Steven Pinker
Fellow Canadians citizens of the world I plan to convince you that the best days of humankind lie ahead. Yes, convince. Decline us speak of a faith or belief in progress but there’s nothing faith-based about it. Our understanding of the human condition must not be grounded in myths of a fall from Eden or a rise to utopia nor on jeans for a sunny or morose temperament nor on which side of the bed you got out of this morning, and it must not come from the headlines.
Journalists report plane crashes not planes that takeoff.
As long as bad things haven’t vanished from the earth altogether there will always be enough of them to fill the news and people will believe as they have for centuries that the world is falling apart.
No, the only way to understand the fate of the world is with facts and numbers that is plot the incidence of good and bad things over time not just for charmed places like Canada but for the world as a whole. See which way the lines are going and identify the forces that are pushing them around.
Allow me to do this for 10 of the good things in life. First, life itself. A century and a half ago the human lifespan was 30 years. Today, it is 70 and it shows no signs of leveling off.
Second, health. Look up smallpox and cattle plague in Wikipedia – the definitions are in the past tense – smallpox was a disease indicating the two of the greatest sources of misery in human existence have been eradicated forever. The same will soon be true for polio and guinea worm and we are currently decimating hookworm, malaria, filariasis, measles, rubella and yaws.
Third, prosperity. Two centuries ago, 85 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, that’s down to 10% and according to the UN by it could be zero on every continent people are working fewer hours and can afford more food, clothes, lighting, entertainment, travel, phone calls, data, and beer.
Fourth, peace. The most destructive human activity, war between powerful nations, is obsolescent. Developed countries have not fought a war for seventy years, great powers, for sixty years.
Civil wars continue to exist, but they are less destructive than interstate wars and there are fewer of them. This pin is a souvenir from a trip earlier this week to Colombia which is in the process of ending the last war in the Western Hemisphere.
Globally, the annual death rate from wars has been in bumpy decline from 300 per hundred thousand during World War 2 to twenty two in the 1950s, nine in the 70’s, 5 in the 80’s, 1.5 in the 90’s, and 0.2 in the 0’s.
Even the horrific civil war in Syria has only budged the numbers up back up to where they were in 2000.
Fifth, safety. Global rates of violent crime are falling in many places precipitously the world’s leading criminologists have calculated there within years we can cut the global rate of homicide in half.
Sixth, freedom. Despite backsliding in this or that country the global democracy index is at an all-time high. More than percent of the world’s population now lives in open societies – the highest percentage ever.
Seven, knowledge in 1820, 17 % of people had a basic education. Today, 82 percent do and the percentage is rapidly heading into a hundred.
Eight, human rights. Ongoing global campaigns have targeted child labor, capital punishment, human trafficking, violence against women, female genital mutilation, and the criminalization of homosexuality. Each has made measurable inroads and if history is a guide, these barbaric customs will go the way of human sacrifice, cannibalism, infanticide, chattel, slavery, heretic burning, torture executions, public hangings, debt, bondage, dueling, freakshows, foot-binding, laughing at the insane and the designated goon in hockey.
Nine, gender equity. Global data show that women are getting better educated, marrying later, earning more and in more positions of power and influence.
Finally, intelligence. In every country IQ has been rising by three points a decade so what is the response of declinists to all of this depressing good news? It is just you wait. Any day now a catastrophe will halt this progress or push it into reverse but with the possible exception of war none of these indicators is subject to chaotic bubbles and crashes like the stock market.
Each is gradual and cumulative and collectively they built on one another. A richer world can better afford to clean up the environment police its gangs and teach and heal its citizens. A better educated and more female empowered world will indulge fewer autocrats and start fewer stupid wars.
The technological advances that have propelled this progress will only accelerate, Moore’s Law is continuing and genomics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, material science, and evidence-based policy are skyrocketing.
What about the science fiction dystopias? Most of them like rampaging cyborgs and engulfment by nanobots are entirely fanciful and will go the way of the y2k bug and other silly techno panics. Two others are serious but solvable. Despite prophecies of thermonuclear World War and hollywood-style nuclear terrorism, remember that no nuclear weapon has been used since Nagasaki. The Cold War ended.
States have given up nuclear weapons programs, including this year, Iran.
The number of nuclear weapons has been reduced by more than percent and a global agreement locked down loose nukes and fissile material more importantly the world may only have to extend its -years streak another few decades a roadmap for the phased elimination of all nuclear weapons has been endorsed by major world leaders including those of Russia and the United States.
