Love Pinker

I have just finished reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. I recommend it highly. 

It is a long book and not always an easy read, but made worth it by its optimistic tone and quality of reasoning. Pinker is a scientist, and one of his main points is to argue based on data and logic, so we should not be surprised that sometimes the data itself can feel overwhelming, almost too much. Yet the data is so positive that we can read through those chapters quickly and feel the waterfall of data without getting bogged down in detail. The harder chapters are those at the end where he tries to argue about root causes and policy, and here the text can seem lugubrious.

The overall thesis of the book is that the enlightenment values of reason, science and humanity have made humanity vastly richer and happier over the last two hundred years, and continue to do so at an accelerating rate, despite what we read and feel based on daily headlines and setbacks. In several wonderful chapters, he runs of graph after graph of positive outcomes, globally and regionally, for each cohort and gender, for any universally good indicator you could think of, from healthy life expectancy to material wealth and happiness.

One of the takeaways is never to trust claims of a crisis ever again, at least not without great evidence. By putting many so-called crises into a broader context, Pinker shows that most are just small blips along a path of progress, and indicate readily solvable problems. An obesity crisis can hardly survive reference to the malnourishment that blighted the planet only a generation or two ago. A teenage mental health crisis is really just a product of rapid change, better measurement, higher expectations and exaggeration.

Pinker gives credence to a few crises. One is the environmental challenge, which he accepts as real but solvable, were politics not to continually get in the way of logical approaches. Another is nuclear war, where he does not accept the dominant logic that the cold war was “won” with nuclear weapons nor that such weapons have any place in global society. Authoritarianism and nativism are real enough challenges, but most likely they will fizzle out from their own inconsistencies and lack of defensible logic.

Rather than trying to review the whole book, I’ll try to focus on a few other takeaways that gave me pause for thought.

Pinker has no time at all for organised religion. I have often mused over whether religion has been a net benefit for humanity, based on its community values perhaps outweighing its human failings and blockage of progress. Pinker thinks the values would have shone through anyway, perhaps more quickly, because fundamental forces of evolution and sympathy and reason support them. The best that can be said for religion is that sometimes it can be vehicle for good. But that is hardly a defence against the large tally of destruction, superstition and tribalism engendered. I buy Pinker’s argument. I’ll continue to go to church for its peace and community and the way in brings out a better me, but I’ll be even more cynical than before about much of the doctrine and be alive to less flawed ways to secure the gains.

Another takeaway is about the risks of belittling science. Pinker writes with passion about what he calls second culture people, arrogant snobs really, and recounts some history starting with CP Snow with which I had only a passing familiarity. Pinker has obviously suffered from this sort of thing himself, and maybe overplays its significance, but I recognise his point. Some erudite artists see themselves as possessing deeper culture and meaning than poorly dressed scientists, and hence can try to relegate science to a nerdy sideshow. Often this attitude comes from envy, or fear of something they don’t understand, or trying to protect their privileged life.

I am prone to this, perhaps in a different way. I read the Economist and love deep, human movies and niche music, and can look down on people who watch cartoons and visit shopping malls. OK, perhaps these folk are less likely to drive major scientific breakthroughs, but they are not inferior, just different. And, especially since they are in the majority, who am I to say they are wrong?

Another takeaway is about democracy. Pinker feels we tend to expect too much too quickly from democracy. He acknowledges that elections can be random and corrupt, and that many people will vote in a direction that all logic would argue against. But he demonstrates that slow progress happens despite this, and that in any case democracy usually succeeds in its basic purpose of avoiding chaos while offering a bias towards liberty and creativity, and hence progress. Strong, centralised, alternatives might feel tempting, especially when leaders use scientific approaches (such as in China today), and at least strong authority is usually less destructive than anarchy and chaos, but in the end most such regimes become corrupt and they stifle progress long before that point. This links with another bête-noire, Nietzsche. Pinker sees him as something of a root for fascism and tribalism – with one group claiming superiority over others.

Pinker writes extensively about the many biases that humans suffer from, often a sort of by-product or bug with evolution. It is bias, and journalism, that makes us believe that everything is getting worse and that crises are everywhere. One bias that piqued my interest was the danger of weakening logic once an issue has been politicised. We might think we are objective, but we tend to give positions of our own team something of a free pass.

So while Pinker has nothing positive to say about Trump or the current Republican positions, he was also pretty scathing of the left. I tried to take extra note of these criticisms. It started with deriding knee-jerk positions against capitalism and markets, pointing out that these have been a key driving force behind progress, progress that has eradicated diseases and dragged billions out of poverty. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. He also pointed out historical sympathy for Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. More prosaically, he pointed out that the arguments for gun control have less support in data than many of us assume. I resolve to challenge my own positions more strongly in future, against the benchmarks of science or available data.

There are many other takeaways. Pinker often tries to distinguish progress between cycles and cohorts, and generally concludes that successive cohorts tend to be more progress-friendly, and to maintain these positions as they age. I found this perhaps the most optimistic conclusion of all. It suggests that the laggards of my own generation truly might be a dying breed, and that the marvellous young people I’ll spend the next week with, during my annual Princeton choir festival, really will drive another acceleration of progress.

When I thought about that, I allowed myself to ponder what accelerated progress might look like. One example might be in mental health, based on a deeper understanding of the brain. Another might be economics, a discipline that feels as though it ought to be almost solvable by experience and data and if politics can be minimised. I believe that economic things we argue about today, such as measures for economic progress, optimal taxation and monetary policies and behavioural incentives, could all seem solved twenty years from now. And wouldn’t that lead to a still better world?

So, Steven Pinker, thank you for a marvellous, attitude-changing, uplifting read. You have helped me already and will help me more, each time the president makes an utterance or a crisis appears to be looming. Enlightenment now is great medicine: I recommend a dose for everyone.