Enlightenment Now Quotes

“As impressive as the conquest of infectious disease in Europe and America was, the ongoing progress among the global poor is even more astonishing. Part of the explanation lies in economic development (chapter 8), because a richer world is a healthier world. Part lies in the expanding circle of sympathy, which inspired global leaders such as Bill Gates, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton to make their legacy the health of the poor in distant continents rather than glittering buildings close to home. George W. Bush, for his part, has been praised by even his harshest critics for his policy on African AIDS relief, which saved millions of lives.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” . . . For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . . .”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“The converse is true as well. The financial writer Morgan Housel has observed that while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.28 Whenever someone offers a solution to a problem, critics will be quick to point out that it is not a panacea, a silver bullet, a magic bullet, or a one-size-fits-all solution; it’s just a Band-Aid or a quick technological fix that fails to get at the root causes and will blow back with side effects and unintended consequences. Of course, since nothing is a panacea and everything has side effects (you can’t do just one thing), these common tropes are little more than a refusal to entertain the possibility that anything can ever be improved.29”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“So you’re saying that we can all sit back and relax, that violence will just take care of itself. Illogical, Captain. If you see that a pile of laundry has gone down, it does not mean the clothes washed themselves; it means someone washed the clothes. If a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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. As Bertolt Brecht put it millennia later: Grub first, then ethics.19”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“physicist David Deutsch’s defense of enlightenment, The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields, scientific, political, and moral: Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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].”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“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. To appreciate this burden, one doesn’t have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions. Humans today rely on cognitive faculties that worked well enough in traditional societies, but which we now see are infested with bugs.

People are by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by “one, two, many” and by rough guesstimates. They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past (remember the beliefs of pre–Scientific Revolution Englishmen). They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence. They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them. They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the most obvious reason may be reason itself: when people become more intellectually curious and scientifically literate, they stop believing in miracles. The most common reason that Americans give for leaving religion is “a lack of belief in the teachings of religion.”84 We have already seen that better-educated countries have lower rates of belief, and across the world, atheism rides the Flynn effect:”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“scientists often treat the public the way Englishmen treat foreigners: they speak more slowly and more loudly.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Americans have become increasingly polarized.50 Most people’s opinions are too shallow and uninformed to fit into a coherent ideology, but in a dubious form of progress, the percentage of Americans whose opinions are down-the-line liberal or down-the-line conservative doubled between 1994 and 2014, from 10 to 21 percent. The polarization has coincided with an increase in social segregation by politics: over those twenty years, the ideologues have become more likely to say that most of their close friends share their political views.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“How reasonable is the hope for continuing progress? That’s the question I’ll consider in this last chapter in the Progress section, before switching in the remainder of the book to the ideals that are necessary to realize the hope. I’ll start with the case for continuing progress. We began the book with a non-mystical, non-Whiggish, non-Panglossian explanation for why progress is possible, namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. At the time skeptics could reasonably say, “It will never work.” But more than two centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“And of course the problems that span the entire planet are formidable. Before the century is out, it will have to accommodate another two billion people. A hundred million hectares of tropical forest were cut down in the previous decade. Marine fishes have declined by almost 40 percent, and thousands of species are threatened with extinction. Carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and particulate matter continue to be spewed into the atmosphere, together with 38 billion tons of CO2 every year, which, if left unchecked, threaten to raise global temperatures by two to four degrees Celsius. And the world has more than 10,000 nuclear weapons distributed among nine countries. The facts in the last three paragraphs, of course, are the same as the ones in the first eight; I’ve simply read the numbers from the bad rather than the good end of the scales or subtracted the hopeful percentages from 100. My point in presenting the state of the world in these two ways is not to show that I can focus on the space in the glass as well as on the beverage. It’s to reiterate that progress is not utopia, and that there is room—indeed, an imperative—for us to strive to continue that progress. If we can sustain the trends in the first eight paragraphs by deploying knowledge to enhance flourishing, the numbers in the last three paragraphs should shrink.