Steven Pinker. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. (2018)

In a paragraph

The enlightenment ideas of reason, science, humanism and progress have transformed human well-being.  As can be illustrated by data and graphs, there has been tremendous progress across life expectancy, health, nutrition, wealth, knowledge and lifestyles – first a Great Escape by the West, then a Great Convergence by the rest of the world.  By contrast, modern problems including existential risks, environment and happiness are overstated or manageable.  Greater awareness of the enlightenment’s achievements and approach would counter declinist, religious and populist thinking.  

Key points

• The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not.  More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defence.  We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket.  But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights.  War, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence.  We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril.

• Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

• Counter-enlightenments are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future.

• How can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being.  And almost no one knows about it.

• Enormous progress on life expectancy (from 30 to 70+), child and maternal mortality, on health, on sustenance, on goods, on peace, on safety, on education, on knowledge, on leisure time, on human rights, on lifestyles.

• Wealth is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation. Technology doesn’t just improve old things; it invents new ones.

• The Great Escape is becoming the Great Convergence. Inequality increased then reduced – the Kuznets curve. The winners and losers from globalization show an elephant curve.

• Environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge. Environmentalism should be grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism. Technology and dematerialization are decoupling flourishing from exploiting stuff.

• Declinism was perhaps the biggest impetus to romantic militarism. Over the long run, a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone.  Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.

• Humanity’s conquest of everyday danger is a peculiarly unappreciated form of progress. As society became richer, it spent more of its income, ingenuity, and moral passion on saving lives on the roads.  The world has become more intelligible, and life more precious.

• Modernisation has led to emancipative values. Younger cohorts are more humanistic.

• We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.

• But are we any happier? If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be. Further data shows there is no Easterlin paradox.  A loneliness epidemic seems unlikely as we are naturally social and can normally arrange contact. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement.

• An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.

• Existential risks may be overstated. Because of the social embeddedness of technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time.  Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real: nuclear war. There are several ideas to remove the threat of nuclear war from the human condition.

• The dangers of declinism. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.

• Politics makes us stupid. Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on in-group esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality). We consume news to enhance the fan experience, not for truth.  Political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

• Philip Tetlock shows superforecasters take a Bayesian approach. Tweaking of probabilities beats grand systems.  The superiority of statistical to intuitive judgment.

• The beauty and power of science are not just unappreciated but bitterly resented. C P Snow: The Two Cultures.  By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet.

• The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality, the second is romantic heroism.  Theistic morality has two fatal flaws – God does not exist and religion, as shown in Euthyphro, cannot be the foundation.  All religious morality is parochial, relativistic while humanism can be universal as based on human needs. Nietzsche is the antithesis to humanism.

• The engine of human progress is problem-solving directed towards improving human welfare.

Comments

This is an excellent book.  It presents a very important and unappreciated story – of the scale of human progress, and its roots in enlightenment values, and does this with writing of exceptional style, clarity and organisation.  It uses data to set out the scale of progress that has been achieved, and shows why the news creates an excessively negative perspective.  It also presents unusually hopeful views of existential risk, climate change and other challenges – views which can be debated but are interesting.   

NOTES

Part I: Enlightenment

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old – fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defence. We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights. In the memories of many readers of this book — and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of the world — war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril.

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, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

Harder to find is a positive vision that sees the world’s problems against a background of progress that it seeks to build upon by solving those problems in their turn.

This book is my attempt to restate the ideals of the Enlightenment in the language and concepts of the 21st century.  The bulk of the book is devoted to defending those ideals in a distinctively 21st-century way: with data.

The Enlightenment has worked — perhaps the greatest story seldom told.

When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble — a reason to live.

1. Dare to Understand!

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. Enlightenment’s motto, he proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!” and its foundational demand is freedom of thought and speech.

The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

Foremost is reason. Reason is non-negotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.

The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a way that is hard to appreciate today.

A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror.

To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science — scepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing — are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. That knowledge includes an understanding of ourselves. The need for a “science of man” was a theme.

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. It is individuals, not groups, who are sentient — who feel pleasure and pain, fulfilment and anguish.

We are endowed with the sentiment of sympathy. Gentle commerce.

It was more prosaic, a combination of reason and humanism. If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the ones that make people better off, we can gradually make the world a better place.

2. Entro, Who, Info

The first keystone in understanding the human condition is the concept of entropy or disorder.

I’ll often refer to the statistical version of the Second Law, which does not apply specifically to temperature differences evening out but to order dissipating, as the Law of Entropy.

