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 perfect, and we can eradicate all known problems. Why do old people love flowers? They love flowers because they’re so aware of the imperfections of life that they’re willing to stop by some of the smaller islands of perfection like flowers and appreciate them. We don’t do this if we have such a grand narrative in mind of the perfection of the species. We will not stop to appreciate and lastly humor. Humor is born out of the gap between our hopes and our reality and those who know how to laugh are also those who know how to be sympathetic to our failed hopes and our failed dreams and we will all have them.
I think many of the worst movements in history have been borne out of the minds of people who believed in perfectionism: scientists, politicians, and others who believe that we could straighten things out once and for all and this is an incredibly dangerous philosophy of life. The perfectionists among us are those who very often ruin and wreck the world and true human progress has often the work of people who are much more modest, who accept their own floors and the floors of others and are not attempting to make a paradise on earth.
Christianity, I speak to you as a secular Jew, very wisely insisted that we are frail fragile and all of us broken. That’s a very useful starting point it’s in if you like not I’m not talking politically it’s a conservative classical starting point that is I believe at the root of wisdom and ultimately this debate, though it seems to be a debate around science, and we have many sciency people in the room, really it’s a debate about wisdom and the philosophy of wisdom that you might want to adopt in your own life. And I want to argue that beneath the philosophy, beneath the theories of the opposing team is a philosophy that is incredibly brittle and possibly intolerant and cruel.
It’s not a livable philosophy. But really at the root of humor, humanity, gentleness and forgiveness is an acceptance that we, with our faulty walnuts, our imperfect understanding of ourselves and the world that we live in we must go easy on ourselves and be extremely modest and it’s this modesty that I want to sell to you and it’s on this basis that I firmly believe you should reject the motion before you.
Matt Ridley:
Woody Allen once said more than at any time in history mankind faces a crossroads: one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose wisely and that’s the way pretty well everybody talks about the future.
When I was young the future was especially grim, the population explosion was unstoppable, famine was inevitable, pesticides were giving us cancer, the deserts were advancing, the oil was running out, the rainforests were doomed, acid rain, bird flu, the hole in the ozone layer were gonna make us sick. My sperm count was falling and a nuclear winter would finish us off. You probably think I’m exaggerating. Well, here’s what a best-selling book by the economist Robert Hale Brunner concluded in the year I left school.
The outlook for man I believe is painful, difficult perhaps desperate and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seemed to be very slim indeed. It was only a decade or two later that it dawned on me that every one of these threats had either been a false alarm or had been greatly exaggerated. The dreadful future was not as bad as the grown-ups had told me. it would be life just kept on getting better and better for the vast majority of people.
Human lifespan has been growing at the rate of 5 hours a day for 50 years. The greatest measure of misery anybody can think of, child mortality has gone down by 2/3 in that time malaria mortality is down by an amazing 60 percent in 15 years. Oil spills in the ocean are downby 90% since the 1970s. An object the size of a slice of bread lets you send letters, have conversations, watch movies, find your way around, take pictures, and tell hundreds of people what you had for breakfast and what’s getting worse? Traffic, obesity, problems of abundance.
Here’s a funny thing: most improvements are gradual so they don’t make the news. Bad news tends to come suddenly. Car crashes make the news, falling child mortality doesn’t and as Steve says: every year, the average person on the planet grows wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal. More equal?
Yes, global inequality is on the way down and fast. Why? Because people in poor countries are getting rich faster than people in rich countries. Africa is experiencing an astonishing economic miracle these days a bit like Asia did a decade or two ago Mozambique is 60 % richer per capita than it was in 2008.
Ethiopia’s economy is growing at about 10 percent a year the world economy has shrunk in only one year since the second world war in when it dipped by less than 1% before growing 5 percent the next year.
If anything, the march of prosperity is speeding up but my optimism about the future isn’t based on extrapolating the past, it’s based on why these things happening. Innovation, driven by the meeting and mating of ideas to produce baby ideas is the fuel that drives them and far from running out of fuel we’re only just getting started.
There’s an infinity of ways of recombining ideas to make new ideas and we no longer have to rely on North Americans and Europeans to come up with them. The Internet has speeded up at the rate at which people can communicate and cross fertilize their ideas
Take vaping. In my country: there are more than million people who’ve pretty well given up smoking because of e-cigarettes – it’s proving to be the best aid to quitting we’ve ever come up with. It’s probably about as safe as coffee and it was invented in China by a man named Hon Lik who combined a bit of chemistry with a bit of electronics and we’re all benefiting from that. So today inventions are happening everywhere and we’re event were benefiting from them but isn’t all this progress coming at the expense of the environment? Well, no. Often the reverse many environmental indicators are improving in many countries: more forests, more wildlife, cleaner air, cleaner water. Even the extinction rates coming down compared with a hundred years ago for the creatures we know most about birds and mammals thanks to the efforts of conservationists and the richer countries are, the more likely their environments improving.
The biggest environmental problems are in poor countries but what about population? The population growth rate of the world has halved in my lifetime from 2 percent to 1 percent and the birth rates plummeting in Africa today. The world population quadrupled in the century but it’s not even going to double in the 21st and the UN thinks it’ll stop growing altogether by the 2080s not because of war, pestilence, and famine as gloomy old Parson Malthus feared but because of prosperity, education, and health.
There’s a simple and beautiful fact about demography.
