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[APPLAUSE]
STEVEN PINKER: Thank you.
It's nice to be back at Google.
From time to time, we all
ask some deep and difficult
questions.
Why is the world
filled with trouble?
How can we make it better?
How do we give meaning
and purpose to our lives?
Well, as imponderable as
these questions may seem,
many people have
ready answers to them.
For example,
morality is dictated
by God and holy scriptures.
When everyone obeys those laws
the world will be perfect.
Or problems are the
fault of evil people
who must be shamed,
punished, and defeated.
Or our nation should claim
its rightful greatness
under the control of
a strong leader who
embodies its authentic virtue.
Or in the past, we lived in
a state of order and harmony
until alien forces brought on
decadence and degeneration.
We must restore the
society to its golden age.
Well, what about the rest of us?
Many people are pretty clear
about what they don't believe
but have much more trouble
putting their finger
on what they do believe.
In Enlightenment Now
I suggest that there
is an alternative system of
beliefs and values, which
we can more or less associate
with the Enlightenment--
namely, that we
can use knowledge
to enhance human flourishing.
Many people already embrace
the ideals of the Enlightenment
without being able to
name or describe them.
And as a result, they've faded
into the background as a bland
status quo or establishment.
The other ideologies have
passionate advocates.
And I suggest that
Enlightenment ideals too
need a positive defense
and an explicit commitment.
And that is what I tried
to do in Enlightenment Now.
Enlightenment ideals
center on four themes--
reason, science,
humanism, and progress.
Let me say a few
words about each.
It all begins in reason
with the understanding
that traditional
sources of belief
are generators of delusion.
Faith, revelation, tradition,
authority, charisma, mysticism,
intuition, the hermeneutic
parsing of sacred texts
are all ways of going wrong.
Reason, in contrast,
is non-negotiable.
As soon as you try to provide
reasons why we should trust
anything other than reason, as
soon as you explain why you're
right, why other people
should believe you,
that you're not lying or full of
crap, you've lost the argument.
Because you have
appealed to reason.
Now, as a cognitive
psychologist,
I would be the
first to acknowledge
that human beings
on their own are not
particularly reasonable.
As a species, we are likely
to generalize from anecdotes.
We reason from stereotypes.
We seek evidence that
confirms our beliefs and blow
off evidence that
just disconfirms them.
We're all overconfident about
our knowledge, our wisdom
and our rectitude.
But people are capable of reason
if they adopt certain norms--
free speech, open criticism
and debate, logical analysis,
fact-checking, and
empirical testing,
which leads me to the
second Enlightenment ideal--
science.
Science is based
on the conviction
that the world is
intelligible and that we
can seek to understand
it by formulating
possible explanations and
testing them against reality.
Science has shown itself to
be our most reliable means
of understanding the
world, including ourselves.
An important
Enlightenment theme is
that there can be
science of human nature
and that beliefs about
society are testable
just like any other
beliefs about the world.
Science, moreover, gives us
not just technical know-how
but fundamental insights
about the human condition.
Naturalism-- the universe
has no goal or purpose
related to human welfare
with the implication
that if we want to
improve that welfare,
we have to figure out
how to do it ourselves.
Entropy in a closed
system, one without input
of energy, disorder increases.
Things fall apart.
Stuff happens-- not because
the universe has it in for us,
but because they are
vastly more ways for things
to go wrong than to go right.
Evolution-- humans are products
of a competitive process
which selects for reproductive
success not well-being.
As Immanuel Kant, that great
Enlightenment thinker, put it,
"Out of the crooked
timber of humanity
no truly straight
thing can be built."
The third theme is humanism--
that the ultimate moral purpose
is to reduce the suffering
and enhance the flourishing of
human beings and other sentient
creatures.
Well, enhance human flourishing,
who could be opposed to that,
you might think.
Well, in fact, there
are alternatives
to humanism such as that
the ultimate good is
to enhance the glory of the
tribe, the nation, the race,
the class, or the faith, to
obey the dictates of a divinity
and pressure others do
the same, to achieve feats
of heroic greatness, or to
advance some mystical dialectic
or struggle or pursuit of
a utopian or messianic age.
Humanism is feasible
because people
are endowed with a sense
of sympathy, a concern
with the welfare of others.
Now, by default, our circle
of sympathy is rather small.
We tend to feel the pain
only of our close relatives,
our friends, our allies,
maybe cute, little, furry,
baby animals.
And that's about it.
But our circle of
sympathy can be
expanded through the processes
of cosmopolitanism, the mixing
of people and ideas--
education, journalism, art,
mobility and even reason
as soon as you engage in
discourse with someone else.
I can't insist that my
interests count and yours don't
because I'm me and
you're not and hope
for you to take me seriously.
Reason inherently
presupposes a symmetry
among those engaged in it.
Finally, we get to progress,
that if we apply knowledge
and sympathy to reduce suffering
and enhance flourishing,
we can gradually succeed.
Now, you might ask
if human nature
doesn't change, how could
progress even be possible?
And an answer from
the Enlightenment
is that it's possible through
benign institutions which
allow us to deploy
energy and knowledge,
to push back against entropy,
to magnify the better
angels of our nature--
as Abraham Lincoln called them,
such as reason and sympathy--
while marginalizing
our inner demons--
our biases, illusions,
our tribalism,
our thirst for
dominance and vengeance.
