appealing.
Another brainchild of the Enlightenment is the theory that democratic government serves as a brake on glory-drunk leaders who would drag their countries into pointless wars.
The Long Peace was also helped along by some realpolitik. The massive destructive powers of the American and Soviet armies (even without their nuclear weapons) made the Cold War superpowers think twice about confronting each other on the battlefield—which, to the world’s surprise and relief, they never did.
Yet the biggest single change in the international order is an idea we seldom appreciate today: war is illegal. For most of history, that was not the case.
This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core.9 The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data.
In the meantime, Abt and Winship observe that “aggressive drug enforcement yields little anti-drug benefits and generally increases violence,” while “drug courts and treatment have a long history of effectiveness.”
Conspicuous by their absence from the list of what works are bold initiatives like slum clearance, gun buybacks, zero-tolerance policing, wilderness ordeals, three-strikes-and-you’re-out mandatory sentencing, police-led drug awareness classes, and “scared straight” programs in which at-risk youths are exposed to squalid prisons and badass convicts.
Haha! Wilderness Ordeals done work. Yes. That's true
Also noteworthy is that opioid overdoses are largely an epidemic of the druggy Baby Boomer cohort reaching middle age. The peak age of poisoning deaths in 2011 was around fifty, up from the low forties in 2003, the late thirties in 1993, the early thirties in 1983, and the early twenties in 1973.57 Do the subtractions and you find that in every decade it’s the members of the generation born between 1953 and 1963 who are drugging themselves to death.
