{"id":239371,"date":"2018-02-27T18:35:10","date_gmt":"2018-02-27T23:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=239371"},"modified":"2023-11-08T20:53:57","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:53:57","slug":"harvards-pinker-makes-case-for-human-progress-in-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2018\/02\/harvards-pinker-makes-case-for-human-progress-in-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Wielding data against doom and gloom"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t
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Rose Lincoln\/Harvard file photo<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tArts & Culture\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\tWielding data against doom and gloom\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t
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\n\t\tColleen Walsh\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/address>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t

\n\t\t\tSteven Pinker makes case for human progress in \u2018Enlightenment Now\u2019\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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In his 2011 book, \u201cThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,\u201d Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that despite common assumptions, violence has dropped dramatically from biblical times to the present. His new book,\u00a0\u201cEnlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,\u201d picks up on that theme, exploring how other threats to human well-being have been in similar retreat.<\/p>\n

Q&A<\/h2>\n

Steven Pinker<\/h3>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>In \u201cThe Better Angels of Our Nature,\u201d you explored how the trend toward peace has steadily increased. Why expand the premise of that book for \u201cEnlightenment Now\u201d?<\/p>\n

pinker:<\/strong>\u00a0To my pleasant surprise, war is not the only scourge that has declined over the course of history. Extreme poverty has been decimated: It\u2019s gone from 90 percent of the world\u2019s population to 10 percent. Literacy has increased from about 15 percent to more than 85 percent. Prosperity has increased; longevity has increased from about 30 to about 71 years worldwide, and 80 in the developed world.<\/p>\n

Human flourishing has been enhanced in measure after measure, and I wanted to tell the broader story of progress, and also to explain the reasons. The answer, I suggest, is an embrace of the ideals of the Enlightenment: that through knowledge, reason, and science we can enhance human flourishing \u2014 if <\/em>we set that as our goal. The goal, too, is a gift of the Enlightenment, namely the moral commitment to humanism, in which the ultimate good is the well-being of people.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>In a recent conversation with Bill Gates<\/a> you talked about the notion of tribalism \u2014 of focusing on yourself and those immediately around you to the exclusion of others. How do you counter that impulse to help only yourself and your tribe, and encourage people to embrace a more altruistic ideal?<\/p>\n

pinker:<\/strong>\u00a0At first hearing, the ideal of promoting human well-being might sound unexceptionable, even banal or trite. But it most certainly isn\u2019t! There are distinct alternatives with much greater emotional appeal. These include the idea that the ultimate good is to promote the greatness of one\u2019s tribe or race or faith or nation; to obey the dictates of a divinity and pressure other people to do the same; to achieve feats of heroic greatness; to transcend the teeming masses by doing something that will put you in the history books, such as martial conquest or feats of artistic greatness.<\/p>\n

The idea that we should get as many people as possible to live long, healthy, happy lives is far from obvious. Thankfully, it is an ideal that the world has increasingly embraced. You see this humanism in statements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. It puts the lie to the claim that in the absence of religion there are no shared values. There are. When you get people from different backgrounds together to decide how we should run our affairs, the conversation tends to move toward humanism because it values nothing more \u2014 but nothing less \u2014 than our common humanity.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>You say in the book that journalistic culture is focused on negative headlines, but that seems like something that\u2019s been going on forever. Has social media driven some of this pessimism forward?<\/p>\n

pinker:<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s not just the internet age. In the book I cite a study using the automated technique called sentiment mapping to chart the use of positive words like \u201cimproved,\u201d \u201cbetter,\u201d and \u201cbeneficial\u201d compared to negative words like \u201ccatastrophe\u201d and \u201ccrisis.\u201d It shows that since the 1950s, the press has gotten steadily more morose. So it is not a sudden shift with the onset of social media: It\u2019s been happening for decades, even as the actual indicators of human well-being have improved. Over the span of increasing media negativity, there have been fewer wars, less crime, and less poverty.<\/p>\n

Partly it\u2019s that the press has adopted the ethic that pessimism is moral. It\u2019s serious; it earns you gravitas. Optimism, even if it\u2019s just a readout of the data, is considered frivolous \u2014 \u201cadvertising,\u201d as one editor put it. Of course there is an optimal amount of pessimism; we have to identify suffering and injustice where it exists. But we also need the conviction that we can do something about it. If you think that the world is just getting worse and worse no matter how many efforts people make to make it better, the logical response is: \u201cWhy even bother? Enjoy life while you can, because the world is going to hell no matter what you do.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of fatalism I am pushing against.<\/p>\n\r\n

“If you ask people if we are living in an increasingly dangerous or increasingly safe environment, they will think of the latest terrorist attack and conclude that life has been getting more dangerous \u2014 rather than going to FBI data on violent crime, which in fact has shown a decline over 25 years.”<\/p>\nSteven Pinker<\/cite><\/blockquote>\r\n\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong><\/strong>\u00a0So much of what we do is actually bad for us. Is our brain our enemy?<\/p>\n

pinker:<\/strong> Your brain can\u2019t be your enemy, because your brain is<\/em> you. But the brain has many subsystems. Some of them incline us toward selfish motives, like revenge, greed, dominance, jealousy. But others are more constructive.\u00a0 We have cognitive processes that can reflect on our own predicament. We have positive emotions like sympathy and compassion. And thanks to the tools of culture, the written word, and now the electronic word, we have the means to learn from our mistakes, to figure out what works and what doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>Is there something in human nature that predisposes us to be negative?<\/p>\n

pinker:<\/strong>\u00a0There is a strand of human nature that does that, called the negativity bias. Losses are more keenly felt than gains. Criticism hurts more than praise emboldens. We tend to be mindful of all the things that can go wrong, not so much when we are reflecting on our own lives, but when we are opinionating about the world as a whole. People often say, \u201cMy<\/em> neighborhood is perfectly safe, and my<\/em> schools are good. But the country is unsafe and the other schools are going to hell\u201d \u2014 sometimes called the \u201cI\u2019m OK; they\u2019re not\u201d bias. When people opine they tend to go negative, partly under the influence of gory headlines and violent images.<\/p>\n

Another quirk of human nature is called \u201cthe availability bias\u201d: Our assessment of risk and danger is driven by available episodes from memory, not representative data. If you ask people if we are living in an increasingly dangerous or increasingly safe environment, they will think of the latest terrorist attack and conclude that life has been getting more dangerous \u2014 rather than going to FBI data on violent crime, which in fact has shown a decline over 25 years.<\/p>\n\r\n

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