What do I mean by
Enlightenment institutions?
Well, some of the brain
children of the Enlightenment
that we continue to enjoy today
include democracy, declarations
of rights, markets,
organizations
for global cooperation, and
institutions of truth seeking
such as academies, scientific
societies, and a free press.
So 250 years later, how did
that Enlightenment thing
work out you might ask?
Well, I found that if you
ask most intellectuals
the answer is not very well.
I have found that intellectuals
tend to hate progress.
And intellectuals who call
themselves progressive really
hate progress.
If you think we can solve
problems, I have been told,
that means that you
have a blind faith
at a quasi-religious belief
in the outmoded superstition
of the false promise of the
myth of the onward march
of inevitable progress.
You are a cheerleader for
vulgar American can-doism with
the rah-rah spirit of boardroom
ideology, Silicon Valley--
that would be you--
and the chamber of commerce.
You are a practitioner of Whig
history, a naive optimist,
a Pollyanna, and of
course, a Pangloss alluding
to the Voltaire
character who declared
all is for the best in the
best of all possible worlds.
Well, as it turns out,
Professor Pangloss
was what we would
today call a pessimist.
A true optimist
would believe there
can be much better
worlds than the one
that we find ourselves in today.
But this is irrelevant
to the question
whether progress has taken
place, which is not a attitude.
It's not a optimistic
temperament.
It's not wearing
rose-colored glasses.
It's not seeing the glass
as half full or half empty.
It is an empirical hypothesis.
Human well-being
can be measured--
life, health, sustenance,
prosperity, peace, freedom,
safety, knowledge,
leisure, happiness.
If they've increased
over time, I
submit that would be progress.
Well, let's go to the data
beginning with the most
precious thing of all, life.
For most of human history
life expectancy at birth
hovered around 30 years of age.
But then with advances in
public health and medicine,
such as vaccination, sanitation,
antibiotics, blood transfusion,
and so on, life
expectancy at birth
has increased to
more than 71 years.
That is the global average
over all of humanity.
Virtually no one guesses
that it is that high.
In developed countries like
those in Europe and America,
it is over 80 on average.
And other parts of the world
are catching up, including
Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
For most of human history, the
biggest contributor to low life
expectancy was child mortality.
Indeed, 250 years ago,
no more than one third
of Swedish newborns lived
to see their fifth birthday.
Sweden brought its
rate of child mortality
down by a factor of 100.
And other parts of the
world followed suit, such
as in the Americas, Canada, in
East Asia, South Korea, Latin
America, Chile, and
in sub-Saharan Africa.
Ethiopia just brought its
rate of child mortality
down from 25% to 6%--
still too high.
But the progress is continuing.
Mothers, too, were vulnerable
every time they gave birth.
About 1% of Swedish mothers died
in childbirth 250 years ago.
Sweden brought that
down by a factor of 250
as have other countries, such
as the United States, Malaysia,
and Ethiopia.
Health-- the biggest
traditional killer of humans
was infectious diseases,
no longer a major killer
in rich countries, but
still a major source
of morbidity and mortality
in the developing world,
especially among children.
But the five most lethal
infectious diseases
for children have all been in
decline over the last 15 years
alone--
pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria,
measles, and HIV/AIDS.
Sustenance-- it takes
about 2,500 calories
to feed a young adult male.
And for most of human
history, countries
were not able to
grow enough calories
to feed their population.
Then with the British
agricultural revolution
in the 18th century with
advances in agronomy, like crop
rotation--
later the development
of synthetic fertilizer,
the cultivation of vigorous
hybrids in the Green
Revolution,
transportation networks
that could bring food
from farm to table--
first England then
other developed
countries like the
United States and France
grew enough calories to feed
themselves-- more recently,
China and India have done so.
And there you have the graph
of the world as a whole.
Now, this would be a
dubious form of progress
if all of those calories were
just making fat people fatter.
But, in fact, they
have been reducing
the rate of
undernourishment, which
just 50 years ago afflicted
about one third of people
in the developing world.
That has fallen to 15%, first
in Latin America then in Asia.
And it's beginning to happen
in sub-Saharan Africa.
And as a result of all these
calories, deaths from famine--
one of the four horsemen
of the apocalypse--
which could strike
any part of the world
and bring devastation
in its wake--
has become rare.
Famines today occur not
because of an inability
to grow enough food,
but the inability
to get it to people in
remote and war-torn regions.
Prosperity-- poverty,
as economists say,
needs no explanation.
What needs an
explanation is wealth.
For most of human history,
pretty much everyone was poor.
This graph shows the
gross world product
from the year one to the year
2015 from recent to date.
And as you can see,
for about 1,600 years,
economic growth was less than
one pixel high in the graph.
But then with the
Industrial Revolution
and the spread of education,
advances in technology,
financial institutions
like banks and markets
and contracts then
expansion of global trade,
gross world product has
increased by almost 200-fold
since the early 18th century.
The great escape as the Nobel
Prize winning economist Angus
Deaton calls it from
universal poverty
was highly uneven over
the regions of the world,
with countries like the UK
and the US that first escaped
from background squalor.
But other countries
now are catching up
such as South Korea and Chile.
And China and India are showing
exponential growth as well.
Here's the graph of
the world as a whole.
Again, this economic
growth would
be a dubious form of progress
if it was all going just
to the proverbial 1%.
But, in fact, it has taken
a massive toll on extreme
poverty, defined nowadays
as $1.90 per person per day,
in 2015, US dollars.
By that criterion, 200
years ago, 90% of the world
lived in extreme poverty.
That has fallen to
less than 9% today.
In fact, there's been a 75%
reduction in extreme poverty
just in the last three decades.
As a result,
international inequality--
which necessarily increased
as a few countries underwent
the Industrial Revolution
leaving the rest behind--
has turned a corner and is
now starting to decline.
Because poor countries
are getting richer faster
than rich countries
are getting richer.
Now of course, within
developed countries,
inequality is increasing,
not decreasing.
But that doesn't mean
that rich countries
have become increasingly callous
to the plight of their needy--
quite the contrary.
Whereas 150 years ago or
so the European countries
allocated no more than 1.5% of
their GDP to social transfers,
to children, to the sick,
to the elderly, to the poor,
in the 20th century every
developed country went
on a massive expansion of
social spending so that today
the median OECD
country redistributes
22% of its economic activity
in social transfers.
As a result, poverty when
it is measured after these
transfers-- after
taxes and transfers--
has come down from about one
third of Americans in 1960
to 7% today.
And where poverty also takes
into account consumption--
the food, clothing, and shelter
that people can afford to buy--
it has fallen about 30% in
1960 to less than 3% today.
Peace-- for most of human
history, the natural state
of relations between empires
and countries was war.
And peace was merely a brief
interlude between wars.
You can see this in a graph
that plots for 25 year
periods, the percentage of
time that the great powers
of the day--
the 800-pound gorillas, the
major states and empires--
were at each other's
throats in major wars.
What it shows is that a
few hundred years ago,
the great powers
were pretty much
always at war with each other.
Today, they are never
at war with each other.
The last great power war pitted
the United States against China
in Korea more than 65 years ago.
Now, if we zoom in
on the 20th century,
we see that even as wars were
becoming shorter and less
frequent, they
were also becoming
more destructive in a
dubious form of progress.
Countries were getting
better at killing more people
in a short amount of time
culminating in the massively
destructive world wars.
But contrary to predictions
that I grew up with,
that it was only
a matter of time
before we would see a third
World War pitting the United
States against the
Soviet Union and fought
with nuclear
weapons, we now know
that the Soviet Union went out
of existence mostly peacefully.
The Cold War ended.
And World War III
never happened.
In fact, if we look at the
postwar period since 1946
and look at the number of people
killed in battle from all wars
combined-- not just
the great power wars,
but smaller inter-state wars,
civil wars colonial wars--
we see that from a rate in
the late 1940s of about 20
per 100,000 per year, the
rate has fallen dramatically--
though highly unevenly-- to less
than one per 100,000 per year.
You can see peaks in the
graph for the Korean War
and the Chinese Civil War in
the late '40s, early '50s,
the Vietnam War in the
'60s, the Iran-Iraq
war and the Afghan Civil
War in the '80s, and then
a small bump for the Syrian
Civil War in this decade.
But overall, the trend,
though a bit roller coastery,
is unmistakably downward.
For this we might point
to a number of factors--
the growth of democracy--
because democracies are
statistically less likely
to fight each other,
the growth of trade--
because trading partners are
less likely to go to war.
You don't kill your customers
you don't kill your debtors.
And if it's cheaper to buy
stuff then to steal it,
you have less of an
incentive to plunder.
Also to international
institutions, particularly
the United Nations, which
has enforced a outlawing war.
War is literally
illegal, which was not
true for most of human history.
Used to be that might
made right, to the victor
went the spoils.
But since 1945, there have
been very few annexations,
conquests, or states that have
gone out of existence through
conquests-- not zero, but
a fraction of what went
on before--
and also probably a
general greater valuation
that countries
place on human life
compared to national
preeminince and glory.
Politicians are a
little more squeamish
about sending their young
men to become cannon fodder.
Freedom and rights-- we
have all watched with alarm
as democracy has been eroded
in countries like Turkey,
in Russia, Hungary
and Venezuela.
Nonetheless, if you
scale every country
in terms of how autocratic
or democratic it is
and add them all up, you
see that the world has never
been more democratic than it
has been in the last decade.
And even the erosion of
democracy that we read about
in the headlines
has taken us back
to where we were in about 2010.
200 years ago, the number
of democracies in the world
could be counted on the
fingers of one hand.
Now a majority of
countries are more
democratic than autocratic.
And a majority of
people live in countries
that are more democratic
and autocratic.
And if this seems
just incredible,
keep in mind that when I was
a student, an undergraduate,
the world had 31
democracies, half of Europe
was behind the Iron
Curtain and ruled
by totalitarian,
communist dictatorships.
Spain and Portugal
were literally
fascist dictatorships.
Greece was under the control
of a military junta--
the colonels.
Most of Latin America
was under the control
of military or right
wing autocracies.
In East Asia, South Korea,
Taiwan, Philippines,
Indonesia-- all of
them dictatorships.
All of them democratic today.
There have also been
curtailments in the power
of states to brutalize
their citizens.
It used to be that pretty much
every country practiced capital
punishment.