When more children survive, people plan smaller families with slowing population growth and expanding farm yields. It’s getting easier and easier to feed the world. Today, it takes 68% less land to grow the same amount of food as 50 years ago.
That means more land for nature. In theory you can feed the world from a hydroponic farm the size of Ontario and keep the rest for wildlife and the planets getting greener. Satellites have recorded 14% more green vegetation than years ago especially in arid areas like the Sahel region of Africa but am I like the man who falls out of the skyscraper and as he passes the second floor shouts out “so far so good”?
I don’t think so. You’ll probably hear the phrase turning point in this debate. You’ll be told that this generation is the one that’s going to be worse off than its parents – that it’s going to die younger or see some deterioration in the environment. Well let me tell you about turning points every generation thinks it stands at a turning point, that the past is fine but the future’s bleak.
As Lord Macaulay put it, “ in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation we cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point that we have seen our best days but so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason.”
We filter the past for happy memories and filter the future for gloomy prognosis.
It’s a strange form of narcissism. We narcissists we have to believe that our generation is the special one where the turning-point comes and I’m afraid it’s nonsense. Macaulay again to end, “On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us.”
I live in the United States but only has to watch five minutes of the Republican presidential debates to know that that proposition is decidedly not true for those people South of the border but perhaps most seriously and I’m going to get to the point here. If this proposition was be it resolved that humankind’s best days historically have lain ahead, I think the answer is absolutely yes, and that is exactly what my two opponents have done. They had beautifully made the case that if we go back into the past and we project forward to the 18th century the 19th century the 17th century and we fast-forward the present day things have been on an upward trajectory and I think we can all say that’s absolutely the case but this debate is not about the past right? It’s about the future, it’s about whether things get better from this point going forward and what I want to say is that the notion that the future is going to get better is hopelessly naive and the word better is misplaced what we really I think are facing when we look at the future is a future that’s different.
Now what do I mean by that? Well I was recently at a conference and I was chatting with some people who were security specialist ITC internet security specialists and they said, ”what do you worry about what’s on your mind?” and they said well you know we’ve gotten done a very good job recently at dealing with the everyday low-level threats that used to comprise the world of hacking the guy from Bulgaria who wants to steal your credit card right there’s thousands of those threats. We’re getting a good job doing a good job of keeping them at bay but what terrifies us is what they called digital 9/11. right? Someone from some nation-state comes in packs their way into the electrical infrastructure of North America and shuts off the power for a week that terrifies them or someone goes in hacks into a thousand cars simultaneously on the and causes a massive traffic jam in car now that might not be substantially different from the way is present time but it would come as something of a shock or another example I just gave you a series of random examples.
There are so many of these I could go on and on for many minutes but not long ago I was reading a paper in a political science journal and it was all about the impact of cell phone use in Africa and pointed out that the introduction of cell phones in Africa has had an extraordinary effect on the lives of ordinary Africans when it’s permitted them to do all kinds of things they could never do in the past but at the same time it is absolutely the case that the introduction of cell phones has made the job of coordinating and executing actions and military operations by terrorist groups like Isis and Boko Haram a lot easier than it was in the past.
Or let me do another example: it’s absolutely the case that our ability over the last 25-50 years to deal with what might be called ordinary climate crisis has gotten an awful lot better. I don’t fear nor do most people fear famine today in the same way that we might have feared it 25 years ago. Our ability to come up with disease resistant or drought resistant crops our ability to come up with much more effective desalinization technologies had meant that the threat of that kind of environmental crisis is absolutely receding but if you talk to a climate expert, that’s not what they’re worried about.
They look at what just happened in Mexico where we had one of the biggest and most ferocious hurricanes ever recorded and they say, “We look at warming trends around the world in the world’s oceans. We’re worried that one of those mega hurricanes is going to come along and deliver a blow the likes of which we’ve never seen before right? The powerful engine of human activity is what allows us to create drought and famine resistant crops but it’s also what’s driving climate change which is a risk of a whole another order.
Now what all these examples have in common? What they tell us is that as a society we have been engaged not in the reduction of risk but in the reconfiguration of risk. You don’t have to worry about a famine every five years but you have to worry about a mega hurricane coming along and wiping out Miami. You don’t have to worry about a guy in Romania stealing your credit card but you have to worry about North Korea coming in and shutting off the power for two weeks and having a cellphone in Africa means that your life is a lot easier than it would have been five or ten years ago but it also means that the threat to you from terrorist groups is greater and more pervasive than it would have been five or ten years ago.
So what does that mean for our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pollyanna? Well, it means that everything they told you is true – it’s all true. I sat there listening to the two of them nodding my head and saying you couldn’t have spoken more truthfully and realistically and honestly about the trajectory of all these different trends but it’s only half the story right to my mind. What this debate is really about is whether the change in the nature of the risks that we face is something that ought to scare us, and I think the answer is obvious. It should.
Rebuttals
Steven Pinker:
First of all I think Alan has shown up to the wrong debate. I don’t remember ever having been invited to a debate whose resolution is that in the future people will be immortal nor that foolishness will evaporate from the surface of the earth nor that we will never again lose our car keys. That is, the resolution of the debate is not that a perfect world is in our future but rather the best days are to come. My second response is: are you serious, are you willing to go to a peasant in Cambodia or Sudan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan and say listen I’ve been there, you’re worried about your child dying your wife dying in childbirth, you’re full of parasites you don’t have enough to eat, but you know trust me it’s no great shakes to live in a country like Switzerland.
