Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker was first published this year. It is essentially Pinker’s assessment of the world we live in and how we got here. The book is a defense of enlightenment ideals and an argument that the world is getting better because of them. The author is known as an optimist. He describes the brand of optimism that he practices as “rational optimism.”

The gist of this book is that human civilization has been improving in numerous ways. This improvement has been accelerating. It is being driven by what Pinker describes as enlightenment ideals. The author covers a lot of ground in this work. He explores subjects as diverse as war, violent crime, poverty, famine, epidemics, literacy, human rights, the spread of democracy, access to knowledge, culture and the arts, as well as many other issues. He devotes many pages to both the already developed and the still developing worlds. Pinker uses a lot of statistics to back up his points. I have more to say about this below.

Pinker attempts to ascertain why humanity is improving.  He attributes these advances to reason, science and what he calls “humanism.” I put what he calls “humanism” in quotation marks because there are so many definitions of humanism around. Pinker defines humanism as,

“The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience”

He attributes the advances in these areas to enlightenment philosophy. He does touch upon various enlightenment philosophers. However, this is a light touch. I would have preferred if the author had explored the various philosophers and their beliefs in greater depth.

Pinker talks a lot about pervasive pessimism that he argues is all over the place. The author writes,

“And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”

As the above quotation illustrates, Pinker argues that due to the nature of the modern world, communication technology, the structure of the media, the fact that we care more about people who are different from us, etc., leads many to believe that things are getting worse at a time when they are getting better.

  

Pinker does address existentialist dangers like climate change and nuclear weapons. He recognizes the reality of these risks. Once again, his optimism prevails, while he acknowledges that although these perils could destroy human civilization, he believes that humanity can overcome them. When it comes to other threats that folks deem as risks to the survival of human civilization, such as the dangers of artificial intelligence, overpopulation, pandemics, etc., Pinker argues that they are not as serious as many are contending.

Pinker is highly critical of what he identifies as past and modern anti-enlightenment, anti-science and anti-humanist movements. His criticism extends to both the right and the left. He delves into Donald Trump as well as nationalistic trends in Europe. The philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are tied to these movements.

The author is also critical of illiberalism emanating from the left, in particular, the latest rounds of censorship on college campuses, an intolerance of dissenting viewpoints, the attempts to destroy the careers of individuals who dissent from left wing orthodoxy, left wing anti-science and anti-reason trends, demonization of all things Western, etc. He is highly critical of post modernism. As he does on the right, he concludes that many issues on the left originate with anti-enlightenment philosophers. Here he identifies Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as such. The ever optimistic Pinker, of course, believes that in the end, reason and moderation will win out over extremists on both sides.

Pinker is also generally critical of religion and particularly critical of conservative interpretations of religion. He talks a about  conservative interpretations of Christianity and Islam. However he acknowledges  that moderate versions of these and other religions are comparable and sometimes even champion enlightenment values. 

There is so much here that it is difficult to encompass in a single blog post, but just a few examples of ills in the world that have been on the downswing over time include poverty, famine, epidemics and violence.  Yet these facts are so rarely talked about. For a more specific example, violent crime in the developed world has been declining dramatically over the last 25 years or so. Yet, the majority of people believe that it is increasing. As another example, in 1984, there existed 54,000 nuclear weapons in the world, and now there are less than 11,000, and there are good prospects that in the coming decades, this number will be substantially reduced.

As mentioned above, Pinker uses a lot of statistics to back up his points. I have been careful to use examples of things that are not only backed up by statistics,  but that match my understanding of the world based upon sources that I have read as well as my basic understanding of the world and of history.

 Some of My Thoughts

A lot of commentary has already been written about this book. Reviews as well as opinion pieces abound all over the internet. Pinker is garnering both praise and criticism. In terms of criticism, it is coming from both the right and the left. Personally, I think that this book illustrates truths about the world that are rarely talked about. Thus, I am devoting a few paragraphs where I share some of my personal observations below.

I have strong opinions on Pinker’s ideas as well as on the issues that he addresses. I have read and thought a lot about these topics over the years.   In an effort to be balanced, I have listened to and read a fair number of these critics. My commentary has been partially influenced by some of Pinker’s detractors.

Pinker uses a lot of statistics. While statistics can be cherry picked and used to distort reality, in my opinion, the author uses them to support logical and common-sense arguments. The statistics presented in this book also match my understanding of history and current events. For instance, his statistics on war and violent crime fit what is happening in the world based upon many sources.  The fact that, as terrible as today’s wars are, they do not come close to matching the frequency and loss of life that conflicts in the past have. The same is true on the subject of crime. Pinker’s statistics generally just quantify what I know to be fairly clear historical trends.