But the overall trend is for
poor countries to abolish it--
most recently, Malaysia
just a month or so ago.
On average, over the
past couple of decades,
three countries a year have
abolished capital punishment.
And if you
extrapolate the curve,
always dangerous, capital
punishment though,
would disappear from
the face of the Earth
by the end of the
coming decade--
joining other institutions
that have more or less
been permanently abolished
such as human sacrifice
and chattel slavery.
Also, country after country has
decriminalized homosexuality--
again, it's by no means all.
But just in the
last year, countries
as diverse as Lebanon, India,
and Trinidad and Tobago
have decriminalized
homosexuality.
Child labor-- it used
to be standard practice
for people to send their kids
to work in farms and factories.
As any reader of Dickens knows,
about 30% of English children
150 years ago were sent to work.
England and the United States
and other European countries
have drastically reduced,
almost eliminated child labor
thanks to the increased premium
that we place on education.
So children are more
valuable in school
than working in the
fields or factories--
and a general
increase in valuation
of the lives of children.
Here, we have our graphs
for the world as a whole.
In 2015, the Nobel
Peace Prize was
shared by Kailash
Satyarthi for his efforts
to reduce child labor.
And as these graphs
show, the efforts
are bringing real results.
Violent crime-- in any
part of the world that
exists in a state of
anarchy, it is easy
for there to be predation
by individuals or gangs
often followed by cycles of
revenge and vendetta and blood
feud.
In medieval Europe, for
example, the homicide rate
was on average about 35
per 100,000 per year.
But as kingdoms started
to exert their control
over the medieval patchwork
of fiefs and baronies,
every European country brought
its homicide rate down.
Now Western Europe has a rate of
about one per 100,000 per year.
And that's a process that
tends to be replicated
in any part of the world
where the rule of law
is exerted over
frontier regions,
and the code of vendetta is
replaced by police and courts
system and rule of law.
It happened in
colonial New England.
It happened in the
American Wild West
where the old cliche in
the cowboy movies was,
the nearest sheriff
is 90 miles away,
so a man has to be
able to defend himself
with a six shooter.
And even in the countries that
are notoriously still violent
today such as Mexico,
the homicide rate
was about five times
higher a century ago.
If we zoom in on the
last 50 years or so,
we see that the United
States after undergoing
a boom in violent crime from
the '60s through the early '90s,
has brought its homicide
rate down by half.
And the world as a whole has
reduced its homicide rate
by almost 30% in the
last couple of decades.
It's not just homicide
that has been in decline,
but violence against women,
such as domestic violence
against wives and
girlfriends, and rates
of rape, sexual assault, down
by about 75% since the FBI
first kept records
in the early 1970s.
And victimization of children--
despite the scary headlines
that we read about
bullying and cyberbullying,
the rate of victimization
of children at school
has come down as have
rates of physical abuse
and sexual abuse.
Indeed, we've been getting
safer in just about every way.
Because of technological
advances in the safety of cars
and in the design
of safer highways,
your chance of getting killed in
a car crash has fallen by 92%.
We are 88% less likely to be
mowed down on the sidewalk, 96%
less likely to die
in a plane crash,
59% less likely to die in a
fall, 92% less likely to drown,
90% less likely to
die in a fire, 92%
less likely to be asphyxiated.
There is, however, one
exception to the trend
of increasing safety.
This is the category that
safety statisticians call death
by poison, solid or liquid.
It includes drug overdoses.
And here you're seeing the
American opioid epidemic--
a severe and tragic
counter example
to the overall trend
of increasing safety.
At the same time, we're 95%
less likely to die on the job.
We're even less likely to die
in a so-called act of God--
a earthquake, wildfire, volcano
explosion, meteor strike,
drought, flood--
presumably not because
God is any less angry
with us, but because
of improvements
in the resilience of
our infrastructure,
in the ability to forecast
natural disasters,
and in emergency
response systems.
And what about the
quintessential act of God--
the literal bolt from the blue?
Yes, we are 96% less likely to
die from a bolt of lightning.
Knowledge-- natural
state of humanity
is to be illiterate
and ignorant.
500 years ago, literacy
was a perquisite
of a fortunate wealthy few.
About 15% of Europeans
could read it and write
at the dawn of the Renaissance.
Most European countries
achieve universal literacy
by the early 20th century.
And the rest of the world
is now rapidly catching up.
In fact, the most recent figures
show that 80% of the world
can read and write today--
90% of people under
the age of 25--
not just men, but women.
Whereas 250 years ago
only six British women
could read and write for
every 10 men who could.
But Britain achieved
gender parity in literacy
by the turn of the 20th century.
And the world is very, very
close to gender parity.
Even the most backward
countries when
it comes to educating girls--
Pakistan and Afghanistan--
have shown steep increases.
And this, of course,
is a kind of progress
that we associate with the other
winner of the 2015 Nobel Peace
Prize, Malala Yousafzai.
And in, perhaps, the most
incredible, astonishing,
difficult to credit
example of progress
that I have come across, we
have been getting smarter.
This is true.
In a well-documented phenomenon
known as the Flynn Effect,
IQ scores increased by
about three points a decade
throughout the 20th century--
a result of presumably
advances in public health,
the spread of education,
and possibly the trickle
down of technical and abstract
concepts from science and tech
and academia to everyday life.