The other threat is climate change this may be humanity’s toughest problem but economists agree it is a solvable one. A global carbon tax would incentivize billions of people to conserve innovate and switch to low-carbon energy sources while accelerated R&D in renewable energy fourth-generation nuclear power and carbon capture would lower their costs will the world suicidally ignore these solutions.
Well, here are three Time magazine headlines from just the last month. China shows its serious about climate change
Walmart McDonald’s and seventy-nine others commit to fight global warming and American’s denial of climate change hits record low.
A better world to be sure is not a perfect world. As a conspicuous defender of the idea of human nature I believe that out of the Crooked Timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made and to misquote a great Canadian we are not Stardust we are not golden and there’s no way we’re getting back to the garden.
In the glorious future I am envisioning there will be disease and poverty there will be terrorism and oppression and war and violent crime but there will be much much less of these scourges which means that billions of people will be better off than they are today and that I remind you is the resolution of this evening’s debate.
Alan De Botton
Let’s look at the four areas where optimists think we’re going to make the largest gains: they are believers in the victory of knowledge over ignorance, a big scourge of our times will be resolved through the light of reason that the great hope of the optimists: poverty will be wiped out through the growing economies of the world. We will no longer have desperate ills of poverty that have accompanied us for so long.
The third point, war. War will be wiped out by the rule of law and the increasing monopolization of power by states that follow international regulations and lastly and fourthly disease will be wiped out through that wonderful tool, medicine. And with those four things: ignorance, poverty, war and disease under control – we will land in the sunlit uplands that our optimistic friends want to tell us are on the way.
I’ve got one major objection and it’s a slightly autobiographical one. I’m Swiss. I’m a citizen of Switzerland and I spend a bit of time there and the thing about Switzerland is that it solved all these problems – it’s got a fantastic education system, the average salary is 50,000 $ a year, the country’s been at peace since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the hospitals are superlative, yet it’s not paradise. Indeed, there are legions of problems. Problems that I would describe as first world problems which are not jokes, they are genuine problems.
Switzerland is where Swaziland and Botswana and Liberia maybe in 500 years’ time but the bad news ladies and gentlemen is that Switzerland is not perfect and it’s that for that reason that we have to discount the optimistic tenor of the motion tonight why Switzerland not perfect and countries like it well. Firstly, because idiocy is not remove moved by reason.
The great the great promise and the great promise of the Enlightenment was if you tell people what the right thing to do is they will do it, that evil is the result of ignorance it’s not idiocy is more stubborn than that. Poverty is not eradicated by raising the GDP.
There are millionaires and billionaires who feel they don’t have enough and that is the true definition of poverty – the sense you don’t have enough and unfortunately that rises and it’s present at any income level.
War is not the last word on meanness and violence and cruelty – these things continue in societies even though people are not bludgeoning each other to death and finally even though there’s no smallpox or guinea worm in Switzerland, people still despite the wonderful advances of medicine, die. Death has not been eradicated and as far as I know MIT as my learned friends have another view, there is no cure for this on the horizon. These are the problems that we face now someone may say yes but with machines and technology and the internet and the iPhone we will perhaps gather together and produce a creature who is perfectly wise, who is perfectly kind, and immortal. Maybe we will but this person is not a human being
Homo sapiens is a different creature, a different species we will never be able to evolve out of these roadblocks that I’ve been telling you about. I believe that the top of our spinal cords we have what I like to call a faulty walnut – a walnut mind that has very destructive impulses that is immune to certain kinds of education and that resists any attempt to help it in many situations. I believe ladies and gentlemen that we must go towards a different sort of philosophy that will serve us much better and that philosophy I call pessimistic realism.
it’s a counter to the boosterish attitude you find in modern science and modern business which for different sets of reasons is permanently trying to get us to feel more cheerful about things this kind of boosterish is dangerous and cruel.
Think of its application in relationships imagine if somebody said I’m perfect and getting more perfect and I’m looking for someone who is perfect and willing to become ever more perfect this will be a disastrous kind of relationship to be getting into forgiveness and tenderness and sin is based on an acceptance of our own fundamental imperfection.
We are flawed creatures and need to keep our flaws in mind in order to be able to be truly human. There is something frankly frightening about perfectionism. We are angry whenever we believe that we were promised paradise and we got a traffic jam, lost keys, a disappointing relationship, a less than optimal job. We are furious and our sense of entitlement comes back to bite us.
This is the danger of the age we cease to appreciate things when we believe that life should be pe