The universe began in a state of low entropy, the Big Bang, with its unfathomably dense concentration of energy. From there everything went downhill, with the universe dispersing.

Self – organization. The part of the law they omit is “in a closed system.” Organisms are open systems: they capture energy from the sun, food, or ocean vents to carve out temporary pockets of order in their bodies and nests while they dump heat and waste into the environment, increasing disorder in the world as a whole.

Information may be thought of as a reduction in entropy. Goal – directed. Energy channelled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy.

Refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than for them to go right.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth.

Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations. The first is abstraction.The second stepladder of cognition is its combinatorial, recursive power.

The potency of language as the original sharing app was multiplied by the invention of writing (and again in later epochs by the printing press, the spread of literacy, and electronic media).

3. COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS

They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future. Declinism.

Enlightenment humanism, then, is far from being a crowd-pleaser. The idea that the ultimate good is to use knowledge to enhance human welfare leaves people cold.

Part II. Progress

4. Progressophobia

We prefer to have their surgery with anaesthesia rather than without it.

In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman shows that prophets of doom are the all-stars of the liberal arts curriculum. The Optimism Gap.

When Europeans were asked by pollsters whether their own economic situation would get better or worse in the coming year, more of them said it would get better, but when they were asked about their country’s economic situation, more of them said it would get worse.

If a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.  Availability heuristic. Heavy newswatchers can become miscalibrated.

How can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count.

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. Max Roser’s Our World in Data,

5. Life

Life Expectancy from around 30 to 71.

The Malthusian Era. The Great Escape, the economist Angus Deaton’s term.

Child mortality. Maternal mortality.

You have more years ahead of you than people of your age did.

Medical progress today is more Sisyphus than Singularity.

In my view the best projection of the outcome of our multicentury war on death is Stein’s Law — “Things that can’t go on forever don’t” — as amended by Davies’s Corollary — “Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”

6. Health

John Snow. Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio. And how much thought have you given lately to Karl Landsteiner? Karl who? He only saved a billion lives by his discovery of blood groups.

Yes, “smallpox was.” It killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century. The total cost of the program over those ten years … was in the region of $ 312 million.

In the 1990s HIV/AIDS in Africa was a setback for humanity’s progress in lengthening life spans.

“It is knowledge that is the key,” Deaton argues. “Income — although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing … — is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.”

Ideas — ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which save millions of lives.

7. Sustenance

Premodern Europe suffered from famines every few decades.

Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.

The grim label “land of famine” has left China, Russia, India and Bangladesh, and since the 1970s has resided only in Ethiopia and Sudan.

Not long ago, Malthusian thinking was revived with a vengeance. In 1968 the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. Food supply can grow geometrically when knowledge is applied.

In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.

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. Those two chemists top the list of the 20th – century scientists who saved the greatest number of lives in history, with 2.7 billion.

Norman Borlaug, Green Revolution.

The beauty of scientific progress is that it never locks us into a technology but can develop new ones with fewer problems than the old ones. Genetic engineering can now accomplish in days what traditional farmers accomplished in millennia.

Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes.

8. Wealth

We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty.

Wealth is created. It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation:

The Gross World Product today has grown almost a hundredfold since the Industrial Revolution was in place in 1820,

Technology doesn’t just improve old things; it invents new ones. How much did it cost in 1800 to purchase a refrigerator, a musical recording, a bicycle, a cell phone, Wikipedia, a photo of your child, a laptop and printer, a contraceptive pill, a dose of antibiotics? The answer is: no amount of money in the world. The combination of better products and new products makes it almost impossible to track material well-being across the decades and centuries.

Adam Smith called it the paradox of value: when an important good becomes plentiful, it costs far less than what people are willing to pay for it. The difference is called consumer surplus.

In 18th-century England cronyism gave way to open economies.

The third innovation, after science and institutions, was a change in values: an endorsement of what the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls bourgeois virtue. Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce.

The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’

The Great Escape is becoming the Great Convergence. The rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10.

“Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”

A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems,

A spread of democracy and the rise of levelheaded, humanistic leaders

Progress consists of unbundling the features of a social process as much as we can to maximize the human benefits while minimizing the harms.

According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $ 3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country.

9. Inequality

Gini coefficient, a number that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and when one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. (Gini values generally range from 0.25 for the most egalitarian income distributions, such as in Scandinavia after taxes and benefits, to o. 7 for a highly unequal distribution such as the one in South Africa.

Fickle effects of inequality on well-being

A Kuznets curve for inequality. Until recently, both countries travelled a Kuznets arc. Inequality rose during the Industrial Revolution and then began to fall, first gradually in the late 19th century, then steeply in the middle decades of the 20th. But then, starting around 1980, inequality bounced into a decidedly un-Kuznetsian rise.