Does this improve the
quality of our lives.
I've gone over a
number of things
that economists like to measure.
But do they actually
improve life as it is lived?
And in many ways, they have.
For example, 150 years
ago the average work week
in the United States
and Europe was 62 hours.
That has fallen to less than 40.
And on average,
Americans and Europeans
get at least three weeks
of paid vacation, which
would have been pretty
much inconceivable
in the 19th century.
And thanks to the universal
penetration of running water
and electricity and the
widespread adoption of labor
saving devices--
washing machines, vacuum
cleaners, refrigerators,
dishwashers, stoves,
and microwaves--
the amount of our lives
that we waste on housework,
which people indicate is their
least favorite way of spending
their time, has gone
from more than 60 hours
a week to less than
15 hours a week.
Because of the
shortening work week
and the amount of our lives that
we reclaimed from housework,
the amount of leisure
time that Americans report
has increased over the last
50 years, both men and women.
Now, you can't help but notice
that the leisure time for women
have plateaued, and even sank
a bit, starting in the 1990s.
And the reason is that
women today spend more time
with their children.
A single, working woman
today spends more time
with her children than a
married stay-at-home mom
did in the 1950s.
So forget Leave it to Beaver,
forget Father Knows Best, now
is the era in which families
spend time with each other.
We also fork over
less of our paychecks
to necessities from 60% a
century ago to less than one
third today.
Ultimate question-- does
it make us any happier?
What good would
all these advances
do if people did
not experience it
as greater happiness
in their lives?
The answer is on average,
it does make us happier.
There is a pretty
strong relationship
between life satisfaction
and GDP per capita.
This is plotted on
log coordinates.
So the relationship in reality
is highly curved linear--
that is $1 means a lot
more to a poor person
than to a rich person.
But it holds across scale
both across countries--
each country in this
graph indicated by a dot--
so people in richer countries
are more satisfied with
their lives--
and within countries-- as
indicated by the regression
line, the arrow
impaling each dot--
within countries people
with more resources
express more satisfaction
with their lives.
This leads to the expectation
that as the world gets richer,
its people ought to get happier.
Now, we don't have
data on happiness
that go back more than a few
decades from most countries.
But what data we have
show that more than 70%
of countries for which we
do have longitudinal data,
happiness has increased.
Interestingly, the United
States is not one of them.
Our happiness level
has declined a bit.
But the United States started
out as a pretty happy country.
And contrary to a
story that I am often
confronted with that
suicide rates are spiking,
the reality is that suicide
rates are plummeting.
Suicide rates globally
are down by almost 40%
over the last 30 years or so
in a majority of countries.
Again, the United States
is not one of them.
We hit a low point in 1999.
And the rates have
been creeping up.
But the United States
is, by no means,
an outlier in suicide rates.
And the increase
that you read about
is measured from one of
the low points in 1999.
Suicide rates in
the United States
were far higher during
the Great Depression
and during the early
decades of the 20th century.
Has this progress come at the
expense of the environment?
And the answer is,
obviously, it has.
As we have extracted energy
to improve our own well-being,
it has come at a cost
in pollution and species
extinction.
However, there is a
well-documented relationship
between economic growth after
a certain point and concern
with the environment.
As countries get rich
enough, their thoughts
turn to the environment.
They can afford cleaner
energy, more pollution control.
And their values tend to shift
from survival and comfort
and economic necessities to
protecting the environment.
The United States, for example,
since the passage of the Clean
Air and Clean Water Act and the
formation of the Environmental
Protection Agency around 1970--
even though population
has increased by 40%,
GDP has increased by a
factor of two and 1/2,
Americans drive twice as many
miles as they did in 1970.
But the rate of emissions
of the five major pollutants
has declined by 60%.
So contrary to widespread
beliefs both from the hard,
libertarian right and be
hard, anti-growth green--
according to which you
can have economic growth
or improvements in
the environment,
you can't have both--
in fact, you can have both.
And there are other
aspects in which
the environment is rebounding.
For example, in the
temperate world,
deforestation has
been in decline
and now is going into reverse
as farms have been abandoned
and are being
reclaimed by forest.
And new forests aren't having
to be cut down to for farmland.
In tropical regions,
this is not true.
Deforestation continues.
But still it is well past
its peak and with the right
efforts could
continue to come down.
The amount of the
earth's surface
that is protected against
economic exploitation
has doubled from 7% to 15% as
has the amount of the ocean
cover or ocean surface that
is protected from 6% to 12%.
And the biggest driver of
environmental degradation--
namely, human beings.
Contrary to fears that
human population would just
grow exponentially forever,
human population growth
peaked in 1962.
And projections that
take into account
the fact that when countries
get richer, better educated,
and women are empowered,
then women start
to have fewer babies, those
projections would predict
that global population will peak
at about nine billion in 2070
and start to decline as we have
seen in almost every developed
country.
Population growth rates are
falling in poor countries
as well.
Well, I hope I can convince
you that progress is not
a matter of looking
on the bright side
or seeing the
glass as half full.
It is a demonstrable,
empirical fact.
How is the fact of human
progress reflected in the news?
Well, in an analysis using
a simple form of sentiment
mapping, that is
just tallying up
the proportion of positive
and negative emotion words,
the data scientist
Kalev Leetaru has
shown that over the
past seven decades
a period in which the world has
become richer and more peaceful
and safer and better
educated and happier,
the New York Times has
gotten increasingly morose.