True, your child might not die in the first year of life but you know when they’re a teenager they’re gonna roll you their eyes at you and you may not have to live under the shadow of war and genocide but people will still make bitchy comments and you may not be hungry but you know sometimes the wine will have a nose that’s a bit too fruity.
I think the response of billions of people on earth would be well thanks but you know I think I’d like to find out for myself. So when it comes to which position is cruel or unwise I think that that’s an accusation that can be turned around.
As for Malcolm Gladwell, it is true that in the luxury of your imagination you can imagine all kinds of catastrophes and that we have no guarantee that that some of the scenarios played out in Hollywood won’t happen, that some hacker in Bulgaria won’t shut down the electrical system. On the other hand there’s a big difference between a fantasy and a likelihood there’s also a big difference between a nuisance like stealing your credit card data and a catastrophe and if you have the world’s experts in cybersecurity from every industrialized country on earth against the teenager from Romania I’m gonna bet on the experts worldwide.
Finally if it were true that cellphones caused as much harm as the problems that they eliminated you would see that the rate of death from warfare….
Matt Ridley:
Mr. and Mrs. Cassandra did a good job of giving you the other side of the story [Applause]
I mean seriously Malcolm are we to genuinely think that a big traffic jam caused by a teenager in Bulgaria is a big problem? I mean there are there are far greater problems in the world and I think one of the things that’s interesting about the Cassandra’s is that they have they have told you about the problems of the developed world, they’ve told you about the problems of rich countries but there’s a billion – I mean forget losing the grid for a few minutes because of a kid in Bulgaria who hacks into it – there’s a billion people in the world who don’t yet have access to electricity and we know that when they get it; it transforms their lives and we know that there’s nothing stopping us getting it to it except will and resources and that kind of thing so I think there’s every reason to think that we can tackle those problems and as Steve was just saying before he was rudely interrupted by your applause. If it was really true that cellphones, which give the average African the chance to do mobile banking, the chance to advertise his number so he can get a job, the chance to communicate with his friends relatively cheaply, if it was really true that that which has brought wonderful improvements to people’s lives was also making war worse, we’d see it in the numbers and we’re not people were able to organize wars before cellphones and they still will afterwards and as for our I mean I think I heard you define poverty as a millionaire who thinks he hasn’t got enough.
I don’t think that’s poverty. I think poverty is when people really can’t afford to feed themselves or to survive and that’s what I’m concerned about.
I’m not looking back at the past like Malcolm said, in fact, I specifically said I wasn’t basing my optimism on that, I’m basing it on what we can achieve, what we know we can achieve, what we know we can do and what we can bring out to improve people’s lives – the people who really need it which are the people in the developing world. This world isn’t perfect; definitely not, that’s the whole point of optimism.
Voltaire defined the word optimism as someone who thought the world already was perfect that’s what the word meant when it was kind. Now it means something different it means you don’t think the world’s perfect you want to improve it and if along the way that means that when we get to Switzerland, we stop being able to appreciate flowers and we lose our sense of humor well maybe it’s a price worth paying.
Alan De Botton
We’ll now get the rebuttals from the con team and allow Europe first. Well the pollyannas are trying to get us to feel that their approach is somehow slightly risky and very modern and subtle and interesting – it is in fact the mainstream boosterish philosophy of the mainstream press capitalism and science. it’s the messages that you hear all the time, it’s the new iPhone, it’s the new little widget that’s going to make your life better. We hear this all the time we are surrounded by voices like those of Mr. Mrs. Pollyanna who sell us a boosterish message and there’s nothing there’s nothing particularly fresh or interesting in what they’re telling us.
We hear all the time that we’re heading for the sunlit uplands. Yes, there are a few voices in newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times who will say that everything’s grim but these aren’t minority voices they loom large in the Pollyanna’s imaginations because they move in those circles but basically in the world out there the big megaphone is given to people who tell us that life is going to be perfect. This is what part of what I’m fighting against because I think it’s such a dangerous and inhuman philosophy.
At the dawn of Western civilization, the ancient Greeks invented a form of theater that they called tragedy and the point of tragedy was to remind a city-state of its constant vulnerability to reversal and therefore of its need for extreme modesty in the face of the unknown and this is what disturbs me so profoundly about Mr. and Mrs. Pollyanna – their arrogance. They are themselves both charming people but their attitude and the attitude that goes with their views is of an underlying brittle arrogance which I think is ultimately dangerous for us. They have an extremely materialistic view of human beings as if the only concern that they have is the material side of life.
Now it’s very easy to say, this guy, he’s only concerned with the problems of the rich world but we live in Canada in the rich world there are countries that qualify as rich and let’s not forget them because the whole rest of the world, the people that they’re interested are trying to become rich so the problems of the rich world are the problems we need to be looking at and they tell us a very complicated story that even when the last malaria bug has been eradicated humankind remains incredibly vulnerable to a host of challenges and it’s the refusal of Mr. and Mrs. Pollyana to take these challenges as seriously as Aeschylus and Flaubert and Tolstoy and to look at the real drama of what it is to be human – that is what disturbs me in the attitude of modern science and it’s Boosterish philosophy so I do urge you to look rather more carefully at the proposition.
