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

by Steven Pinker

Despotism has persisted through history not just because being a despot is nice work if you can get it, but because from the people’s standpoint the alternative was often worse.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word “democratic” in its official name, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn’t one.

In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.

But aside from these transgressive youths (and there have always been transgressive youths), private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth, which means that we can expect it to decline still further as aging bigots cede the stage to less prejudiced cohorts.

As we will see in chapter 20, Trump’s success, like that of right-wing populists in other Western countries, is better understood as the mobilization of an aggrieved and shrinking demographic in a polarized political landscape than as the sudden reversal of a century-long movement toward equal rights.

The graph displays a historical trend that is seldom appreciated in the hurly-burly of political debate: for all the talk about right-wing backlashes and angry white men, the values of Western countries have been getting steadily more liberal (which, as we will see, is one of the reasons those men are so angry).

Studies that assess education at Time 1 and wealth at Time 2, holding all else constant, suggest that investing in education really does make countries richer.

Also, it beggars belief to think that an average person of 1910, if he or she had entered a time machine and materialized today, would be borderline retarded by our standards, while if Joe and Jane Average made the reverse journey, they would outsmart 98 percent of the befrocked and bewhiskered Edwardians who greeted them as they emerged. Yet surprising as it is, the Flynn effect is no longer in doubt, and it has recently been confirmed in a meta-analysis of 271 samples from thirty-one countries with four million people.

(The myth, still popular among leftist intellectuals, that IQ doesn’t exist or cannot be reliably measured was refuted decades ago.)

One is that although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.

It wasn’t long ago that the average American man had two stages of life: work and death. . . . Think of it this way: The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51.”

Though people increasingly complain about how crazy-busy they are (“yuppie kvetching,” as one team of economists put it), a different picture emerges when they are asked to keep track of their time. In 2015, men reported 42 hours of leisure per week, around 10 more than their counterparts did fifty years earlier, and women reported 36 hours, more than 6 hours more (figure 17-6).

If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be. An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure. He or she can spend that leisure time reading on the Web, listening to music on a smartphone, streaming movies on high-definition TV, Skyping with friends and relatives, or dining on Thai food instead of Spam fritters.

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed, we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.

A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.

Nate Silver began, “Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page.” That finding jumped right off the page and into the article’s headline: “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”

Most interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.

Among the exit poll questions that probed general attitudes, the most consistent predictor of Trump support was pessimism.

Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority.

Inglehart and Norris concluded that supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition.

As we saw in chapter 15, people carry their emancipative values with them as they age rather than sliding into illiberalism. And a recent analysis of 20th-century American voters by the political scientists Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman has shown that Americans do not consistently vote for more conservative presidents as they age.

The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false.

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. And if you disagree, then why should we accept your claim that humans are incapable of rationality?

In a revolutionary analysis of reason in the public sphere, the legal scholar Dan Kahan has argued that certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality).

Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness.

The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation.

The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses.

Humans may be vulnerable to bias and error, but clearly not all of us all the time, or no one would ever be entitled to say that humans are vulnerable to bias and error. The human brain is capable of reason, given the right circumstances; the problem is to identify those circumstances and put them more firmly in place.

The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are deeper than the phenomena themselves.

The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct. The traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, hermeneutic parsing of texts, the glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism.

Spinoza’s dictum is one of a family of principles that have sought a secular foundation for morality in impartiality—in the realization that there’s nothing magic about the pronouns I and me that could justify privileging my interests over yours or anyone else’s.

A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism”—that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Human rights promote human flourishing. That’s why, in practice, humanism and human rights go hand in hand.

Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. That explains why certain reform movements, such as legal equality for women and gay marriage, overturned centuries of precedent astonishingly quickly (chapter 15): with nothing but custom and intuition behind it, the status quo crumbled in the face of utilitarian arguments.

Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas.