The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured Steven Pinker, a well-known philosopher and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. What interested the Chronicle most was Pinker’s optimism. As interviewer Tom Bartlett said, ”Pinker writes that intellectuals hate ‘the idea of progress’ while happily enjoying its multitudinous comforts (‘they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia’).”[1] Pinker, in contrast, believes that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth,” as he wrote in the New Republic in 2007.
It does seem that many intellectuals are pessimistic about the future and also pessimistic about the past. That is, they devalue the progress that has taken place. For example, the status of women has changed enormously since the 1960s. (When I started working, prominent magazines like Time didn’t hire women reporters, just researchers who worked with male reporters). But Laurie Penny, a London writer, recently disparaged the positive story of “empowerment” she was taught to believe in. She can’t get beyond the fact that “behind every one of the brave and brilliant women I sketched in my schoolbooks were a great many men who tried to destroy her.”[2]
Robert J. Norell wrote a devastating book about the experience of Jim Crow (the racial segregation following Reconstruction and continuing until the civil rights movement). The book, The House I Live In, was written partly to show how much race relations have improved in the United States. But (unlike his more recent Up from Slavery, about Booker T. Washington) it received a cold shoulder, especially from academics. The story of progress is not all that attractive, it seems.
This pessimism—or perhaps it is negativism—turns up often. For more than twenty years I worked with an organization that promoted environmental protection through free markets and individual initiative (the Property and Environment Research Center, or PERC). We were optimistic, and we had to combat recurring fears of upcoming environmental disasters.
Environmentalists have been predicting catastrophes for decades (some predictions go back to the late 1800s—such as the fear of a “timber famine” as forests were being cut down). In my lifetime, I have seen these predictions: a population “bomb” in the 1960s; running out of energy in the 1970s; the perils of acid rain in the 1980s; global warming in the 1990s; the dangers of fracking in the 2000s, and now “climate change” (a newly minted label for global warming).
None of these has proven to be a serious problem. And these are just the big ones—there were the Alar scare, the garbage crisis, and more. Such issues constantly fade away. The only environmental prediction that had some validity was the claim that chlorofluorocarbons were creating an “ozone hole.” The impact was far less than the alarmists thought, but there was a measurable reduction in ozone in parts of the stratosphere.
Many authors other than Pinker have pointed out that human beings are much better off today than they used to be and the environment is much better protected than it has been for centuries. Among those writers are Wallace Kaufman, Julian Simon, Stephen Moore, and others. Even I have written about it, with Michael Sanera.
My recent interest in history stemmed from my enthusiasm for the great changes that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution. And I don’t mean just more machines and factories and high tech. Friedrich A. Hayek labeled the fundamental change that occurred slowly over time as the “extended order of human cooperation,” the relationships, built largely through trade, that have led to the increasing prosperity and elimination of deep poverty that we have seen around the globe.
Wallace Kaufman, the occasional co-blogger who inspired this post, listed four “hypotheses” to explain why historians and other academics might be pessimistic. I quote:
- First, Americans are still idealists and tend to measure the present by the polar star of absolute perfection.
- Second, history is largely taught as a record of conflict and human disasters.
- Third, few Americans know much history of any kind.
- Fourth, evolution has programmed the human mind to search for and react to threats.
These may be correct. Surely historians should lead the way in countering these dismal views. But, by and large, they don’t.
[1] Tom Bartlett, “Why Do People Love to Hate Steven Pinker?” Chronicle Review, Chronicle of Higher Education 2019 (n.d.), https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/hating-pinker?cid=wcontentgrid_40_2. (Subscription probably required.)
[2] Washington Post, March 8, 2019.
Thank you for the interesting commentary, Jane. As the other comments make clear, folks are deeply divided over the answer to what ought to be a relatively easy question: Is the world getting cleaner, safer, and more prosperous, or dirtier, less safe, and poorer? Julian Simon, Steve Moore, Vaclav Smil, Robert Bryce, and now Pinker have made what seems to me to be an overwhelming case for optimism on all three counts. The latest report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) also has an excellent summary of the data, it’s available online at http://www.climatechangereconsidered.org. Steven Vincent might look at what the NIPCC report says about acid rain and climate change… the former was solved a decade ago, and the latter is likely to produce more benefits than costs for at least the next century, and no predictions longer than that are credible.
I’ll suggest yet another reason for the pessimism that often includes prophecies of doom–the desire for moral superiority.
To be the historian that recognizes the great failures of humanity and predicts more to come, implies that the historian has a morally superior vision than those who created such suffering and such present and future crises.
While most of humanity lives in the best of all times for health, safety, longevity, knowledge, and much more, it is quite possible that the extraordinary powers we have developed will be our downfall, but not famine, not resource exhaustion, not war. In other words, not the plagues historians study and project into the future and not even climate change which we can control by geo-engineering rather than by the political feel good measures of unenforced and unfulfilled international protocols.
We might bring about our own demise through something like an engineered virus or bacteria. In a century or two Artificial Intelligence creating ever better AI might make us obsolete. Or gene edited transhumans might make today’s Homo sapiens as irrelevant as Homo erectus or Neandertals.
Meanwhile let us recognize that Homo sapiens has been a species unequaled in creativity by any other. We are the only species that has created a social system on the scale of nations and global cooperation. And we are the only species that constantly expanded its tolerance of social experiment and cultral differences or that has ever cared a hoot about saving the planet’s life forms, including ourselves.
Jane Shaw is right about the generally optimistic conclusions in my 2005 book THE HOUSE I LIVE IN: RACE IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY. The research was finished in 03, during a completely different time from now. We had had a succession of Republican and Democrat regimes that were fair and positive about immigration and race–in contrast to this hate-filled time presided over by #45 and his toadies in Congress. My mild attempt at prophecy back then demonstrated the truism that historians have enough trouble predicting the past accurately that we should never prophesy about the future. I even made the silly mistake of moving to enlightened NC at the moment Art Pope’s minions took over the legislature and made it the most reactionary in the US. To Jane’s point about we historians as grim reapers, I do not deserve to live out my golden years amid this anger and hate promoted at the highest levels of government–and thus I am driven to profound despair. The Reaper could hardly be more grim for me.
The “anger and hate” did not begin with the Trump candidacy nor is it the creation of a bigoted conservative movement. We should not forget the attack ads that portrayed conservatives pushing grandma and her wheel chair over a cliff or snatching school lunches from poor children or the widespread use of “pigs” for law enforcement officers. All this from the left that also constantly referred to the 2nd George Bush as stupid (albeit his grades were higher than their candidate Kerry). Nor are the conservatives those that have such a limited vocabulary that often they can express their anger only in F bombs. When you refer to people whose ideas you don’t like as “Art Pope’s minions” you are engaging in the same anger generation you don’t deserve to age into.
I agree that there is more pessimism than justified, especially concerning social and economic progress. But to assume that acid rain and global warming have not been (or continue to be) major problems is to deny basic science. The environment may be protected with more laws and regulations than previously (though the current administration is quickly changing that), but this does not mean that there are not serious problems that need to be addressed.
Steven Vincent