Major wars often level the income distribution.

The explosion in social spending has redefined the mission of government: from warring and policing to also nurturing.

The cliché about globalization is that it creates winners and losers, and the elephant curve displays them as peaks and valleys. Around the 85th percentile we see globalization’s “losers”: the lower middle classes of the rich world, who gained less than 10 percent.

People move in and out of income brackets.

10. The Environment

Environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge.

I will present a newer conception of environmentalism which shares the goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems but is grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism.

As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin.

There is an optimal amount of pollution. As countries first develop, they prioritize growth over environmental purity. But as they get richer, their thoughts turn to the environment.

Ecopessimists commonly dismiss this entire way of thinking as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact, it is a scepticism that the status quo will doom us — that knowledge will be frozen in its current state and people will robotically persist in their current behaviour regardless of circumstances.

Demographic transition.  It happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies.  The 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.

Resources just refuse to run out. It’s a fallacy to think that people “need resources.”  They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas.  This way of thinking does not sit well with the ethic of “sustainability.” The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones

Seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer. People remember the accidents and are unaware of the incremental improvements.

The ozone layer is expected to heal

Decouple productivity from resources. Density. Dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less.

Britons, too, have reached Peak Stuff, having reduced their annual use of material from 15.1 metric tons per person in 2001 to 10.3 metric tons in 2013.

Something in the nature of technology, particularly information technology, works to decouple human flourishing from the exploitation of physical stuff.

If the emission of greenhouse gases continues, the Earth’s average temperature will rise to at least 1.5° C above the preindustrial level by the end of the 21st century, and perhaps to 4 °C above that level or more.

Morality is different from moralizing and is often poorly served by it.

As the industrial world climbed an energy ladder from wood to coal to oil to gas (the last transition accelerated in the 21st century by the abundance of shale gas from fracking), the ratio of carbon to hydrogen in its energy source steadily fell.  Long sweep of decarbonization.  Carbon pricing. Nuclear power. Climate engineers.

11. Peace

I will put the recent bad news in perspective by going back to the data.

Conflicts that have a radical Islamist group on one side. Russian nationalism. Syrian civil war, with 250,000 battle deaths as of 2016. War is illegal.

The muzzy notion that violent struggle is the life force of nature (“red in tooth and claw”) and the engine of human progress. (This can be distinguished from the Enlightenment idea that the engine of human progress is problem-solving.)

Perhaps the biggest impetus to romantic militarism was declinism.  They thought they were bravely resisting the creep of a liberal, democratic, commercial culture that had been sapping the vitality of the West since the Enlightenment, with the complicity of Britain and the United States. Only from the ashes of a redemptive cataclysm, many thoughts, could a new heroic order arise. They got their wish for a cataclysm. After a second and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honour, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded.

War may be just another obstacle an enlightened species learns to overcome, like pestilence, hunger, and poverty.

Over the long run, a world in which all parties refrain from war is better for everyone. Inventions such as trade, democracy, economic development, peacekeeping forces, and international law and norms are tools that help build that world.

12. Safety

Human ingenuity has been vanquishing the major hazards of life, including everyone enumerated in the prayer, and we are now living in the safest time in history.

This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core.

Together with anarchy, impulsiveness, and opportunity, a major trigger of criminal violence is contraband.

As society became richer, it spent more of its income, ingenuity, and moral passion on saving lives on the roads. Humanity’s conquest of everyday danger is a peculiarly unappreciated form of progress. Though accidents kill more people than all but the worst wars, we seldom see them through a moral lens.

Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life.  They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible, and life becomes more precious.

13. Terrorism

Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm.

As modern states have successfully claimed a monopoly on force, driving down the rate of killing within their borders, they opened a niche for terrorism.

14. Democracy

Humanity has tried to steer a course between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. History of democratization in three waves: 19^th Century, post-1945, post-cold war.

In 1989 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a famous essay in which he proposed that liberal democracy represented “the end of history,” not because nothing would ever happen again but because the world was coming to a consensus over the humanly best form of governance and no longer had to fight over it.

Could recent history really imply that people are happy to be brutalized by their governments? Patronal authoritarian regime.

Democracy is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain. To be responsive — to pay attention — whether there are elections or not.

15. Equal Rights

Private prejudice is declining with time and declining with youth,

In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Wetzel has proposed that the process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.” As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life.