Malcolm Gladwell
I try to make a list when I was listening to the two of them of statements that struck me as odd and so I thought I’d just go through them I’ve three that struck me is. The first one was a comment by Mr. Pinker about how he was greatly cheered by the fact that the number of nuclear weapons had been reduced by 80% well forgive me for putting this out but it doesn’t actually solve the problem if you reduce the number of weapons by 80% because all it takes is one weapon in the hands of one crazy person to blow us all up. It’s a bit like the person with a gun to your head who says don’t worry I’ve reduced the number of bullets in the chamber by percent I would not be terribly relieved by that perhaps Mr. Pinker would be.
My favorite Pinkerism if I might coin a phrase was another one he said which was in talking of climate change which he glossed over very quickly he said he dismissed it with the phrase and this I just love this economists agree it’s a solvable problem.
First of all economists? Like in what fantasy world do you imagine that economists are the first place you turn for solution solutions to life’s most complicated problems, this isn’t a problem that can be solved with demand curves and with moving the interest rate up or down a basis point this climate change is something that is embedded in some of the most complex social and political and economic problems of our day – it is about changing institutions, about confronting entrenched interests, it’s about the way we behave it’s and I could go on and on and on and on.
It strikes me as typical of the kind of intellectualized fantasy world that I think our opponents are living in that they would look at this extraordinary complex issue and turn for help to the economics department of Harvard University or as the case may be the House of Lords.
Last one, there were many howlers are too many hollers really I only have seconds left from Mr. Ridley but I was quite drawn to his notion that we could feed the world from a hydroponic farm the size of Ontario – my only two questions, for him one first of all how much science fiction do you read? and secondly, how much hydroponic food have you eaten?
There but the larger question here is look it’s really really easy to sit there and imagine a more perfect world – it’s a lot more difficult to put many of those utopian notions into practice, on this side of the aisle we are committed to reality and on that side they’ve read just a little too much…
Rebuttal 2
Matt Riddley
Well, I mean the notion that were materialists I think is one that that needs to be nailed because it’s all very well saying that materialism doesn’t satisfy all of your needs that’s certainly true but I think I would rather be well-fed and miserable than hungry and miserable.
I think satisfying material needs does matter and as for Malcolm’s point about climate change and climate science all I can hear from him is a council of despair, I can’t hit him saying there’s nuclear technologies there’s other technologies or things we can do – there are all sorts of things we can do. We’re trying to summon the political will we’re trying to get the economics right we’re trying to get the technologies right we haven’t succeeded yet in in decarbonizing the world economy but to think that it’s completely impossible that over the next few decades we could crack that problem is weird.
I mean we may not succeed but it’s pretty likely that we will.
Malcolm Gladwell:
I never said that the issue was that it was impossible rather I said that it was more difficult than you would lead us to believe in sort of as you guys present all kinds of these fantastic scenarios about feminist progress but more than that climate change represents a kind of threat to progress that is a different order than the threats we’ve seen in the past and this goes back to my opening statement true absolutely.
Matt Riddley:
Some of the things that we’ve raised in the past we’ve faced famine we’ve faced disease these were huge.
M.G
You can we cannot point to a single famine that had the kind of global consequences that a consequential change in the climate of the earth will have right name me a famine from years 0 through 1750 that had the effect of changing the fundamental structure of the world’s oceans – can’t do it
M.R
but I can name you a famine in the s that wiped out 60% of the population of France because we didn’t have trade and so we couldn’t get food to people in those days but now because of likewise – yes –
A.B
I think we almost have to take a step back and say what is driving this camp to want to assert so rigorously from what center of your beings is this coming that you feel such a need to insist on something that you have that um the da? the data does not point you irrevocably to a sense that you know life is going to be made perfect so we’re just perfect come from Surrey not perfect remember Mr. Pinker this is your brain this is your great let out clause because whenever we point to something you’ll go oh I didn’t mean that of course that will remain a problem it’s this that I’m interested in so we’ll say what about the rate of you know done use and you’ve got no no no I’m interested in the you know South African liver worm virus and so we then constantly shift and give ground you’ll say okay I’m not interested in that problem so when I mentioned that the high rate of mental illness you go oh no I’m not interested mental illness I’m interested in extreme poverty and then I say well what about the idea of relative poverty that you know the famous economist Easterlin pointed out in the 1970s you don’t know I’m not interested in relative poverty I’m only interested in extreme poverty so you keep shifting the ground thereby making your own position slightly invalid because whenever we say no there are real grounds for concern about the progress of humanity you’ll say oh it’s not that bit of progress I’m interested in.
Are you being selective with your facts?
S.P.
I’d like to hear those other thirty so those other than life health education affluence peace safety intelligence women’s empowerment what are the other thirty on top of those?
