Much of Pinker’s talk was devoted to showing how most of the things than humans
care about (except climate) have been getting drastically better over the last
few centuries and decades. The roster includes length of life, health, food,
prosperity, education, human rights, freedom from violence and accidents,
leisure, and happiness—world wide.
That good news is surprising to many and unwelcome to some, who fear it could
foster complacent optimism. “While pessimists sound like they’re trying to
help you,“ Pinker noted, “optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you
something.” So Pinker explored the specific causes of progress in each domain
and what it will take to keep the progress going over the coming decades and
centuries despite inevitable setbacks and new threats.
The main roots of continual advance Pinker sees as the values pushed by the
18th Century Enlightenment—reason, science, humanism, and progress. Those
values can’t be taken for granted because they are far from universal. From
the 18th Century to this day, they are opposed and sometimes defeated by
authority, tradition, faith, mysticism, intuition, ideology, romanticism, and
exclusion.
Human nature doesn’t change much, but progress can proceed anyway thanks to
benign institutions such as democracy, markets, a free press, schools and
universities, scientific societies, declarations of rights, and global
organizations for cooperation. Their job is to apply knowledge and sympathy to
enhance human flourishing. It is no accident that “Secular liberal democracies
are the happiest and healthiest places on Earth.”
What is the program for continued progress? Don’t treat every problem as a
sign that we should burn down our institutions and hope for something better to
rise out of the ashes. Nor should we treat progress as a mystical force
guaranteed to lift us ever upward. Progress is the result of human effort,
guided by an idea: that if we apply reason and science to make a better world,
we can gradually succeed. If we continue to embrace that idea, Pinker
concluded, it’s reasonable to expect progress to continue. If we don’t, it may
not.
—Stewart Brand
s...@longnow.org <mailto:s...@longnow.org>
[Go here <http://longnow.org/seminars/02018/mar/13/new-enlightenment/> for a
podcast of the whole talk and video of tjust he 45-minute Question & Answer
section. (Video of the full talk will be posted later.) For a linkable,
illustrated version of this summary, go to Medium
<https://medium.com/@stewartbrand/making-the-world-better-cdeebc1490d7>.]_______________________________________________
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