Many folks who criticize Pinker, and people who I have discussed these issues with, bring up many of today’s horrors. One example is the war in Syria. There has been terrible suffering and death as result of this conflict. Upper estimates put the death toll as approaching 500,000. There are several other conflicts going on in the world that are also causing mass losses of life and suffering. However, as Pinker points out, in almost every time in the past, there were many more conflicts going on. Many of these conflicts were much worse in terms of deaths than what is occurring in Syria. Pinker writes of this kind of critique,

“they forget the many civil wars that ended without fanfare after 2009 (in Angola, Chad, India, Iran, Peru, and Sri Lanka) and also forget earlier ones with massive death tolls, such as the wars in Indochina (1946–54, 500,000 deaths), India (1946–48, a million deaths), China (1946–50, a million deaths), Sudan (1956–72, 500,000 deaths, and 1983–2002, a million deaths), Uganda (1971–78, 500,000 deaths), Ethiopia (1974–91, 750,000 deaths), Angola (1975–2002, a million deaths), and Mozambique (1981–92, 500,000 deaths)”

Pinker goes on and uses charts and graphs, among other things, to show that deaths from war have been progressively coming down. As I mentioned above, these statistics match my understanding of history. This is just one example. Pinker makes dozens of rational, historical and statistical arguments as per above on many topics, such as poverty, literacy, epidemics, famine, etc.

There is another point that bears some discussion. Some critics have implied that being optimistic about these issues shows a callousness to present day human suffering and death. Often, individual or group examples of suffering, violence or oppression are brought up as counterarguments when discussing improvements in the world.

Granted, for the relatives of a murdered person, a rape survivor, or a child dying of hunger, a person living in a war zone, etc. the fact that these things are becoming less common is no solace. We should never forget about, and more importantly, we should never stop trying to reduce and ameliorate these ills. However, if these evils have been progressively becoming less common and less severe, it is vital that we understand to what extent this is happening and why this is happening. This understanding is important if we want to sustain and perhaps accelerate the improvement. Recognizing and trying to understand what is going on does not diminish the suffering of those who are still exposed to these terrible things.  On the contrary, understanding what is going on help us to reduce suffering in the future. In addition, the pursuit of truth is in itself important.

Pinker writes,

“The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works.”

  

Pinker does talk about the terrible things in the world, including the situation with refugees, declining incomes and declining life expectancies in some segments of the population in developed countries, climate change as well as many more issues that are addressed in the book. He makes a strong case that, based on historical trends, we will see improvements in these areas over time.

While he does acknowledge that climate change might destroy human civilization, he makes a case that human civilization can survive it and eventually ameliorate it. He seems more optimistic than pessimistic here.  I am not as optimistic as Pinker seems to be on this front, though I do think that it can go either way.  Pinker makes the case that there is a good chance that humanity will find ways to cope with this challenge. I acknowledge that we might overcome this threat, but I think that that it is so pressing and potentially destructive to human civilization that Pinker would have done better to integrate its negative affects upon his future prognostications.

I generally like Pinker’s politics and views on social issues. He clearly recognizes the benefits that moderate liberalism has brought to the world while recognizing a growing illiberalism growing out of the left. He is also not hesitant to take conservative positions when reason leads him to them.  In some ways, this entire book is a call to moderation, with a slight tilt to the left. It seems that Pinker and I are mostly on the same the same page here.  

I agree with the message of this book: that the plight of humanity is improving in multiple ways and, for the most part, modernity is enormously beneficial.  The ideas of the enlightenment, science and reason are driving this progress. I believe that there are downsides to modernity, and Pinker does mention them, but I would have preferred that he written about them more. However, I agree with him that the constant drumbeat that modernity is detrimental to humanity and things were better in the past, is erroneous. Thus, when all is said and done, I find myself mostly in agreement with Pinker on a whole host of issues.

I think that this book, along with the author’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, are two of the most important works written in recent years. Even if one disagrees with many of Pinker’s points, he is an intriguing thinker who raises all kinds of compelling issues. I personally believe that Pinker is one of the most important thinkers of our time. I highly recommend this book.

Our New Republic

I often hear or read opinions about how bad the Internet and the digital age is in terms of people’s ability to think. I must disagree. I considered not putting up this post, as I think that I am stating the obvious. However, the ubiquity of contrary opinions that I hear on an almost daily basis has convinced me lay out my opinions.