A.B
Do you know a famous novel written in the th century called Anna Karenina now the people in Anna Karenina? None of them none of them suffered from your was it a happy story no something very crucial Mr. Pinker about your narrow did we claim we were going to abolish unhappiness and we’re not interested in that bit we’re only is in the liver worm so what does me say what you are interested in and stick and offended
M.R
Have you looked at the data unhappiness having this correlates with wealth between countries within countries and within lifetimes it’s perfectly true that you can be very work very wealthy and very unhappy but that’s alright because it cheers up other people
M.G
so Allen I think is making a very literate couples first of all
S.P
The Easterlin paradox has been resolved I think you’re a decade out of date the idea that wealth does not correlate with happiness which is what we Easterlin paradox was has been resolved
A.B
just want to know about price a couple of weeks ago for showing that that it’s basically there are some people in this room are a little unhappy about various things and they’re not on the breadline and you would go well I’m sorry guys but my data suggests that your happiness does not correlate with your income and therefore your happiness your unhappiness there’s not really real
M.G
I thought that Alan was making a very good point with respect to the slipperiness of some of mr. Pinkus positions I wanted to bring up one of the howlers that I didn’t have time to go through in my in my rebuttal which is on this very point when he’s talking about how we’re a lot less murderous today than we were in the past and points out that we that developed countries haven’t fought a war for 60 years major developed countries but I would point out when they did fight that war years ago it was quite nasty I think it’s fair to say so it goes to my point it is of small consolation that the gap between wars is growing if the wars themselves are of terrifying ferocity and if the wars themselves contain the possibility of the extinction of the planet – that to me is an extremely important point so what in pointing to the fact that there’s been Wow 60 years since you know England engaged in a major war doesn’t tell us much does it – we have to look very closely at the nature of that conflict and that’s why I to return to the point I was trying to make at the beginning when I said that when I said there has been a change in the configuration of risk that’s exactly the point that wars have got here let me quit but yeah or catastrophic.
Mod
Are we loading the system up with things that are producing these beneficial outcomes now but just as easily they could be reversed around to produce calamity
M.R
Well let me give you an example of why that’s not the case and that is back to farming again in nowadays it’s pretty well impossible very nearly impossible to have a major global famine because you’d have to have simultaneous droughts in many different parts of the world because of world trade so world trade has reduced the risk by allowing us to turn a shortage in one area into instead of everybody dying in that area a general increase in prices around the whole world and that’s what happens so we’ve actually mitigated the risk by linking up the world so when people say we’ve made the world more risky by linking everybody up may be true in some cases but it’s not true in a lot of other cases and a lot of other cases it’s actually enabled us to spread the risk to reduce the risk
M.G
I thought I conceded famines explicitly in my I gave you that one so you’re fighting… yeah yeah I would be more interested if you if you actually tried to confront some of the disagree with you then the cases you agree with me that might be more effective as a debate tool.
S.P
I certainly agree that economists are an inviting target and one can always get a laugh by by making fun of economist but the problem of climate change is an economic problem it all the projections of the worst-case scenarios all depend on calculations of economists namely how many people will burn how many units of fossil fuels define effectively by economists that doesn’t make it an economic problem it absolutely is an economic problem because it all depends on how many people will burn house
M.G
it’s like saying if the artist draws a still life of has some happens then apples are an artist problem couple is not an artist property the analysis outside of the relevance of
M.R
the analysis of climate change and the possible solutions are economic problems we know that we can have solar panels the question is will there be enough solar panels to reduce fossil fuel use, we know that that a nuclear power can cut into carbon chain emissions by how much.
We know that people could reduce their consumption enough to mitigate the problem, will they? under what kind of insane to the point you know is the most comprehensive analysis of the chemistry the history the economics and the technology of climate change he is an economist not a Harvard whose Yale
M.G
climate change is something that is effectively described by economists that does not make it an economic problem it is a problem to successfully confront climate change will require the successful coordination of many different disparate sectors of society on many different levels to simplify it and to say this is something that we can reduce to the to the amount of economic analysis is is foolish.
S.P
That’s what economists do but the study of complex what they do that’s my point that’s right there should be
A.B
you guys are coming from a scientific background I’m coming from a humanistic background so for me the history of the arts is really the description of various forms of human unhappiness fairest islands that humans have been in over the centuries and that’s what the history of literature and theatre and poetry is really charting and I just like to ask our learned friends how in their laboratories they might try and cope with some of the problems that we see evidence in literature so I if Hamlet walked into your lab or if some of the dilemmas raised by Euripides were to be seen through your lenses what would you do with the levels of human unhappiness that were spotted in in Kafka and would you apply certain forms of medical intervention?
M.R
Do you think scientists are not human beings?
A.B
I’m just keen to find out what answers science might have to the very serious kinds of human unhappiness which have tracked human being through
Mod.
The question here is about exterior versus interior progress and the extent to which do you have a feeling of theory that progress affects not just the things that humans create but humans themselves?
M.R
do I think that we are going to cure happiness with a pip unhappiness with a pill in the next few years to you know so that Anna’s literary heroes can be less miserable no I don’t but do I think do I think that the progress of science the discovery of deep geological time the discovery of the the vast excesses of space the discovery of the the genome of what’s going on inside ourselves do I think that has in enlarge the human imagination and given us even more exciting things to think about and to want to write literature and plays and things about yes I do.
A.B
Anna Karenina standing on the edge of the platform and you’re saying hang on deep dear deep geological time is the answer for you dear.
