Enlightenment Values

In Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker explains the impact of Enlightenment values – reason, science, and humanism – on the world. These values were instrumental in moving society forward, and Pinker worries that they are under threat.

Humans have achieved a whole bunch of cool shit over the ages. Unfortunately, we take it for granted. Progress has a very funny way of erasing its tracks as we move forward as a species. 

The local supermarket is overflowing with food. You’ve got clean water on tap. You drop your waste in the toilet, and with a click of a button, it vanishes. We have pills that demolish painful infections, planes to take us to the other side of the world, cheap energy to pop the lights on, and you have all of the world’s knowledge inside your pocket.

We assume these things are birthrights, forgetting that they’re human accomplishments. At some stage in history, a person worked on solving these problems and drove our society forward. 

Areas of Progress 

“If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be – you didn’t know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family, a poor family, what country you’d be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman – if you had to choose blindly what moment you’d want to be born, you’d choose now.” – Barack Obama

Life Expectancy

Humans want to avoid death and stay alive as long as possible. In centuries past, human life expectancy was only around 35. Then luckily, in the 19th century, we saw ‘the great escape’. Life expectancy began to rise dramatically. During the 20th century, our life expectancy increased so much that the average person approached death by only seven months for every year they aged!

In developing countries, it is even more extreme. In Kenya, life expectancy rose by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013. After living and struggling for a decade, mathematically, they hadn’t taken a single step closer to death! Mathematically, they hadn’t taken a single step closer to death after living and struggling for a decade 

Health

For most of human history, the strongest force against our human health was infectious disease. These nasty organisms make a living at our expense, taking a wild ride from body to body in bugs and worms. The old way of dealing with it involved black magic arts such as bloodletting, toxic metals, and even squeezing a hen to death against the infected part. But some legend invented vaccinations in the 19th century and the world changed. With the acceptance of germ theory, the battle began to turn. Handwashing, midwifery, mosquito control, and the chlorination of water started to save millions of lives. 

Before the 20th century, cities were literally full of shit. The rivers were viscous with waste, and you’d wash your clothes and take drinking water from the brown liquid.

Going to your local doctor was actually a health hazard. His black coat was encrusted with dried blood and puss. He’d go straight from an autopsy to probing your wounds. Thankfully, another legend developed the idea of washing and sterilising your hands and medical equipment. 

Nutrition

The great philosopher Chris Rock once observed, “This is the first society in history where the poor people are fat.” Though obesity is a health problem for us today, it’s a pretty good problem to have compared to the famines of the past. Recently, the developing world has begun feeding itself. When children are underfed, their growth is stunted, and they’re at higher risk of dying.

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world had a productivity boom in agricultural productivity. This productivity has meant that the land required between 1961 and 2009 increased by 12%, but the food supplied increased by 300%.

Wealth

It’s easy to imagine that wealth has always been with the world. The diaries outlining the suffering of the working class battler never made it into the history books. But you can be sure it was actual hell compared to today’s standards. As economist Nathan Rosenberg pointed out: 

We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the literature, poetry, romance and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologised and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.

In preindustrial Europe, a piece of clothing was something you’d have the luxury to buy a few times in your lifetime. One of the main jobs of hospital administration was to make sure the clothes of the dead would go to the lawful inheritors.

It is a fallacy to think that wealth is a given and that a specific amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time. It was the enlightenment thinker Adam Smith who saw the first rational analysis of prosperity. Its starting point was not how wealth is distributed, but the initial question of how wealth comes to exist in the first place. This was a huge realisation: wealth is created, primarily through networks of people that combine their labour and ingenuity.

The advent of specialisation changed the world. Smith explained that economic activity was a form of mutually beneficial cooperation, a positive-sum game. Each person goes to work to make something and gets something back that is more valuable in return. Then through voluntary exchange across the population, everybody keeps on benefiting from the transactions. The exchangers can make an entire society richer and nicer because you’re better off buying things than stealing them in this kind of market. 

We don’t need to rely on the compassion of the butcher or the baker. They sell their product looking to improve their own living standards. But as a result, everyone benefits from the transaction.

Inequality

But aren’t all these benefits just going to the rich? The common idea is that the top 1% are taking all the wealth of recent decades and everybody else is treading water (or slowly sinking).

The first thing we need to recognise is that income equality is not a fundamental component of well-being. It isn’t like prosperity, knowledge, health, safety or other areas of progress. This is captured by this old joke from the Soviet Union: 

Igor and Boris are dirt poor peasants, barely scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day, a fairy appears to Igor and grants him one wish. Igor says, ‘I wish that Boris’s goat should die.’

The two peasants have become closer to equal, but neither is better off. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that inequality itself isn’t morally objectionable. Poverty is objectionable. If a person lives a long, pleasurable and stimulating life, then how much the Joneses earn and how big their house is, is irrelevant. From a morality point of view, everyone doesn’t have to have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough. Having such a narrow focus on economic inequality can be destructive if it distracts us into killing Boris’s goat instead of figuring out how Igor can get one.

In the space of 200 years, the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90% to 10%. The point of calling out progress is not for self-congratulation, but to identify the causes of wealth to do more of what works.

Equal Rights

Humans evolved to be a little cautious around people who aren’t in the same group. Typically, it is due to skin colour, gender and race. Systemic discrimination, such as racism, sexism and homophobia, has been rampant throughout history and culture. The removal of these evils is typically what we refer to as the progression to equal rights.

As with the other elements of progress, humans have made things better over the ages. Equality of rights has never been better.

Progress can be picked up in one quote by Michelle Obama. After sitting in the Whitehouse in 2017, just after Barack Obama completed his second term, she said: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my two beautiful, intelligent black women, playing with their dogs on the White House Lawn.”

Obama was succeeded by the first woman nominee of a major party in a presidential election. This was less than a century after the first woman was allowed to vote.

But like most things with progress, it has found a way to erase its tracks. Today, we fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.