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“As societies have become healthier, wealthier, freer, happier, and better educated, they have set their sights on the most pressing global challenges. They have emitted fewer pollutants, cleared fewer forests, spilled less oil, set aside more preserves, extinguished fewer species, saved the ozone layer, and peaked in their consumption of oil, farmland, timber, paper, cars, coal, and perhaps even carbon.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“freer, they are also becoming more literate, knowledgeable, and smarter. Early in the 19th century, 12 percent of the world could read and write; today 83 percent can. Literacy and the education it enables will soon be universal, for girls as well as boys. The schooling, together with health and wealth, are literally making us smarter—by thirty IQ points, or two standard deviations above our ancestors. People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Life has been getting safer in every way. Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 59 percent less likely to fall to their deaths, 92 percent less likely to die by fire, 90 percent less likely to drown, 92 percent less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job.2 Life in other rich countries is even safer, and life in poorer countries will get safer as they get richer.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“(Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.)”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Figure 19-1 shows that the United States has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak, and now has fewer nuclear warheads than at any time since 1956.113 Russia, for its part, has reduced its arsenal by 89 percent from its Soviet-era peak.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“knowledge is acquired by formulating explanations and testing them against reality, not by running an algorithm faster and faster.25 Devouring the information on the Internet will not confer omniscience either: big data is still finite data, and the universe of knowledge is infinite.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“For half a century the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse have been overpopulation, resource shortages, pollution, and nuclear war. They have recently been joined by a cavalry of more exotic knights: nanobots that will engulf us, robots that will enslave us, artificial intelligence that will turn us into raw materials, and Bulgarian teenagers who will brew a genocidal virus or take down the Internet from their bedrooms.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“men kill themselves at around four times the rate of women,”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In the United States there are more than 40,000 suicides a year, making it the tenth-leading cause of death, and worldwide there are about 800,000, making it the fifteenth-leading cause.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the rich are getting even richer (though of course they are, a topic we will examine in the next chapter). Extreme poverty is being eradicated, and the world is becoming middle class.18”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Yet traditional environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called their “customary indifference to starvation,” have prosecuted a fanatical crusade to keep transgenic crops from people—not just from whole-food gourmets in rich countries but from poor farmers in developing ones.29 Their opposition begins with a commitment to the sacred yet meaningless value of “naturalness,” which leads them to decry “genetic pollution” and “playing with nature” and to promote “real food” based on “ecological agriculture.” From there they capitalize on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public. Depressing studies have shown that about half of the populace believes that ordinary tomatoes don’t have genes but genetically modified ones do, that a gene inserted into a food might migrate into the genomes of people who eat it, and that a spinach gene inserted into an orange would make it taste like spinach. Eighty percent favored a law that would mandate labels on all foods “containing DNA.”30 As Brand put it, “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Like fans at a rock concert, everyone stands up, but no one gets a better view. That’s the way evolution works: it myopically selects for individual advantage, not the greater good of the species, let alone the good of some other species. From a farmer’s perspective, not only do tall wheat plants waste energy in inedible stalks, but when they are enriched with fertilizer they collapse under the weight of the heavy seedhead. Borlaug took evolution into his own hands, crossing thousands of strains of wheat and then selecting the offspring with dwarfed stalks, high yields, resistance to rust, and an insensitivity to day length. After several years of this “mind-warpingly tedious work,” Borlaug evolved strains of wheat (and then corn and rice) with many times the yield of their ancestors. By combining these strains with modern techniques of irrigation, fertilization, and crop management, Borlaug turned Mexico and then India, Pakistan, and other famine-prone countries into grain exporters almost overnight. The Green Revolution continues—it has been called “Africa’s best-kept secret”—driven by improvements in sorghum, millet, cassava, and tubers.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber which used methane and steam to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, replacing the massive quantities of bird poop that had previously been needed to return nitrogen to depleted soils. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th-century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.18”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“the conspiracy theory spread by the Taliban and Boko Haram that vaccines sterilize Muslim girls, or the one spread by affluent American activists that vaccines cause autism.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress