Signs of progress

The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works.

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

When I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago, it made sense to me. He argues in that book that human beings and civilization in general are getting better, and I have read enough history to believe this to be true.

So I was surprised to read in Pinker's follow-up book, Enlightenment Now (2018), how controversial that earlier book was. Critics argued that the world is getting worse, not better, and they had many examples to point to. In the later book, Pinker defends himself, going point by point, using plenty of graphs and statistics, to show that conditions really are improving in such areas as health, wealth, peace, the environment, democracy, knowledge, quality of life and equal rights.

There are many setbacks, he acknowledges, and he considers Donald Trump one of the big ones. He takes a punch at Trump in just about every chapter. One might wish he had waited for the Biden administration to finish his book. Yet to some extent Pinker anticipates Biden by slamming many left-wing ideas that threaten human progress. In his mind, progressives work counter to progress.

Capitalism works better than socialism, he argues. Environmental extremists pose a serious danger, he says, adding, "As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human being to vermin, pathogens, and cancer." He believes science can conquer all environmental problems and that efforts should focus more on nuclear energy than windmills.

More troublesome is Pinker's apparent support of world government, as if such a government could be guaranteed to work for the people rather than for its leaders and other elites, and his hatred for all religion. He strongly favors humanism, which he defines as "good without God." Yet when disaster strikes, as in the recent Florida hurricane, humanistic do-gooders tend to get caught up in bureaucracy, red tape and now calls for equity, while religion-based groups set quickly to work helping people. Much of the human progress Pinker points to, such as colleges and hospitals and the end of slavery, were often the work of devout men and women with strong religious beliefs, while atheists gave us communism and the worst kinds of environmental extremism.