For those of us who are curious about the world, it is simply the best time to be alive so far. Of course there are negative aspects to the information age. There are negative aspects to almost everything; but for those who utilize these modern tools to propagate and explore real knowledge, ideas and opinions, the digital highway is a wondrous medium that no previous generation has had the good fortune to have at its disposal.

No one needs to be reminded about the ocean of information and resources available. Just as importantly, there is such a free and efficient exchange of information, viewpoints and ideas. Book Blogging is but one example! 

In The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined Steven Pinker draws a parallel between what he calls our “Electronic Republic” and the old Republic of Letters. Centuries ago, intellectuals and writers kept their ideas percolating by a system that was known as “The Republic of Letters”.  During the 17th and 18th century, these notable thinkers engaged in a written exchange of ideas and commentary.  Today, people throughout the world have availed themselves the use of this new medium. The modern community is so much vaster. Furthermore it is not solely for the elites anymore. Millions of people throughout the globe are participating. Of course, our system is also much more efficient in terms of speed and is enhanced by verbal and visual communication. Though Pinker’s analogy between the centuries old medium and our modern interactions is limited and not entirely congruous, in many ways our current endeavors are an heir to the old literary republic.

All of my life I longed for more fulfilling communication with interesting, dynamic and innovative thinkers. Long before the Internet came along, I established friendships with such folks, read books and articles written by other such people and even watched television that helped me to understand the world better. Now, however, at any time of day or night I can read, communicate and exchange ideas on my blog, as well as on the sites of fellow bloggers. I can download millions of books and access essays on technological and scientific subjects, history and literary criticism. I can read and comment upon magazine articles, watch videos of authors discussing their books, the list goes on and on!

Many will lament the profusion of fluff, junk information, hate speech, etc. found on the Web. Many humans will also inevitably spend enormous amounts of time on silly online pursuits (indeed, I do so a little myself!).  I think that we must ask, however, twenty, or fifty, or one hundred years ago, were there that many more people engaged in intellectually stimulating pursuits? I hazard to guess that the information age has stimulated more then stymied the growth of curious minds. A dreamer, out of the box thinker, or even just a bright individual, who in years past might have been stuck in an intellectual backwater, now has access to vast communication channels with paths that reach to the far edges of both the geographic and intellectual world.

Nevertheless, a lot of unproductive time is spent with electronic devices. Some folks have had their lives consumed by them. However, when it comes down to it, I could care less what most people do with their time or their thoughts. I am just very happy and grateful that myself and likeminded folks have such a wondrous and useful door to the universe at our fingertips!

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is a grand and all encompassing study in human violence as well as the trends that the author believes are driving it down. Pinker has succeeded in producing an extremely comprehensive work that provides the reader with a thought provoking and enlightening view of the big picture of this extremely important subject.

The book begins with one vital proposition that the entire work rests upon: over the course of human history, violence in all of its major forms has been declining. Pinker himself acknowledges that for many modern readers this may be a hard sell.

“In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.”

He subsequently devotes scores of pages to presenting volumes of statistics, analysis of statistics, as well as additional archeological, sociological and historical evidence in proving that the further back one delves into human history, the more violence one sees.

The author explores all major kinds of violence, including wars between states, civil wars, mass killings and genocides, crimes including murder and rape, corporal punishment, capital punishment, bullying, and more. He concludes that over the millennia, every single one of these practices has been on the downswing.

“It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence”

My assessment of this bedrock hypothesis is that Pinker is mostly, perhaps even close to entirely, correct. As noted, the book presents both comprehensive statistics as well as analysis of historical evidence to support his assertion. As someone who has pursued a lifelong interest in history, Pinker’s contention indeed fits with what seems to me to be an accurate view of historical patterns. In fact, I mostly agreed with the assertion that violence has been declining before reading this book. My problem beforehand was how to reconcile this theory into what many presume to be the most violent period in world history, that of the first half of the twentieth century. If violence is on a steady decline, how do we explain this era?

Pinker makes a relatively convincing case that the wars and mass murders that blackened the early part of the last century, while being among the worst incidents of this type, in terms of percentage of the world’s population killed, were not the absolute worst. He labels these horrendous events involving the intentional deaths of an enormous number of human beings as hemoclysms. The author argues that hemoclysms such as the Mongol conquests, as well as multiple very obscure events such as the Yuan Dynasty Wars, at the time, actually killed a larger percentage of the Earth’s population. Pinker sees the twentieth century calamities as the last in a series of terrible events that have occurred throughout world history, their frequency steadily diminishing.