And a sample of the
world's broadcast
has gotten glummer
and glummer as well.
So why do people deny progress?
Part of the answer comes
from an interaction
between the nature of cognition
and the nature of journalism.
According to the hypothesis
of an availability heuristic
from Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky,
people tend to
estimate risk according
to how easily they can
recall examples from memory--
that is we use our
brains own search
engine as a shortcut to
estimating risk probability
and danger.
For example, people judge that
tornadoes kill more people
every year than asthma
attacks, presumably
because tornadoes make for
really gripping television
and asthma attacks not so much.
In reality, more than
40 times as many people
die from asthma attacks.
In fact, consider
the nature of news.
News is about stuff that happens
not stuff that doesn't happen.
You never see a
journalist saying,
I'm reporting from
a country that
is at peace or a
city that has not
been attacked by terrorists.
If those regions expand, we
have no way of knowing about it.
Also, news is about sudden
events not gradual changes.
As the economist Max
Rosen pointed out,
the papers could have run
the headline, 137,000 people
escaped from extreme
poverty yesterday every day
for the last 30 years.
But they never ran that
headline with the result
that a billion and
a quarter people
escaped from extreme poverty
and no one knows about it.
On top of these built-in biases
that are just part of the very
nature of journalism, there
is also an attitude among many
journalists that their mission
consists of shaking people out
of their complacency
with negative news,
that positive news is corporate
PR or government propaganda
or feel-good stories--
puppy befriends orangutan
or cop buys groceries
for a single, welfare mother.
Satirized in a headline from the
satirical newspaper the Onion,
CNN holds morning
meeting to decide
what viewers should panic
about for the rest of the day.
As a result, you can see why
the world is coming to an end
and always has been.
Also, there is a negativity bias
that is built into all of us.
Psychologists have
shown that bad
is stronger than good
psychologically speaking.
We think about and feel bad
events more than good ones.
We dread losses more
than we look forward
to gains, especially when
it comes to recent events
where even if we remember bad
events from the distant past,
we tend to forget how bad
they were at the time.
Captured in a
saying from Franklin
Pierce Adams, "Nothing is more
responsible for the good old
days than a bad memory."
Also, there is
market competition
among would be profits.
Pessimism sounds serious.
Optimism sounds frivolous.
As the musical satirist
Tom Lehrer once put it,
"Always predict the worst and
you'll be hailed as a prophet."
Let me end now with three
questions about progress
and enlightenment that I suspect
have occurred to many of you.
First, isn't it good
to be pessimistic,
to safeguard against
complacency, to break them up,
to speak truth to power?
Well, not exactly.
It's good to be accurate.
Of course, we must be aware
of danger and risk and threat
and suffering and injustice
wherever they occur.
But it's also crucial
to be aware of how
they can be reduced.
Because there are dangers
of fact-free pessimism.
One of them is fatalism.
If you think that all
of people's attempts
to make the world a
better place have failed
and that things get worse and
worse no matter what we do,
the natural response is, well,
why throw good money after bad?
Why waste time and money
on hopeless causes?
And if you think
that we're doomed,
that if climate
change doesn't do us
and then runaway artificial
intelligence will,
then the natural
response is, well,
let's let our grandchildren
worry about it.
There's nothing
we can do about it
but eat, drink, and be
merry, for tomorrow we die.
There's another danger
to thoughtless pessimism.
And that is radicalism.
Because if you think that all
of our institutions are failing
and beyond all hope of reform,
you'll be open to calls
to smash the machine,
drain the swamp,
burn the empire to the ground
or to empower an aspiring leader
who promises only I can fix it.
Second question, is
progress inevitable?
And, again, the answer
is, of course not.
Progress does not
mean that everything
becomes better for everyone
everywhere all the time.
That would not be progress.
That would be a miracle.
And progress is not a miracle.
Progress consists of using
knowledge to solve problems.
Problems are inevitable.
And solutions create
new problems, which
must be solved in their turn.
Also, even against a backdrop
of steady improvement,
the world can be blindsided
by nasty shocks and surprises.
And I've mentioned or
shown a number of them--
the world wars, the 1960s
crime boom, AIDS in Africa,
and the American
opioid epidemic.
And the world has
severe challenges now
that it has not yet
solved-- foremost
among them are climate change
and the threat of nuclear war.
I suggest in my analysis
of these challenges
that we treat them as unsolved
but potentially solvable
problems, that we should
deal with climate change
by decarbonizing the world's
economy as rapidly as
possible by a combination
of policy measures,
primarily carbon pricing,
and technological measures--
that is the development of
low, zero, and eventually
negative carbon technologies,
including both present
and new generation nuclear--
and that we
denuclearize the arena
of international relations
by first enhancing
strategic stability to minimize
the chance of an accidental
or unwanted nuclear war and
by programs of arms limitation
and reduction-- culminating
eventually in global
zero the total abolition
of nuclear weapons.
Now, this used to
be a concern of
eccentric, bearded professors
and peaceniks and folk singers.
But it has been embraced by some
of the most hawkish of the Cold
War hawks such as Henry
Kissinger, Sam Nunn, George
Shultz, and William Perry.