Any secular (in the sense of historical or long-term) change in human behaviour, then, can take place for three reasons. The trend can be a Period Effect: a change in the times. It can be an Age (or Life Cycle) Effect.  It can be a Cohort (or Generational) Effect.

American cohorts are commonly divided into the GI Generation, born between 1900 and 1924; the Silent Generation, 1925 – 45; the Baby Boomers, 1946 – 64; Generation X, 1965 – 79; and the Millennials, 1980 – 2000.

A lot more liberal: young Muslims in the Middle East, the world’s most conservative culture, have values today that are comparable to those of young people in Western Europe, the world’s most liberal culture, in the early 1960s.

Knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.

16. Knowledge

Homo sapiens, “knowing man,” is the species that uses information to resist the rot of entropy and the burdens of evolution.

The supernova of knowledge continuously redefines what it means to be human. Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge.

Such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history. An analytic mindset.

Human Development Index that is a composite of three of the major ones: life expectancy, GDP per capita, and education (being healthy, wealthy, and wise).

Although the world remains highly unequal, every region has been improving, and the worst-off parts of the world today are better off than the best-off parts not long ago.

The Rest in 2007 had reached the level of the West in 1950.

17. Quality of Life

A long tradition of cultural and religious elites sneering at the supposedly empty lives of the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen sidesteps this trap by proposing that the ultimate goal of development is to enable people to make choices.  Martha Nussbaum has taken the idea a step further and laid out a set of “fundamental capabilities” that all people should be given the opportunity to exercise.

Time is what life is made of, and one metric of progress is a reduction in the time people must devote to keeping themselves alive at the expense of the other, more enjoyable things in life. The entire concept of retirement is unique to the last five decades. Another once-crazy pipe dream has become a reality: paid vacations.

Time spent on laundry alone fell from 11.5 hours a week in 1920 to 1.5 in 2014.  As a feminist-era husband I can truthfully use the first-person plural in celebrating this gain.

Nordhaus estimated how many hours a person would have to work to earn an hour of light to read by at different times in history. A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labour fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that — you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb.

In 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.

There is a widespread belief (and recurring media panic) that families are caught in a time crunch. But the new tugs and distractions have to be weighed against the 24 extra hours that modernity has granted to breadwinners every week and the 42 extra hours it has granted to homemakers. Typical American parents spent more time, not less, with their children.

Overall, electronic technology has been a priceless gift to human closeness. A century ago, if family members moved to a distant city, one might never hear their voices or see their faces again. Grandchildren grew up without their grandparents laying eyes on them. Photography is another gift to the richness of experience.

Affordable transportation does more than reunite people. It also allows them to sample the phantasmagoria of Planet Earth. This is the pastime that we exalt as “travel” when we do it and revile as “tourism” when someone else does it.

Another way in which the scope of our aesthetic experience has been magnified is food. Before refrigeration and motorized transport, most fruits and vegetables would have spoiled before they reached a consumer, so farmers grew non-perishables like turnips, beans, and potatoes. Apples were the only fruit. Today, even small towns and shopping mall food courts offer a cosmopolitan menu.

It’s hard for us to reconstruct the gnawing boredom of the isolated rural households of yesteryear.

There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.

Our ceaseless creativity and our fantastically cumulative cultural memory. We have, at our fingertips, virtually all the works of genius prior to our time, together with those of our own time, whereas the people who lived before our time had neither. Better still, the world’s cultural patrimony is now available not just to the rich and well-located but to anyone who is connected to the vast web of knowledge, which means most of humanity and soon all of it.

18. Happiness

But are we any happier? If we have a shred of cosmic gratitude, we ought to be.

Richard Easterlin. Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer. The Easterling paradox was explained with two theories from psychology.  Hedonic treadmill. Social comparison.

“The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”

Well-being is not a single dimension. We can begin with objective aspects of well-being.

Sen: Development as Freedom.

How can a scientist measure something as subjective as well-being? The best way to find out how happy people are is to ask them. Happiness has two sides, an experiential or emotional side, and an evaluative or cognitive side. The ultimate measure of happiness would consist of a lifetime integral or weighted sum of how happy people are feeling and how long they feel that way.

The final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose.

An implication of the circumscribed role of happiness in human psychology is that the goal of progress cannot be to increase happiness indefinitely, in the hope that more and more people will become more and more euphoric. But there is plenty of unhappiness that can be reduced, and no limit as to how meaningful our lives can become.

Let’s agree that the citizens of developed countries are not as happy as they ought to be, given the fantastic progress in their fortunes and freedom. But are they not happier at all? Have their lives become so empty that they are choosing to end them in record numbers? Are they suffering through an epidemic of loneliness, in defiance of the mind-boggling number of opportunities to connect with one another? Is the younger generation, ominously for our future, crippled by depression and mental illness? As we shall see, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no.

Evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind are an occupational hazard of the social critic. In the 1854 classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” How a recluse living in a cabin on a pond could know this was never made clear, and the mass of men beg to differ.

Today we have much more evidence on wealth and happiness, and it shows there is no Easterlin paradox. My favourite presentation comes from the economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers and may be summarized in a graph.

Though people often do rebound from setbacks and pocket their good fortune, their happiness takes a sustained hit from trials like unemployment or disability, and a sustained boost from gifts like a good marriage or immigrating to a happier country.

The American happiness stagnation doesn’t falsify the global trend.

Among the world’s problems, social isolation would seem to be one of the easier ones to solve: just invite someone you know for a chat. To anyone who believes there is such a thing as human nature, it seems unlikely, and the data show it is false: there is no loneliness epidemic.  Americans today spend as much time with relatives, have the same median number of friends and see them about as often, report as much emotional support, and remain as satisfied with the number and quality of their friendships.  Users of the Internet and social media have more contact with friends (though a bit less face-to-face contact ), and they feel that the electronic ties have enriched their relationships. Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes.

But just because social life looks different today from the way it looked in the 1950s, it does not mean that humans, that quintessentially social species, have become any less social .

So in all three countries for which we have historical data, suicide was more common in the past than it is today. Though Sweden’s suicide rate in 1960 was higher than that of the United States (15.2 versus 10.8 per 100,000), it was never the world’s highest, and it has since fallen to 11.1, which is below the world average (11.6) and the rate for the United States (12.1).

Everyone occasionally suffers from depression, and some people are stricken with major depression, in which the sadness and hopelessness last more than two weeks.  Lowering the bar for what counts as a mental illness.  The expanding empire of psychopathology is a first-world problem, and in many ways is a sign of moral progress. A lot of reducible suffering.

“When clear diagnostic criteria are applied, there is no evidence that the prevalence of common mental disorders is increasing.”

Everything is amazing. Are we really so unhappy? Mostly we are not. Developed countries are actually pretty happy, a majority of all countries have gotten happier, and as long as countries get richer they should get happier still. The dire warnings about plagues of loneliness, suicide, depression, and anxiety don’t survive fact-checking. And though every generation has worried that the next one is in trouble, as younger generations go the Millennials seem to be in pretty good shape.

Still, when it comes to happiness, many people are underachievers. Americans are laggards among their first-world peers, and their happiness has stagnated.

Today young women increasingly say that their life goals include career, family, marriage, money, recreation, friendship, experience, correcting social inequities, being a leader in their community, and making a contribution to society. That’s a lot of things to worry about, and a lot of ways to be frustrated: Woman plans, and God laughs.

As George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

Though some amount of anxiety will inevitably attend the contemplation of our political and existential conundrums, it need not drive us to pathology or despair. One of the challenges of modernity is how to grapple with a growing portfolio of responsibilities without worrying ourselves to death. As with all new challenges, we are groping toward the right mixture of old-fashioned and novel stratagems, including human contact, art, meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness, small pleasures, judicious use of pharmaceuticals, reinvigorated service and social organizations, and advice from wise people on how to lead a balanced life.

The media and commentariat, for their part, could reflect on their own role in keeping the country’s anxiety at a boil.

Anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adult responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them. Perhaps that is emblematic of the challenges of modernity. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “ humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”

19. Existential Threats

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.

Apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides.  False alarms. Humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. If humanity is screwed, why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? “Collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Power-law distribution, one with “fat” or “thick” tails, in which extreme events are highly improbable but not astronomically improbable.  All we know is that very bad things can happen. The Y2K bug?

Technology, then, is not the reason that our species must someday face the Grim Reaper. Indeed, technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for a while.

David Deutsch. In a parochial sense, the weather killed them; but the deeper explanation is lack of knowledge .

There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors. Indeed , we know of one highly advanced form of intelligence that evolved without this defect. They’re called women.

According to this narrative, technology allows people to accomplish more and more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do anything — and given human nature, that means destroy everything. Because of the social embeddedness of technology, the destructive power of a solitary individual has in fact not increased over time.

The key is not to fall for the Availability bias and assume that if we can imagine something terrible, it is bound to happen. The real danger depends on the numbers: the proportion of people who want to cause mayhem or mass murder, the proportion of that genocidal sliver with the competence to concoct an effective cyber or biological weapon, the sliver of that sliver whose schemes will actually succeed, and the sliver of the sliver of the sliver that accomplishes a civilization-ending cataclysm rather than a nuisance, a blow, or even a disaster, after which life goes on.  People are highly resilient in the face of catastrophe.