S.P
Anna Karenina didn’t actually exist she’s actually right well she exists we’re talking about billions of people who don’t see their children die in the first year of life
A.B
another another classic shift we’ve shift the goalposts but please address the thing under consideration which is the dioramas of the psyche and I’m asked I asked you and mag think what how would you respond to some of the dynamics IRA math I think that if gesture the deep geological time would be a suitable answer
S.P
I think you’d add point deeply concerns the human psyche I think it’s very relevant to happiness I think if billions of people do not see their children die that’s a much more relevant consideration for the human psyche this for
A.B
what you’re doing is you’re essentially saying the problem spotted in literature you’ve been that classic move the problems spotted in literature are not the real problems you’re like Dickens is Mrs. jela be the only real problems are the problems of extreme poverty here’s tutorial princess not literary theory I’m sorry so in other words the only real problems are the problems of extreme poverty – whenever I try to shift our conversations here talking about very often anything in the proposition that limited the discussion narrowly – I know you’re scientists but that limited the discussion narrowly to science and material progress we are as human beings matter and spirit are you saying to
Mod
Matt, talk to us a bit about your idea about why progress is accelerating because that’s part of the argument here that better days lie ahead not simply because things are getting better but the pace at which they’re getting better what is the theory for this acceleration?
M.R
I mean I wouldn’t state my debate on the fact that it’s definitely accelerating but I think there’s every chance that because more people are in contact with more people today and more people are doing the heavy lifting of innovation in other countries than North America and Western Europe therefore the chances of life-saving innovations coming from anywhere are improved – this morning in the newspapers in London there was a story about a baby whose cancer has been cured by gene therapy this is a first that’s in London there’s probably something similar happening in Japan etc etc so all over the world we’re coming up with these with these new ideas but it’s certainly true that improvements don’t go at the same rate.
I mean if you go back years everybody thought we were going to see spectacular improvements in transport and we haven’t but they didn’t see that we were going to have such spectacular improvements in communication so communication has gone much faster than we expected transport has got much more slowly. I think we’re on the brink of a biomedical revolution that is going to be quite extraordinary not on the brink we’re into it already there most amazing things are happening in biotechnology and in the treatment of diseases which are truly very positive.
Mod
a lot of people do in their lives have the sensation of acceleration the acceleration of technology the acceleration of discovery the acceleration of innovation why in your view does that not speak to some fundamental shift that then supports the argument in the resolution?
M.G
Well two reasons – one reason is that the very same things that can create this and I agree a dramatic shift in the progress of certain kinds of change can also create a parallel increase in risks so when you talk about.. when Marilee talks about how the fact that we are increasingly connected as a people in the globe and that leads to all kinds of positive outcomes.. it also leads to all kinds of negative outcomes… so if you talk to epidemiologists they will talk about the threat of you know species extinctions referring to human beings – the reason that we talk now about species extinctions with respect to human beings is because we are so connected – that makes it possible for some unbelievably lethal organism virus whatever to spread all over the globe very very quickly and if you talk to epidemiologist they will tell you we’ve come awfully close on certain occasions quite recently precisely because of that fact – the second thing is and it would go to the to the comment that Matt was making about the biomedical explosion again he’s absolutely correct that there have been extraordinary and unbelievable changes for the good in terms of medical technology, our ability to address and treat certain diseases but once we have established that fact let us not lose sight of the fact that when you create those kinds of new technological approaches you create a whole series of new social and economic problems.
So for example how do you pay for them? Absolutely everyone who has examined many of these new technological approaches in medicine concedes that they come with a price tag that is by definition what 5X 10X the price tag of existing therapies you have to deal with that fact no do they do the problems… all I’m saying is the fact of that new problem that you have created means that we have to temper our enthusiasm about the progress that we’ve made
S.P
In other words we must listen to economists… now if you’re bringing up infectious disease… if there’s just no comparison between the vulnerability of the human population in the past compared to the present… Matt mentioned a an epidemic in France is also the Black Death which wiped out a quarter of the population of Europe… there are the Americas were decimated by the introduction of diseases from the old world as was the old world by the introduction of syphilis from that from the new world… the rate of death from infectious diseases absolutely plunged and there are dozens of new antibiotics in the pipeline there of course there are science fiction scenarios in which the proverbial Bulgarian teenager invents the super bug in his garage but on the other hand we have a massive and increasingly sophisticated network of expertise in molecular biology that is mastering the machinery of life like in a way that mitigates risks that make them a tiny fraction of what humanity has lived with throughout its existence.
M.R
One of you, I can’t remember which because you both look so alike but what one of you one of you mocked the worm the guinea worm if I remember right it’s worth just talking like the guinea I was just after you’d mocked Aeschylus and what the guinea worm does there were – there were 3.8 million people with this in the late 1980s … it grows down inside your leg till it comes by only seeded like unlike at Arapahoe stick rounded a droid burst an inch at a time over several months … now Jimmy Carter said we can get rid of this all we need is better fill to drinking water and we can get rid of it last year there were just a handful of about cases in South Sudan… that’s all that’s left…
A.B
It’s not the case that everything’s getting worse or that no progress has been made it’s the attitude towards the future that I think we’re trying to put our finger on Mr. Pinker made there was a charming moment in the green room earlier today when Stephen said wouldn’t it be funny if walking home, I happen to be bludgeoned to death by a stranger given my philosophy wouldn’t it be funny?