And just a couple of
hints that these are not
utopian, romantic,
inconceivable aspirations--
the world's economy
has been undergoing
a natural process
of decarbonization,
at least carbon intensity--
that is how much CO2 has
to be admitted to produce
a dollar of economic value.
As industrialized countries
first industrialized
and burned massive
amounts of coal,
their CO2 emissions shot up.
But then as they switched to
lower carbon energy sources
to petroleum, to methane, to
hydro, nuclear, to renewables,
the carbon intensity declined.
China underwent a more lurching
version of this process
with spikes that actually shoot
up off the top of this graph,
because of Mao's
great leap forward,
in which peasants had to
setup backyard smelters which
produced massive amounts of
CO2 with zero economic output
until China came to its senses.
And India has turned
a corner as well
as has the world as a whole.
Now, this does not
mean that the world
is on track to dealing
with greenhouse gas
emissions for two reasons.
One of them is that this is
a measure of how much CO2 you
have to admit to produce a
given amount of economic value,
the amount of economic output
is shooting up-- a good thing.
Plus it's not enough for
this emissions to be reduced.
They have to go to zero
and eventually negative.
But what it does show is
that modern economies are not
inherently tied
to flaming carbon.
Few people realize that the size
of the world's nuclear arsenal
has been reduced by
about 85% since the peak
during the Cold War.
Indeed, almost 10% of American
nuclear electricity generation
comes from reprocessed
fuel from nuclear weapons,
the ultimate beating of
swords into plowshares.
This development
is, needless to say,
highly threatened right now.
But what the graph shows
is that it is possible.
Final question-- does the
Enlightenment just go against
human nature--
a poignant question to me
as a prominent defender
of the very idea
of human nature.
And people have asked, is
humanism just too tepid or arid
or flat to get people's
hearts pumping?
Is the conquest of disease,
famine, poverty, violence,
and ignorance boring?
Do people need to
believe in miracles--
a father in the
sky, a strong chief
to protect the tribe,
myths of heroic ancestors?
Well, that's not so clear.
We have found that secular,
liberal democracies
are the happiest and
healthiest places on Earth.
And they are the top
destination of the people
who vote with their feet.
And I would argue that
applying knowledge and sympathy
to enhance human flourishing
is heroic, glorious,
maybe even spiritual.
Unlike hero myths,
this one is not a myth.
Myths are fiction.
This one is true, true to
the best of our knowledge
which is the only
truth we can have.
And it is a hero story that
belongs not just to one tribe,
but to all of
humanity, to anyone
with the power of reason and the
drive to persist in its being.
For it requires nothing
more than the convictions
that life is better than death.
health is better than sickness.
Abundance is better than want.
Peace is better than war.
Freedom is better than coercion.
Happiness is better
than suffering,
and knowledge is better than
superstition and ignorance.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: One of
the questions is
it seems like there is
a strong desire on both
the left and the
right to regress back
to pre-enlightenment and
more authoritarian values.
Can you articulate what are
the Enlightenment values
and why they're worth defending?
STEVEN PINKER: What are the
Enlightenment values and-- oh.
Oh, that's easy.
Enlightenment as I
would just tell them
would be reason,
science, and humanism.
And they're worth
defending because they
have led to progress that
is measurable empirically
demonstrable progress.
Thanks.
AUDIENCE: The
progress that we've
made across the
past few centuries
is undeniable from the
empirical evidence.
And the value of the
Enlightenment principles
is also, I believe,
beyond question.
But not all progress has been
made through those principles.
For instance, chattel
slavery in the United States
was not ended by free speech.
It was ended by war.
The Civil Rights Act
passed in the wake
of civil disobedience
of varying levels
of non-violent and
violent protest.
And, of course,
we're in pride month
so it's important to remember
the first pride was a riot.
What do you--
STEVEN PINKER: What was a riot?
AUDIENCE: First
pride celebration
was the Stonewall riots.
STEVEN PINKER: Oh, the
Stonewall, yes, for gay pride.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
So what role do you believe the
intentional focused application
of entropy plays
in a world which
values the
Enlightenment principles
and is dedicated
towards progress?
STEVEN PINKER: Yes, well
some kinds of progress did
require struggle,
conflict, violence.
Although, in many cases,
the mobilization of people
to struggle for some
cause depended on ideas,
on new ideas that often were
articulated by philosophers,
by thinkers that were circulated
in coffeehouses and salons
and libraries and
schools and universities.
Martin Luther King, for
example, was in his pilgrimage
to nonviolence that noted
that among his influences
were the Enlightenment
philosophers the more
liberal branches of
Christianity, which
in turn, had been influenced
by Enlightenment thinkers,
and of course, by Gandhi and
the ideas of nonviolence.
So ideas motivated
that kind of struggle.
Also, although in the United
States, there was a Civil War,
lots of other countries got
rid of slavery without it.
And the Civil War--
one of the-- in fact, the worst,
most violent war in American
history, 650,000 deaths--
it was perhaps not
the only or hard
to say whether it was the
only way slavery could
have been eliminated.
But I come from Canada.
Canada and the British
empire eliminated slavery
without a civil war.
So we don't know--
it may be cases where struggle
and violence are the only way
to achieve some social goal
but in many cases, not.
The Stonewall riot did happen.
It probably was not
the main instigator
of the advances in gay rights,
I suspect, which came later.
