Steven Pinker “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” Random House, 2018, 453 pp.
For thousands of years, societies divided people into permanent categories of race or caste with little regard for anyone’s individuality. “Then the Enlightenment ushered in a philosophy that says each person is to be judged and respected on account of their own merits, not the class or caste of their ancestors.” That belief, championed by John Locke paved the way for human equality, pluralism, democracy, capitalism and the idea that a person can have a plurality of identities and a society can contain a plurality of moral creeds. However, Tribalism was always there, lurking under the surface. Today it returns as identity politics. But, the core problem today is not just tribalism. It’s excessive individualism, which has eaten away at our uniting faith and damaged our relationships with one another.
Some time ago I read and reported on Pinker’s 2011 book “The Better Angels of our Nature.” That earlier work argued that human life is becoming better, decade by decade, not worse as the news media implies. This current work “Enlightenment Now” is an update of that previous work containing updated statistics and two extra elements: first, the rise of authoritarian populism, especially in the form of Donald Trump; and, second, a defense of the four ideas in the subtitle: progress, reason, science, and humanism. The original definition of Enlightenment was ‘human-kind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.’ Humanism replaced the reliance on tradition and dogma and Aristotle, the basis of medieval philosophy that were important from about 400 B.C. to 1500 A.D.
When reading this book, it is important to have a grasp of what humanism is: the philosophical stance that humans are important both individually and collectively and that critical thinking and evidence-based decisions are preferable, especially preferable to the shallow blurbs on Facebook type media. It may be hard for some to believe that Enlightenment ideals need defending in the 21st century. Who could be against reason, science, humanism, or progress? Yet, it appears that since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk; the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment. Instead, there is a return to tribalism, authoritarianism, contempt for experts rather than respect for knowledge, and nostalgia for an idyllic imagined past rather than hope for a better future.
My Notes:
Pg. 3: Humans have all been endowed with a sense of sympathy: the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness.
Pg. 5f: 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, and the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. Some political movements depict their countries as being pulled into a hellish dystopia by malign factions that can be resisted only by a strong leader who wrenches the country backward to make it ‘great again.’ The author maintains that Enlightenment’s underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated today. These ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference.
Pg. 7: Kant proposed that the Enlightenment consists of ‘human-kind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity, its “lazy and cowardly submission to the dogmas and formulas of religious or political authority.” Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is ‘Dare to understand.” And its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.
Pg. 8: The Enlightenment is conventionally placed in the last two-thirds of the 18th century, though it flowed out of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason in the 17th century and spilled into the heyday of classical liberalism of the first half of the 19th. Four themes tied these eras together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Reason demands that we apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts. For all that, not all of the Enlightenment thinkers were atheists. Some were deists: they thought that God set the universe in motion and then stepped back.
Pg. 10: The thinkers of the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion.
Pg. 14: Progress, an Enlightenment tenet, has brought forth some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, the author suggests, are entropy, evolution, and information. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not interacting with its environment), entropy never decreases. (The First Law is that energy is conserved; the Third, that a temperature of absolute zero is unreachable.). Closed systems inexorably become less organized until they slide into an equilibrium of gray monotony and stay there. Creationists commonly doctor the Second Law of Thermodynamics to claim that biological evolution, an increase in order over time, is physically impossible. The part of the law they omit is ‘in a closed system.’(p. 19).
Pg. 22: Before the concepts of information and computation were elucidated, it was reasonable for someone to be a mind-body dualist and attribute mental life to an immaterial soul (just as before the concept of evolution was elucidated, it was reasonable to be a creationist and attribute design in nature to a cosmic designer).
Pg. 23: Around 500 B.C. several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence. Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, Second Temple Judaism in Judea, and classical Greek Philosophy and drama emerged within a few centuries of one another. This was the age 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. (Not everyone was required to labor producing or harvesting food).
Pg. 24: The Industrial Revolution again released a gusher of usable energy and launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world.
A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. In this primitive but ubiquitous understanding, everything happens for a reason, so when bad things happen, some agent must have wanted them to happen. If a person can be fingered for the misfortune, he can be punished. Galileo, Newton, and Laplace replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future.