We laughed and Stephen laughed and I think it comes to the heart of what we’re saying the reason it was funny – there’s an old Jewish saying “man thinks God laughs” in other words it’s a lesson in modesty and Stephen was in this little throwaway joke in the greenroom admitting that for whatever his theories etc he remains vulnerable he remains motile he might be bludgeoned to death… his grand Pollyannish narrative could be undermined and I think ultimately this is what Malcolm and I are saying we’re not saying that it is amazing how many things have happened and we’re simply trying to caution that in your attitude there is a brittleness which out there becomes sometimes a kind of secularized the scientific messianic tone which can be pretty grating and get in the way of properly accepting what life is going to be like … which is cyclical
M.R
Are you seriously suggesting that if Steve is bludgeoned to death tonight I should give up my view of the world?
A.B
If you were to go home to bed having put a drape over Stephens body and seen him off at the mall and reassured yourself with some statistics that actually very unlikely
M.G.
Many things you know occurred to me as I listened to the two of them I suppose I can recount my thoughts at this time… one was one was I wish I had the kind of cheerful self confidence that those two have that whenever I were to imagine a worst-case scenario I could dismiss it as a science fiction fantasy… that’s like what a wonderful way I suppose to banish all unfortunate thoughts… I wish that had occurred to me when I was at my most troubled and angst-ridden as a teenager I would have had a much happier adolescence …my other point in listening Tim Matt Ridley and that quite hilarious discussion about the hypothetical bludgeoning of our dear friend Mr. Pinker I do think Alan had a very good point which is we are asking for just a little bit of a little moment of introspection.. a little … an understanding that these questions cannot be resolved entirely through a simple appeal to statistics… and to what ran in nature or the journal science last week or we’d like them to step outside of their very narrowly constrained scientific universe and just consider these problems in the light of their full complexity… that’s really what this side is asking for
S.P.
I’m willing to accept those odds I I will I think that if I get blood room to death tonight that Matt will concede but if I can tweet tomorrow morning that rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated then that I would maintain that our side will win because the chances of any of us being bludgeoned to death are extremely small and a fraction of what they were several centuries ago… in terms of simplicity vs. complexity Malcolm are you saying that a scientific approach the problem is the simplistic one that instead we should look to Aeschylus or we should look to science fiction?
I would maintain that if you want to understand the world… which way it’s going which scenarios are likely and most important how to deal with them… science is the sophisticated way to address these problems not the simplistic one, that is, if you want us to know what we should do to continue the trajectory to reducing disease to reducing hunger to increasing the lifespan to getting kids to school to reducing the threat for climate change, yes science is where you should look and know it is not the simplistic way to deal with these problems or to analyze them and again and not nor is fiction or the appropriate way to figure out how to deal with the very serious challenges that with that we have the way to deal with it is with science.
Mod
Because we’ve just heard from Malcolm and Steve and I’m onna change the order of closing statements slightly so Alan we’re gonna have you go up first.
A.B
Okay look I’m glad that Stephen really nailed his colors I mean I didn’t think he would just come out with something so crass he has hey John I just want to freeze the moment one of our great scientists has said that literature is not real it’s made up okay in other words he’s equated the fact of the work of the imagination as something that has no validity okay… this is one of our great minds he is arguing this and he is arguing that science has the answers and the humanities have none of the answers… this is what I thought I was terrified about Stephen has reassured me that I was right to be terrified about it because it’s precisely this attitude ladies and gentleman that is so dangerous in scientists… the great scientists have known their limitations and have worked together with the humanities to understand the complexities of the human… what you have in front of you ladies gentleman is a specimen of a new kind of scientist who is so cocksure of what he and his lab can do that he has discarded 2000 years of the insights of the humanities and of religion and of anything that lies outside of the scientific method and this is highly reductive and highly dangerous you know it used to be the case that people who were very religious dreamt of a New Jerusalem a new dawn when all problems would be done away with through… the light of Reason… what these blend two gentleman represent is a secularized scientific version of that dream of building the New Jerusalem… it was dangerous then it it’s dangerous now because it breeds with it millennial fantasies of perfectionism which are very dangerous… you know across the border we have the United States which was built upon the idea of constructing heavenly Jerusalem here on earth through the use of religion… there is now in the United States a secularized scientific version of this which Steven Pinker represents….
In Canada and in Europe and in other parts of the world we remember older more complex kind of heritage where we accept that human nature cannot be made perfect and that in fact the best way of improving our laws our societies our relationships with one another is not to go in with a bunch of Statistics assuming that all the answers lie in science… believe me I am a firm believer in the wonders of science… like everybody I’m deeply on the side of those brave researchers who’ve wiped out all sorts of diseases in Africa but don’t ladies and gentlemen… allow this to sway you when assessing the motion because you can very much feel proud of what scientists have done without wishing as this team would like us to do to disregard all the complexities of the psyche or with no super natural inclinations we could call the soul that those problems and issues remain… that we have philosophy and art and other disciplines to deal with them and they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the sciences in the hope of making life not perfect but sometimes less painful… this is what I am arguing for… a more humane realistic version of the meaning of life.
