By Steven Pinker
A data-driven defence of human progress
Subject
Themes
A student once asked, after a lecture on the physical basis of mental life, "Why should I live?" The answer came from a body of ideas more than two centuries old: the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. These four themes, articulated by Kant, Hume, Smith, and their contemporaries, hold that humanity can apply rational inquiry and mutual sympathy to improve the human condition incrementally, through better laws, institutions, and knowledge.
A student once asked, after a lecture on the physical basis of mental life, "Why should I live?" The answer came from a body of ideas more than two centuries old: the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. These four themes, articulated by Kant, Hume, Smith, and their…
Enlightenment Now arrived in 2018 at a moment of acute political polarisation. The election of Donald Trump in the United States, the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, and the rise of populist movements across Europe had shaken confidence in liberal democratic institutions. Pessimism about…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics provides the deepest explanation for why progress is so hard won and so easily lost. In closed systems, entropy never decreases; disorder always increases, because there are astronomically more ways for matter to be disorderly than orderly. A sandcastle left…
Cognitive biases conspire with journalistic norms to make people chronically pessimistic about the state of the world, even as that world measurably improves. The Availability heuristic, identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, leads people to estimate the frequency of events by how easily…
For most of human history, the story of material well-being was simply: nothing happened. The Gross World Product was essentially flat for two thousand years. A millennium after the year 1 CE, the world was barely richer than it had been in the time of Jesus. It took another five hundred years for…
Individual human beings are not naturally rational. Evolution equipped them with cognitive faculties adapted to survival in small-scale archaic environments, not to navigating the complexities of modern civilisation. People are innumerate, reasoning by "one, two, many" rather than by statistics.…
Humanism holds that the well-being of sentient individuals, not the glory of tribes, nations, or gods, is the ultimate moral good. This seems obvious, yet it faces opposition from multiple directions: religious morality, which values souls and obedience over earthly happiness; nationalism, which…
Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment in 1784 as humanity's emergence from self-incurred immaturity, its motto being "Dare to understand!" Four themes bind the Enlightenment together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. Reason comes first and is nonnegotiable. The moment one argues for any…
Global life expectancy in 2015 reached 71.4 years, yet Hans Rosling's surveys showed fewer than one in four people guessed this correctly. For most of human history, life expectancy hovered around 30, parked there by what economists call the Malthusian Era. Starting in the 19th century, the Great…
Economic inequality became an obsession in the 2010s, with New York Times mentions soaring tenfold. The conventional wisdom holds that the richest one percent captured all recent growth, but this narrative requires scrutiny. International and global inequality have actually been declining: the gap…
Terrorism combines major dread with minor harm. In 2015, 44 Americans died from terrorism, compared with 15,696 from homicide and 136,053 in all accidents. An American was 3,000 times more likely to die in an accident. Most global terrorism deaths occur in civil war zones; excluding six such zones,…
In 1870, Western Europeans worked 66 hours a week; today they work 28 fewer. The concept of retirement is barely fifty years old; in 1880, nearly 80 percent of American men over 65 were still in the workforce. Housework consumed 58 hours a week in 1900 but fell to 15.5 by 2011 as appliances replaced…
Opposing reason is self-refuting: the moment one argues against it, one is deploying reason to make that argument. The philosopher Thomas Nagel observes that "one can't criticise something with nothing." Yet irrationalism thrives in many forms: Romantic emotivism, captured in Herder's avowal "I am…
By Steven Pinker
Subject
Themes
A student once asked, after a lecture on the physical basis of mental life, "Why should I live?" The answer came from a body of ideas more than two centuries old: the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. These four themes, articulated by Kant, Hume, Smith, and their contemporaries, hold that humanity can apply rational inquiry and mutual sympathy to improve the human condition incrementally, through better laws, institutions, and knowledge.