And, of course, other countries
did not necessarily need riots.
And as far as violence goes,
this is pretty small stuff.
I don't think anyone was
killed in the Stonewall riots.
There were some injuries.
And other many improvements
in human well-being
such as the Green Revolution,
the development of antibiotics
and vaccinations had
no violence at all.
And as Gandhi and King
showed and as my colleague
Erica Chenoweth has recently
documented quantitatively,
even in cases where there
is entrenched opposition so
that some kind of
conflict is inevitable,
the nonviolent resistance
movements, on average,
are more successful
than the violent ones.
That is surely in
achieving their goals,
they're twice to three
times as successful.
And often, movements
that achieve their goals
through violence carry a
legacy of violence thereafter
that at least allows one
to question the price.
The United States is
probably the most violent
Western democracy.
And it came into existence
through violence.
Countries that
become independent
in violent revolutions are less
likely to become democratic.
So it's a complicated
relationship.
And in general,
I tend to believe
that less violence and the less
struggle, the more successful
the revolution.
AUDIENCE: In most
parts of the world,
life expectancy has increased.
But the US life
expectancy is starting
to decline in certain areas.
Any thoughts on that?
STEVEN PINKER: Yeah.
So, again, progress doesn't
mean that everything gets better
everywhere for all the time.
And there is a slight decline in
American life expectancy almost
entirely explicable by the--
what Angus Deaton and
his collaborator Case
call deaths of despair.
These tend to be baby boomer,
mostly male, mostly white,
mostly rural, mostly
less educated.
So these are the victims
of the industrialization
and disinvestment in
American rural areas.
And indeed, it is a
tragedy that is big enough
in magnitude to drag
down the overall average
by a little bit.
And it's clearly something
that we have to address.
Again, if you break down
any data on progress
to a granular
enough level, there
will always be parts
of the world that are
going in the wrong direction.
Part of the
appreciation of progress
is not to be shocked
if it doesn't
occur everywhere uniformly.
It never does.
But progress can
continue, resume,
be accelerated if we
concentrate exactly
on the parts that are not
progressing or, in this case,
progressing.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for
the presentation.
It was very compelling.
One thing I'm
curious about, so you
mentioned some of the
alternate interpretations
or alternate worldviews
that humanity
is best with a strong
leader or living according
to transcendent ideals
or also another world
view around that
people do best when
motivated by self-interest.
I'm curious-- so for folks
that you're talking with
or debating--
they may be advocating or
articulating these ideas.
I'm curious if you've
looked into like some
of the patterns
underlying why people
will arrive at these
different kinds of worldviews?
And, in particular,
I know there's
been work in adult psychological
development-- so tracking
how people go through
stages in terms
of the complexity of their
thinking, the scope of groups
that they're able
to empathize with.
Have you evaluated
any of this work
for making sense
of these patterns?
STEVEN PINKER: Yeah.
It is interesting to ask since--
if I'm right and cosmopolitan,
liberal, secular, humanism,
Enlightenment is
such a great idea,
why doesn't everyone
believe in it?
And I hope more and
more people will.
There are trends, global
trends in the direction
of cosmopolitan liberalism-- so
again, uneven with exceptions.
So the world values survey has
asked people a large number
of questions about their
political, moral, and lifestyle
values going back to 1980.
But because of a
discovery that they
made that these values tend
to be largely a cohort effect,
namely people born
at a given time
tend to keep them as they age,
you can extrapolate backwards,
if you take into account
the cohort effect
and some of the
nation level effect.
So you can almost
extrapolate backward to 1960.
If you do, you find that--
Christian Welzel has found
that a composite of liberal--
what we might call
liberal values--
that is respect for rights
of women, for democracy,
for gay rights, rights
for people to divorce,
to child rearing philosophies
that emphasize creativity
and autonomy rather
than obedience--
you can put those together
in one liberal value.
You find that every
part of the world,
a sense of liberal values has
increased over the last 60
years or so.
Now, the different regions of
the world show massive gaps.
Not surprisingly Sweden is more
liberal than the Middle East
and North Africa.
However, by many measures, a
young person in Egypt today,
for example, is more
liberal than his counterpart
in Sweden in 1960.
Now, less this seem
absolutely incredible,
imagine getting into a time
machine, going back to 1960
and interviewing a
random Swedish person
and say, what do you
think about two men being
able to marry each
other or a woman
being the CEO of a corporation?
They would have
thought, you're nuts.
That's impossible.
That's outrageous.
That's against
the natural order.
And so when you think
about how, especially
in the most illiberal
regions, the fact that younger
people are more liberal
and cosmopolitan,
it becomes less shocking.
And the correlates of
this gradual shift--
and this, by the way, is
only as of 2005, 2008 or so.
So I don't know if there has
gone into reverse since then.
But that was over
a span of 50 years.
Correlates tend to be
affluence of the whole country,
education, information flow--
countries that
translate more books,
have more telephones,
more internet connections,
they have more patents,
more high degrees--
a general knowledge
intensiveness together
with affluence and
some other variables
tend to tilt people in
the liberal, cosmopolitan,
Enlightenment,
humanist direction.
Again, maybe it's
all gone into reverse
in the last five or 10 years
with the ascent of populism.
Too soon to say.
[APPLAUSE]