Likewise, the violent crime waves that most Western societies began experiencing in the 1960’s, as well as the rash of civil wars and political and ethnic violence that have plagued Africa and other regions since World War Two, are shown be part of a long pattern of temporary, relatively small upward bumps that have always been part of the pattern. Furthermore, Pinker argues that both of these trends are past their peaks and are on the downswing. Deaths caused by terrorism, which has occupied so much of our attention over the past few years, are so relatively low, that they do not even appear as a blip in the statistics. Nevertheless, Pinker argues that the rates of terrorism are also on the decline.

If we put into perspective these temporary and less frequent upswings in violence, the picture of the downward slope in violence over time does become clearer. Pinker details what many perceptive students of history know; as bad as things seem today, the past, in virtually every society, was a place where wars, rape, torture, slavery, child abuse, animal cruelty, as well as countless other human evils were much more commonplace.

Next, Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, turns his attention on neuroscience and tries to explain not only the neurological and evolutionary reasons for violence, but also the reasons for our “Our Better Angels” such as altruism, sympathy, cooperation, etc. He then attempts to connect these neurological phenomena to explain the trends and patterns related to the history of violence.

A good chunk of the book consists of Pinker attempting to explain why violence has been subsiding, as well as why there are often temporary but real setbacks in the trends. The book digs into the history, philosophy, psychology and sociology of humanity to find answers.

Pinker identifies five major trends over the course of history to explain this waning of violence. First, what he calls the “Leviathan effect”. That is the decline in violence that resulted as nation states became more and more organized (he comprehensively explores the countertrends that occur when such states wage wars as well as when they murder their own citizens). Second, “Gentle Commerce”, which is the gradual growth of commerce, trade and capitalism. Third, “Feminization” is the process where women become more and more empowered. Fourth, “Expanded Circles of Sympathy” by which sympathetic and empathetic feelings which humans originally reserved for family and tribe eventually expanded into larger and larger groups. Fifth, the “Escalator of Reason”, which is the ascent of reason over the centuries in opposition to irrational thought processes. According to the author, these forces have not just led to the reduction in violence, but to the betterment of humankind in innumerable ways.

At over 800 pages this is a massive work. Pinker journeys deeply into his contentions and does not give short shift to counterarguments. He tries to explore every angle of the subject. Readers of this blog will likely find some disagreements with these assertions. The arguments that I have laid out here are explored in such intricate detail in the book itself that I am not really doing them justice in this outline. There are so many avenues that the author ventures into that my synopsis overlooks really big parts of this work.

An example of just one of dozens of important points that Pinker makes here that I think is of particular consequence: the author talks about a number of immense significance to every human being alive.  It is a number that I have been cognizant and thought about over the years long before I had even heard of this book. That is the number zero. Zero is the number of direct major power violent conflicts that have occurred on Earth since 1952. It is a historically unprecedented span of time without such a war. It would have left informed citizens of past ages incredulous. Those who predicted such a period in times past were labeled as naive and foolish utopians. If it continues, it bodes well for the future.

Pinker is ultimately championing knowledge, rationality, and modernity. According to the author, behind all of the five major forces lay an increase in the dissemination of knowledge and/or the continued development of rational thinking. Contrary to the stereotype of cold and soulless logic, the text lays out a convincing premise that rational viewpoints and analytical thinking encourage such virtues as empathy, altruism, cooperation, nonviolence, etc.  The author even contends that such rational and critical cognitive processes encourage the propagation of non-violent and humane religious- based morality over exclusory, discriminatory and violent theologies.

Pinker’s line of reasoning is more or less in line with my views. I am a big advocate of rationalism as a driver of much that is good in the world.  There are such an enormous number of contentions and theories presented in this book that any thinking reader will find at least a fair amount to disagree with. However, in my opinion the author gets it mostly right.

I believe that this is a vitally important work. It is what I like to call a “big picture” book that is a key to understanding where humanity has been and where it is going as a species. As Pinker puts it,

“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”

In a world of nuclear and other potential doomsday weapons, if Pinker is wrong then we are certainly doomed. If he is right, and if we can overcome an environmental calamity, we will likely make it as a civilization.  This is my conclusion, not Pinker’s.

Pinker is no utopian. He acknowledges that to some degree violence will always be a human problem. He faces up to what are clearly the downsides of modernity. He also concedes that predicting future trends is difficult. However, if his conclusions are correct, what he describes as the “arrow of history” is headed in a direction that promises somewhat better days ahead.