Do we morph into each other or?
You can do this with software, you know.
Well I loved Better Angels of Our Nature.
I’m even more thrilled about your next book,
Enlightenment Now.
I was inspired to write it after I finished
Better Angels of Our Nature, which had all
of these graphs showing measures of violence
in decline.
And people started to write to me from disciplines
that I was only dimly aware of saying, “It’s
actually much better than you even imagined."
Hunger is declining and infant mortality and
maternal mortality.
And even came across odd things like the rate
of death in traffic accidents have plummeted,
like a hundredfold, in the last fifty years.
Your likelihood of getting mowed down on the
sidewalk if you’re a pedestrian, air traffic
safety, even—perhaps my favorite graph in
the whole book, your chance of being killed
by a bolt of lightning had declined by more
than ninety-five percent.
Now, of course it isn’t that God stopped
throwing thunderbolts, but we have better
houses, better cars and tractors.
Humanity really does seem to be improving
in one area after another--almost makes you
believe in this old-fashioned thing called
progress.
Yeah, I’d say the most stunning thing to me--ever--is
this
disconnect between the actual improvement
and people’s mental view that, maybe the
past was better, maybe the future’s going
to be worse.
As a psychologist, I’m curious as to where
this disconnect comes from.
I think part of it comes from a funny chemistry
between on the one hand, the nature of news
and the nature of cognition.
Namely, news is about stuff that happens,
not about stuff that doesn’t happen.
So there’s never a Thursday in March in
which you say, “Hunger has plummeted,”
or, “Diseases have been decimated.”
Whereas things that go wrong, go wrong all
at once.
You know I’d love to have people have this
positive message and see where it really does
hint at how we can do even better going forward.
I couldn’t agree more.
Ideas matter.
The universe kind of
doesn’t care about us.
We’ve got law of entropy, things fall apart.
We’ve got evolution.
We’ve got bugs who are constantly trying
to kill us.
So the odds are really stacked against us,
but if we try to understand how the world
works and make people better off, bit by bit
we can succeed, and that’s a different view
of progress that tends not to be popular among
21st century intellectuals.
But I think that the facts show that it works.
Not all at once, but bit by bit.