Pg. 43: The author’s 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” presented a hundred graphs and maps showing how violence and the conditions that foster it have declined over the course of history, in spite of what people think and what is presented on the news each night. (See my 11/9/2011 report on that book).
Pg. 50: “If it bleeds, it leads” and the decades of journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies prepared the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root.
Pg. 53: On average, a person in the world can be expected today to live 71.4 years. In the 18th-century life expectancy in Europe and the Americas was around 35, where it had been parked for 225 previous years for which we have data. Hunter-gatherers lived about 31.5 years. Death of children and women in child-birth drug these figures down to these levels.
Pg. 76: Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food. Between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent. Between 1820 and 1900, the world’s income tripled. It tripled again in a bit more than fifty years. It took only twenty-five years for it to triple again, and another thirty-three years to triple yet another time. The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820, and almost two hundred-fold from the start of the Enlightenment in the 18th century.
Pg. 99: Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century wrote: “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.” But, Pinker points out, total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not ‘as poor.’ (See my report on Piketty’s book posted 7/30/2014).
Pg. 107: Modern capitalist societies are criticized for their callousness toward the poor. But these critics are probably unaware of how little the pre-capitalist societies of the past spent on poor relief and the amount spent was a much smaller proportion of their wealth: from the Renaissance through the early 20th century, European countries spent an average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on poor relief, education, and other social transfers. In many countries and periods, they spent nothing at all.
Pg. 114: (How about the nifty-fifties when America was Great?) A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all.
Pg. 125: The population bomb so often predicted appears to defuse itself when countries get richer and better educated. First, death rates decline as nutrition and health improve, this does temporarily swell the population as they are not dying like flies. Birth rates peak and then decline as parents no longer need large broods as insurance and women when they become better educated marry later and delay having children. World population growth rate peaked at 2.1 percent a year in 1962, fell to 1.2 percent by 2010, and will probably fall to less than 0.5 percent by 2050 and be close to zero around 2070.
Pg. 135: Just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass.
Pg. 137: If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 2.7⁰ F above the preindustrial level by the end of the 21st century and perhaps to 7.2⁰ F. Sea levels have already risen almost eight inches since 1870, and the rate of the rise appears to be accelerating. (Living in Florida, I can only be glad this is a Chinese hoax as Trump maintains).
Pg. 146: Solar energy is not a plausible solution to our energy needs. Energy analyst Robert Bryce estimates that simply keeping up with the world’s increase in energy use would require turning an area the size of Germany into wind farms every year. Nuclear energy, in contrast, represents the ultimate solution and it is much safer nowadays. (See the book for a detailed discussion of this topic.)
Pg. 152: The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, cooled the planet about one degree Fahrenheit for two years.
Pg. 169: No progressive trend is inexorable, and violent crime is a case in point. Starting in the 1960s, most Western democracies saw a boom in personal violence that erased a century of progress. It was most dramatic in the US where the rate of homicide shot up by a factor of two and a half.
Pg. 191f: Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm; it is a distraction in the assessment of progress, and, in a way, a backhanded tribute to that progress. For instance, there were 44 deaths in 2015 from terrorism in the US but 15,696 homicides and 35,398 vehicle deaths. Excluding 9/11 and (Timothy McVeigh) Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups. We may never drive the already low numbers of terrorist casualties to zero, but we can remember that terror about terrorism is a sign not of how dangerous our society has become, but of how safe.
Pg. 200: The political scientist Samuel Huntington organized the history of democratization into three waves. The first when the great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with its check on government power seemed to be working. The experiment crested at twenty-nine countries by 1922, pushed back by the rise of fascism and communism. The second wave followed WWII as colonies gained independence, pushing the number of recognized democracies up to thirty-six by 1962. However, this was pushed back by Communist takeovers and military juntas in Greece and Latin America. Then democracy’s third wave erupted. Military and fascist governments fell in southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, freeing the nations of Eastern Europe, bringing the total to 103 democratic countries, embracing 56 percent of the world’s population and if we add the 17 countries that were more democratic than autocratic, we get a total of two-thirds of the world’s population living in free or relatively free societies. However, again we are seeing push back with people like Putin.