M.R.
it is not a man who hopes when others despair who is regarded by a large class of persons as a sage said John Stuart Mill but the man who despairs with others hope… in other words we’ve always thought Casandra’s were wise and Pollyanna’s were foolish but history teaches us that this is the wrong way around Cassandra is nearly always wrong Pollyanna’s nearly or rarely been cheery enough given history the apocaholics of my youth were wrong to tell me that the world the future was locked was deadly grim … and they were wrong to teach me a counsel of despair about it but don’t go away with the idea that optimists like Steve and I think the world is perfect no idea where Alan got that idea…Of course we don’t think that we think quite the reverse we think this world is a veil of Tears, a slough of despond compared with what it could be, and will be in the future if we do the right things… I’m not an optimist by temperament but by evidence… that’s what changes my mind we’re not saying don’t worry be happy we’re saying don’t despair be ambitious…. we’re not saying everything’s gonna be okay there’s going to be war and pain and misery in the future but there was even more in the past and by the way talking about the past I’ll give Alan a little bit of ancient Greece Hesiod lived in the Golden Age of Greece and even he complained that things aren’t what they used to be we’ve hardly started gathering the harvest of innovation that can improve people’s lives in the future and heal the planet they live on and that’s what makes Steve and me different from Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide Pangloss explains to Candide that the death of , people in the Lisbon earthquake must be for the best because God made the world and he’s able to make a perky don’t he’s not able to make an imperfect world so they must have been bad people..
Voltaire was actually teasing the theodicy of Leibniz and Mauxpetri perhaps because his mistress was sleeping with Mauxpetri but today we’d call Pangloss a pessimist somebody who thinks them that we really can’t improve our lot that the world is as perfect as it could be progress has been real progress is real progress has been good for the great majority of people progress has been particularly good for poor people and there’s no reason to think that it’s suddenly gonna stop now just because we’re not thinking enough about our soul or our psyche… there’s every reason to think that the future is going to be bright and I think you should vote for the motion if you think that.
M.G.
I want to talk about something that we haven’t talked about nearly enough this evening which is kind of astonishing but maybe it’s because the two steamed gentlemen on the other side of this proposition have essentially spent the entire time with their hands over their ears and eyes saying la la la la…. what I’m what I’m talking about course is nuclear war and the story that always stays with me and I think is bear bears repeating this evening is the story of what’s known as the Petrov incident… the of September a time when relationships between the United States and Soviet Union were at an all-time low… Korean airline double-oh-seven had just been shot down by the Soviets… we were on the brink as close as we have come perhaps to nuclear war in quite some time the Hawks are all lined up in Washington people in Yuri Andropov in Moscow believes America is on the verge of a nuclear first-strike and at that point at the height of that paranoia there is a lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov in the soviet air force who one day on his computer screen sees a report of an incoming nuclear missile from the united states to blow up the soviet union and he knows what the protocol requires him to do which is if the America has launched a first strike he has to retaliate in full force…so what did he do? Well he decided that it was a computer malfunction and he didn’t push the button and his hesitation is the real reason that we’re all here today right.. his hesitation is the reason that we’re all here today well the lesson is that’s obvious that couldn’t happen ever.. and this is this threat is a distinctly modern creation and the notion that there could be a computer malfunction that could lead us to blow ourselves up is as… the threat of that is as real today as it was years ago and the Petrov incident.
So I look at that and I return to the point that I made at the beginning of this debate… we have done extraordinary things over the last 100-200 years in reducing our interpersonal risks in making progress in the ways the everyday ways we live our lives… Mr. Pinker gave you areas in which we have made that kind of progress Matt really gave you more everything they said is true but it’s beside the point right…. at the same time as we have reduced those interpersonal risks we have increased our existential risks and for you to vote for this proposition you have to believe that that trade-off leaves us better off and it doesn’t…
S.P.
Everyone knows that the human mind is vulnerable to illusions biases and fallacies. several of these mental bugs fool us into believing that the world is in decline or an existential danger and always has been. First we’re overly impressed by memorable images and that’s what the world gives us… if it bleeds it leads… that’s why we fear shark attacks and plane hijackings when what we should fear is falling down the stairs and texting while driving…
Now smartphones have made billions of people into on-the-scene reporters and the world seems to contain more shootings and explosions than ever…. second, we confuse changes in ourselves with changes in the times… as we get older we become more aware of follies and dangers that have been there all along… so every generation becomes nostalgic for the good old days… third, everyone’s a social critic… as Hobbes observed competition of praise inclined to a reverence of antiquity for men contend with living not the dead… recently the epidemiologist Hans Rosling gave a thousand people a series of multiple choice questions on population, literacy, life expectancy, and poverty he noted if for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas and asked chimps in the zoo to pick the right answers they’d have done better than the respondents…..
the reason was that the respondents consistently picked answers that were too pessimistic… I got the same result in a survey about violence in the present in the past and this refutes the claim by Mr. Botton that the people’s default position is one towards optimism the facts are exactly the opposite…
Ladies and gentlemen you can do better than a chimpanzee the cure for cognitive fallacies is data and the trend lines are unequivocal on average people are living longer healthier richer safer freer more literate and more peaceful lives… while past performance is no guarantee of future returns the world is not Wall Street… we are unlikely to wake up one morning and face a world with smallpox slave auctions or surgery without anesthetics… to be sure the world faces formidable challenges and that brings me to my final port point… optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy so is pessimism the progress we enjoy is not the result of some mysterious historical dialectic or law of another inevitable progress or arc bending toward justice, it is the result of people spotting problems including nuclear proliferation and fragility and instead of moaning that we’re all doomed applying their ingenuity and their efforts to solving them.
A recent survey show that people who believe that our way of life will end in a century also endorsed the statement the world’s future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves… ladies and gentlemen don’t be among them it’s irresponsible enough to be a fatalist when the objective indicators say the world is getting worse… all the more so where they say the world is getting better….