Last December, I was feeling glum, and so was almost everyone I know. I thought, I should get a bigshot intellectual to give the Stevens community a pep talk, but who? Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor turned mega-pundit, immediately came to mind.
In the latest of his many bestsellers, Enlightenment Now, Pinker argues that, contrary to what we might infer from daily headlines, things are getting better and better; we should be grateful to live in our era, the best (aside from recent setbacks) in our long, troubled history. This, I thought, is just the upbeat message that we need to hear in this plague-wracked season.
Some of my egghead friends groaned when I told them Pinker had agreed to give a talk. They are offended by Pinker’s claim that humanity has advanced morally as well as materially over the past few centuries. They are what Pinker calls progressives who don’t believe in progress. Of course, few of my friends have actually read Pinker. A philosopher whom I urged to check out Enlightenment Now said he would do so only if I put a gun to his head, and probably not even then.
Now those loath to read Pinker’s 556-page book can check out the recording of my one-hour conversation with him, “The Case for Optimism: A Conversation with Steven Pinker.” (I came up with the title. Pinker isn’t crazy about being called an optimist, unless it’s clear that his optimism stems from empirical evidence.) In addition to fielding questions during our chat, which took place on March 17, Pinker spent 20 minutes or so presenting graphs documenting our progress, which he defines as “improvements in human flourishing.”
Some graphs track increases in good things: income, longevity, sustenance, safety, literacy, democracy, civil rights, leisure and happiness. Others show declines in bad things: poverty, infant mortality, famine, state-sponsored torture, capital punishment, war, homicides, lynchings and racist attitudes. Together, the graphs demonstrate that we are wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful, smarter and nicer than we have ever been. Not by a little, but by a lot.
Pinker isn’t a Doctor Pangloss, who thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds. He recognizes that the goods of modern life are unequally distributed, and that poverty, disease, tyranny, violence and ignorance endure. But he wants us to know that we have advanced against these ancient wellsprings of misery, and we can advance even further if we don’t succumb to fatalism, tribalism or revolutionary fanaticism.
Pinker is what you might call a conservative progressive. He wants to preserve those practices, values and institutions—notably science, democracy and, yes, capitalism–that have contributed to human flourishing. He says: We’ve been doing some things right over the past few centuries; let’s keep doing those things, so we can make the world an even better place. He writes that “there is room–indeed an imperative—for us to strive to continue [our] progress.”
Progress is neither steady nor inevitable. “There are setbacks,” Pinker said, “there are reversals.” Anticipating questions about COVID-19, he flashed a graph of rising life expectancy among wealthy countries in the 20th century. The biggest downward spike came not from World Wars I or II but from the 1918-1919 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people. Longevity continued climbing after that pandemic, and it will do so again, Pinker suggested, as we suppress COVID-19 with vaccines and other measures. (Having just gotten my second Moderna shot, I was especially receptive to this upbeat message.)
Donald Trump’s election, which occurred after Pinker started writing Enlightenment Now, “knocked me off my stride,” he admitted. He re-wrote parts of his book to account for the ascent of Trump and other right-wing demagogues. Their support, Pinker conjectured, comes primarily from older white males threatened by growing rights for women, immigrants and people of color; as this group ages, liberalism and tolerance should continue spreading. Surveys suggest, “amazingly,” Pinker said, that racist attitudes in the U.S. declined during the Trump regime, and after all Trump did lose the last election.
Pinker called climate change arguably “the biggest problem in human history.” To move away from fossils fuels, he suggested, we should tax carbon emissions in a way that does not unduly penalize the poor and implement cheaper, cleaner sources of energy, possibly including advanced nuclear reactors. Pinker rejected solutions that involve abolishing capitalism, which even China has embraced, or returning to a state of low-energy, pre-technological innocence, which would prevent developing regions from attaining the affluence enjoyed by wealthier nations.
All in all, Pinker did what I’d hoped he would do. He defended his data-driven optimism in a way that encourages social and environmental activism. Some progressives worry that acknowledging progress will make us complacent and hence undercut efforts to solve our remaining problems. I worry, as Pinker does, that not acknowledging progress will discourage activism by fostering despair and rage, which can be exploited by power-hungry tyrants on the right and left.
There are divergences between Pinker and me. In Enlightenment Now, he argues that the left worries too much about inequality; poverty is the problem, not inequality per se, some degree of which is inevitable. I’m an old-fashioned lefty, who wants to decrease both poverty and inequality by taxing the rich at a higher rate and giving more to the poor. But for the most part, I share Pinker’s perspective.
There is something unseemly, I realize, about white, bourgeois males like Pinker and me singing the praises of modern civilization. Of course we like it, guys like us are its chief beneficiaries! But as Pinker demonstrates, more and more people are benefitting from our current world order, in spite of its manifest flaws, and I feel a responsibility to convey this hopeful message to my students and anyone else who will listen. So please check out Pinker’s talk, or buy his book. You might feel better about the future.
John Horgan directs the Stevens Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one originally published on ScientificAmerican.com.
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