Pg. 206: Ideas matter. For democracy to take root, influential people have to think that it is better than alternatives such as theocracy, the divine right of kings, colonial paternalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or authoritarian rule by a charismatic leader who directly embodies the will of the people.
Pg. 209: The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. (American executions are concentrated in a handful of Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of counties in those states.)
Pg.222: In 1900, women could vote in only New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City.
Pg. 234: Until the 20th century, Spain was an economic laggard among Western countries. Spanish education was controlled by the Catholic Church and the children of the masses received only oral instruction in the Creed, the catechism, and a few simple manual skills…Science, mathematics, political economy, and secular history were considered too controversial for anyone but trained theologians.
Pg. 238: Most of the world’s knowledge is now online rather than locked in libraries (much of it free), and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of distance learning are becoming available to anyone with a smartphone.
Pg. 240: Flynn Effect: Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores have been rising for more than a century, in every part of the world, at a rate of about three IQ points (a fifth of a standard deviation) per decade. If an average person of 1910 had entered a time machine and materialized today, they would be considered borderline retarded by our standards. (Philosopher James Flynn first documented this phenomenon in 1984).
Pg. 278: Though the suicide rate for women in developed countries fell by more than 40 percent between the mid-1980s and 2013, men kill themselves at around four times the rate of women. However, overall rates have moderately but steadily decreased using records dating back to 1860. (There are approx... 40,000 suicides per year in the US)
Pg. 314: Most historians today believe that Japan surrendered not because of the atomic bombings, whose devastation was no greater than that from the firebombings of sixty other Japanese cities, but because of the entry into the Pacific war of the Soviet Union, which threatened harsher terms of surrender.
Pg. 317f: Few people are aware of how dramatically the world has been dismantling nuclear weapons. The US has reduced its inventory by 85 percent from its 1967 peak; Russia has reduced its arsenal by 89 percent. However, the world still has 10,200 atomic warheads, which is 54,000 less than there were in 1986.
Pg. 329: Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American Growth, analyzed why productivity growth slacked off in the early 1970s. (I reported on this book on 7/30/16). Gordon pointed to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people).
Another explanation is cultural: Workers in depressed regions no longer pick up and move to vibrant ones but collect disability insurance and drop out of the labor force.
Pg. 332: Aggregate statistics like GDP per capita and its derivatives such as factor productivity were designed for a steel-and-wheat economy, not an economy in which information and data are the most dynamic sector. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.
Pg. 333: The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s people (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience. Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. It denigrates elites and experts.
Pg. 339: Analysis of the American 2016 election reveals that voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52-42, as did those who identified the economy as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out immigration and terrorism, not the economy, as the most important issues.
Pg. 371: The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today is politicization and it appears to be on an upswing. In 2014, 38 percent of Democrats held very unfavorable views of the Republican Party (up from 16 percent in 1994). Republicans were even more hostile to Democrats, with 43 percent viewing the party unfavorably and more than a third seeing it as a threat.
Pg. 418: History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. For instance, eight of the thirteen British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministers salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right.
Pg. 425: If the multiverse turns out to be the best explanation of the fundamental physical constants, it would not be the first time we have been flabbergasted by worlds beyond our noses. Our ancestors had to swallow the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, eight other planets, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.
Pg. 437: (Currently, 59 percent of the world’s population identify themselves as religious, down from close to 100 percent a century before). In 2012, 60 percent of Americans called themselves religious, compared with 46 percent of Canadians, 37 percent of the French, and 29 percent of Swedes. Other Western democracies have two to six times the proportion of atheists found in the US.
Pg. 438: Commentators in the US think religion is rebounding because the “Nones”, those having no religion, don’t’ vote. In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the populace but 12 percent of the voters. Organized religions, by definition, are organized and they get out the vote. Evangelical Protestants made up 20 percent of the population but made up 26 percent of the voters. Thought the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by three to one, they stayed home on November 8th.
Pg. 450: The claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state is understandable when thought of as a transference of tribalism to a larger tribal unit. However, the nation-state is a historical artifact of the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia, a rather recent event. It also seems absurd to seek a foundation for morality in the institutions that brought us the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, and the European wars of religion.
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