Advances in biology work the other way as well: they also make it easier for the good guys, and there are many more of them.

Some of the threats to humanity are fanciful or infinitesimal, but one is real: nuclear war.

For some intellectuals the invention of nuclear weapons indicts the enterprise of science — indeed, of modernity itself — because the threat of a holocaust cancels out whatever gifts science may have bestowed upon us.

A positive agenda for removing the threat of nuclear war from the human condition would embrace several ideas.  The first is to stop telling everyone they’re doomed.  Deterring an attack that the Soviets had no interest in launching in the first place. “The odds that the Americans would have gone to war were next to zero.”  Thinking about our predicament in this way allows us to avoid both panic and complacency.

Nuclear weapons technology is not the culmination of the ascent of human mastery over the forces of nature. It is a mess we blundered into because of vicissitudes of history and that we now must figure out how to extricate ourselves from. The Manhattan Project grew out of the fear that the Germans were developing a nuclear weapon; quite possibly, had there been no Nazis, there would be no nukes.  Nor do nuclear weapons deserve credit for ending World War II or cementing the Long Peace. A taboo grew up around the use of nuclear weapons, effectively turning them into bluffs.

Zero is an attractive number because it expands the nuclear taboo from using the weapons to possessing them.  Launch on warning, then, is unnecessary for deterrence and unacceptably dangerous.  If the trend away from interstate war continues, then by the second half of the century we could end up with small, secure arsenals kept only for mutual deterrence.

20. The Future of Progress

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

The Enlightenment is an ongoing process of discovery and betterment.  The process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. So too with moral progress.

Economic stagnation.  Technology watchers are adamant that we are entering an age of abundance.

The Second Machine Age. Whereas the First Machine Age that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution was driven by energy, the second is driven by the other anti-entropic resource, information.

Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large.”

Human welfare has parted company from GDP in a second way. As modern societies become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of human betterment that are not priced in the marketplace.

A Counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.  Nothing captures the tribalistic and backward-looking spirit of populism better than Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.

If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably systematic forces behind it.  The young voters who reject populism today are unlikely to embrace it tomorrow.

By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.

Part III: Reason, Science and Humanism

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. — John Maynard Keynes.  There can be no better proof of the power of ideas than the ironic influence of Marx, the political philosopher who most insisted on the power of vested interests.

21. Reason

Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable. But that hasn’t stopped a slew of irrationalists from favouring the heart over the head.  Subjectivity and relativism regarding logic and reality are incoherent, because “one can’t criticize something with nothing.”

The very fact that one is appealing to reasons demonstrates that reason exists.

What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing.

Real evolutionary psychology treats humans differently: not as two-legged antelopes but as the species that outsmarts antelopes.  Reasoning thus has deep evolutionary roots.

Certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance.

Kahan concludes that we are all actors in a Tragedy of the Belief Commons: what’s rational for every individual to believe (based on esteem) can be irrational for the society as a whole to act upon (based on reality). A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group.

While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth: they are trying to antagonize liberals and display solidarity with their blood brothers.

As Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Each set of students saw more infractions by the other team.

We know today that political partisanship is like sports fandom: testosterone levels rise or fall on election night just as they do on Super Bowl Sunday. Engagement with politics is like sports fandom in another way: people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.

“How Politics Makes Us Stupid.”  Daniel Klein. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.

Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope. The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism.

Political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition.

The acid test of empirical rationality is prediction.  Philip Tetlock.  Forecasting tournaments. “Superforecasters” who performed not just better than chimps and pundits, but better than professional intelligence officers. The very traits that put these experts in the public eye made them the worst at prediction.

Bayes on how to update one’s degree of credence in a proposition in light of new evidence.  They begin with the base rate for the event in question: how often it is expected to occur across the board and over the long run. Then they nudge that estimate up or down depending on the degree to which new evidence portends the event’s occurrence or non – occurrence. They seek this new evidence avidly and avoid both overreacting to it (“This changes everything!”) and underreacting to it, the most accurate superforecasters expressing the most vehement rejection of fate and acceptance of chance.

To my mind, Tetlock’s hardheaded appraisal of expertise by the ultimate benchmark, prediction, should revolutionize our understanding of history, politics, epistemology, and intellectual life. What does it mean that the wonkish tweaking of probabilities is a more reliable guide to the world than the pronouncements of erudite sages and narratives inspired by systems of ideas? Aside from smacking us upside the head with a reminder to be more humble and open-minded, it offers a glimpse into the workings of history on the time scale of years and decades. Events are determined by myriad small forces incrementing or decrementing their likelihoods and magnitudes rather than by sweeping laws and grand dialectics.

One generation is replaced by another that doesn’t cling to the same dogmas (progress, funeral by funeral).

Many psychologists have called on their field to “give debiasing away” as one of its greatest potential contributions to human welfare.

Even the mere requirement to explicate an opinion can shake people out of their overconfidence. Most of us are deluded about our degree of understanding of the world, a bias called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.

In area after area, the world has been getting more rational. There is , of course, a flaming exception: electoral politics and the issues that have clung to it. Here the rules of the game are fiendishly designed to bring out the most irrational in people.

However long it takes, we must not let the existence of cognitive and emotional biases or the spasms of irrationality in the political arena discourage us from the Enlightenment ideal of relentlessly pursuing reason and truth.

22. Science

Humanity can boast about science but can’t crow about historic triumphs in human rights as it would be like listing in the achievements section of a résumé that you overcame a heroin addiction.

In our species that curiosity to understand has been exhilaratingly satisfied. 

Science is shedding new light on the human condition. The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they often tinkered with precursors and approximations).

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty.

A foundational understanding of reality.

The beauty and power of science are not just unappreciated but bitterly resented.

Science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation.  On the contrary, science is indispensable in all areas of human concern.

The highbrow war on science is a flare-up of the controversy raised by C. P. Snow in 1959 when he deplored the disdain for science among British intellectuals in his lecture and book The Two Cultures.  He called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.

A true scholar is receptive to ideas regardless of their origin. E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge.

The first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

It’s certainly true that an empirical proposition is not the same as a logical one, and both must be distinguished from normative or moral claims. But that does not mean that scientists are under a gag order forbidding them to discuss conceptual and moral issues, any more than philosophers must keep their mouths shut about the physical world.

Naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing supernatural”.  The world is intelligible.  Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called reductionism.

We must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct.

It looks more like Bayesian reasoning than conjecture and refutation.

A theory is granted a prior degree of credence, based on its consistency with everything else we know. That level of credence is then incremented or decremented.

Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality.

By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet.

This humanism which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions.

The intellectualized racism that infected the West in the 19th century was the brainchild not of science but of the humanities: history, philology, classics, and mythology.

In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic warrior civilization across Eurasia.  Hitler rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The most decisive repudiation of eugenics invokes classical liberal and libertarian principles: government is not an omnipotent ruler over human existence but an institution with circumscribed powers, and perfecting the genetic makeup of the species is not among them.

The superiority of statistical to intuitive judgment.

The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness.  Morose cultural pessimists.  Our theories of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the universe and our makeup as a species.

23. Humanism

Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.”

Can we put humanistic morality on a deeper foundation — one that would rule out rational sociopaths and justify the human needs we are obligated to respect? I think we can.

Much of what we call wisdom consists in balancing the conflicting desires within ourselves, and much of what we call morality and politics consists in balancing the conflicting desires among people.

The Pacifist’s Dilemma — hangs over humanity like the Sword of Damocles.

A different philosophical objection to humanism is that it’s “just utilitarianism” — that a morality based on maximizing human flourishing is the same as a morality that seeks the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Any Moral Philosophy student who stayed awake through week 2 of the syllabus can also rattle off the problems with deontological ethics.  Many moral philosophers believe that the dichotomy from the Intro course is drawn too sharply.

Neuroscientist Joshua Greene has argued that many deontological convictions are rooted in primitive intuitions of tribalism, purity, revulsion, and social norms, whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.

History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American Constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the Enlightenment but from practical necessity.

The idea that morality consists in the maximization of human flourishing clashes with two perennially seductive alternatives. The first is theistic morality, the second is romantic heroism.

What does an appeal to a supernatural lawgiver add to a humanistic commitment to make people better off? The most obvious add-on is supernatural enforcement.  It’s a tempting add-on because secular law enforcement cannot possibly detect and punish every infraction.

But theistic morality has two fatal flaws. The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists.  The more sophisticated theists have tried to place God into two of these gaps: the fundamental physical constants and the hard problem of consciousness.  A head- scratching conceptual enigma.  In the end I still think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual problem but agree with Dennett that it is not a meaningful scientific problem. It is a conceptual problem, or, more accurately, a problem with our concepts.

Positing an immaterial soul is of no help at all. For one thing, it tries to solve a mystery with an even bigger mystery. For another, it falsely predicts the existence of paranormal phenomena.  The phenomena of consciousness look exactly as you would expect if the laws of nature applied without regard to human welfare. If we want to enhance that welfare, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves.

And that brings us to the second problem with theistic morality. It’s not just that there is almost certainly no God to dictate and enforce moral precepts. It’s that even if there were a God, his divine decrees, as conveyed to us through religion, cannot be the source of morality. The explanation goes back to Plato’s Euthyphro.

Today, of course, enlightened believer’s cherry-pick the humane injunctions while allegorizing, spin-doctoring, or ignoring the vicious ones, and that’s just the point: they read the Bible through the lens of Enlightenment humanism.

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests.  Moral realists. It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. The parochial dogmas of one’s tribe. Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral.

Contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal.

Atheism is not a moral system in the first place.  It’s just the absence of supernatural belief, like an unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu . The moral alternative to theism is humanism.

According to the atheists, the New Atheists are too shrill and militant, and just as annoying as the fundamentalists they criticize.  (In an XKCD webcomic, a character responds, “Well, the important thing is that you’ve found a way to feel superior to both.”)

If the positive contributions of religious institutions come from their role as humanistic associations in civil society, then we would expect those benefits not to be tied to theistic belief, and that is indeed the case.  An atheist who has been pulled into a congregation by an observant spouse is as charitable as the faithful among the flock.  Just as religious institutions deserve praise when they pursue humanistic ends, they should not be shielded from criticism when they obstruct those ends.

Judged by universal standards, many of the religious contributions to life’s great questions turn out to be not deep and timeless but shallow and archaic.

A “spirituality” that sees cosmic meaning in the whims of fortune is not wise but foolish. The first step toward wisdom is the realization that the laws of the universe don’t care about you. The next is the realization that this does not imply that life is meaningless.

The world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all.  As countries get smarter, they turn away from God.  The history and geography of secularization belie the fear that in the absence of religion, societies are doomed to anomie, nihilism, and a “total eclipse of all values.”

No discussion of global progress can ignore the Islamic world, which by a number of objective measures appears to be sitting out the progress enjoyed by the rest. Many of the precepts of Islamic doctrine, taken literally, are floridly antihumanistic. Of course, many of the passages in the Bible are floridly antihumanistic too. One needn’t debate which is worse; what matters is how literally the adherents take them. The problem is that this benign hypocrisy is far less developed in the contemporary Islamic world. Self-identifying as a Muslim, regardless of the particular branch of Islam, seems to be almost synonymous with being strongly religious.  Sayyid Qutb. Muslim humiliation.

If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed , of pretty much every argument in this book , one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche.  Earlier in the chapter I fretted about how humanistic morality could deal with a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath. Nietzsche argued that it’s good to be a callous, egoistic, megalomaniacal sociopath.  Lest you think I am setting up a straw Übermensch, here are some quotations.  These genocidal ravings may sound like they come from a transgressive adolescent who has been listening to too much death metal, or a broad parody of a James Bond villain. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy , they “might be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: ‘I wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Medici.’ ”

The idea that the global order should consist of ethnically homogeneous and mutually antagonistic nation-states is just as ludicrous. The claim that humans have an innate imperative to identify with a nation-state (with the implication that cosmopolitanism goes against human nature) is bad evolutionary psychology. Like the supposed innate imperative to belong to a religion, it confuses a vulnerability with a need. People undoubtedly feel solidarity with their tribe, but whatever intuition of “tribe” we are born with cannot be a nation-state, which is a historical artifact.

The claim that ethnic uniformity leads to cultural excellence is as wrong as an idea can be. There’s a reason we refer to unsophisticated things as provincial, parochial, and insular and to sophisticated ones as urbane and cosmopolitan. No one is brilliant enough to dream up anything of value all by himself. Individuals and cultures of genius are aggregators, appropriators, greatest-hit collectors. Vibrant cultures sit in vast catchment areas in which people and innovations flow from far and wide.

Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness. It didn’t turn out so well.  After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again.”

The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. It goes something like this. We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a force that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness, and at times astounding stupidity. Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our experience and ingenuity. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy — for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed, and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism, and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason: intellectual curiosity, open debate, scepticism of authority and dogma, and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality. As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter, and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, oppressed, or exploited by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing, and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains, and tremendous peril. But ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived. We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing.  This heroic story is not just another myth.  Myths are fictions, but this one is true — true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have.  We believe it because we have reasons to believe it.  As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true, and which ones false — as any of them might be, and any could become.

And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity — to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being.  For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.