An Invitation to Optimism

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Penguin Random House, 2018, 524 pages, $35
____________________________________________

This is a terrific book! Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist whose discipline straddles natural and social science, serves us a rich menu of food for thought. He restates the core message of the Enlightenment with passion, facts and clarity: rational action and rule-bound behaviour can—indeed do—improve the human condition.

Pinker bases his argument on a dauntingly thorough survey of the analytical and empirical literature to show that the long-term trends in material wellbeing, nutrition, longevity, birth-giving and child mortality, health, individual freedom and indeed happiness show heartening improvements. Pinker rightly celebrates the fact that massive increases in per-acre productivity now allow the replanting of forests and the creation of nature reserves in many places. The commentariat are plain wrong when they tell us that the spread of suburbia around Sydney and a few coal mines in the Hunter destroy Australia’s chances to feed ourselves and help feed the world!

Pinker anticipates the dismissive arguments of Green and other misanthropic critics, Malthusian Jeremiahs and angst merchants. He tackles intellectuals, who deem only pessimism as virtuous, with convincing factual rejections. In this, he can speak from personal experience at the battlefront of public discourse, as his earlier books with similar hope-inspiring messages—for example that the level of violence has declined in the world as a whole—met with a barrage of criticism, based on sentiment and “fake facts”. In Enlightenment Now, intellectuals who demand perfection get short shrift—perfection is the enemy of improvement. Admittedly, the world is far from perfect. The poorest who have escaped dire poverty are still a long way from middle-class comfort. Admittedly, diseases persist and equality of outcomes is—and always will be—unattainable. Admittedly, reversals, lapses and mishaps deviate from the long-term trends towards a better life, as his many telling graphs show.

Pinker’s is not the only book to document recent improvements in the human condition. Pinker lists an armful of such books. Has any of these authors received a prize for telling the good news? No! Instead, city and premier’s awards, invitations to writers’ festivals and government arts grants are habitually bestowed on latter-day propagandists of the Charles Dickens variety, who judge poor people not from the alternatives they and their forebears have faced, but from the arrogant standpoint of the wealthy retrospective observer.

As someone who has taken a good look at the Third World, and not from the luxury hotel balcony, I have seen the triumph and joy of the many who have escaped dire rural poverty and earned a modest living in new industries. I can vouch from first-hand experience in newly industrial countries how liberating work in factories is for women who were previously house-bound, and for men whose only alternative was the arduous work of walking behind a buffalo through parasite-infested paddy fields. Joining a global labour force is not only a matter of pure material advancement—children no longer hungry, basic health care, movie tickets, a mobile phone—but also a matter of joy to have achieved a better, freer life than one’s parents had. Western intellectuals often dismiss these achievements as unimportant.

When I was the first Western economist permitted to visit the famine-stricken Chinese province of Sichuan in 1981, I witnessed at first hand the new freedom of poor peasants to produce for markets, the cheer of trading and the offer of new services. Housewives could now, without commissar permission, choose between different lunch options; and street tailors liberated girls from their dreary Mao suits. But when I wrote about this good news for an Australian journal, run by Mao-era leftover academics, my piece was published with the “health warning” that I was of course no China expert. I can therefore sympathise with the many real-world observers, quoted by Pinker, who get derided by the intelligentsia for not dwelling on the negatives.

For the Enlightenment message to be updated and broadcast anew, it is of course not enough to document past trends. Steven Pinker elucidates the causes. I liked in particular the first cause for the improvements in the conditio humana since the 1980s that he lists: the single most important contribution to new life opportunities for the world’s poor, he says, was Mao’s death in 1976. Since then, megalomaniac central-plan initiatives and massive social engineering have given way to a decentralised, individual knowledge search informed by markets. Millions of Chinese were suddenly able to satisfy the diverse demands of millions of others seeking a better life. After the 1960s, numerous dictatorial and stupid post-colonial leaders—such as Nehru with his Soviet-style industrialisation plans, or Nkrumah, who had the precious Gold Coast seed bank destroyed because it was a colonial leftover—gave way to a less inhumane generation of politicians and bureaucrats. Many of course were kleptocrats, but at least they allowed the people to create and keep some new wealth. The material improvements over recent decades owe much to knowledge-testing, millions of little production revolutions guided by market signals, including lately also from global markets.

Like Adam Smith, Pinker is not a fundamentalist who says that all government is bad. He comes across as a middle-of-the-road pragmatist who argues not only for a protective function of government, but also for a productive role as a provider of infrastructure and a redistributive one committed to poverty-eliminating social spending. Public-choice economists will disagree with him on the latter two functions.

A psychologist, Pinker does a more than creditable job in acquainting his readers with the core fundamentals of growth economics. He is wise to follow the inspirations not only of Adam Smith, but also of recent wise men of the discipline, such as Peter Bauer, Tom Sowell, Johan Norberg and Joel Mokyr. And he has the knack of making the basic theoretical conclusions memorable by telling quotes and episodes. Maybe he will manage to convince second-hand dealers of ideas, such as think-tankers and journalists, whom we in the economics profession have failed to free of their deep-seated pessimism. Maybe young people with an interest in global affairs and statistical facts will be inspired by his passion, learning and wisdom. Maybe young doctors and nurses who go to crisis areas for Médecins sans Frontières will learn that global health and life expectancy have been improving, numerous setbacks notwithstanding. Maybe Oxfam volunteers on well-funded bonking holidays will learn that most of the world’s poor improve their own lives without foreign aid. The arguments in the book are accessible for the general reader.

The substantial chapter on “Inequality” is a master class in statistical analysis and common sense. Pinker debunks the political arguments on relative income distribution, based on Gini coefficients, which have become a political factor highlighted by noxious populists on the Left and the Right. Relative income distribution must not be confused with absolute poverty, which has greatly declined across all countries since the 1950s, partly thanks to massive increases in social spending. More recently, relative income distribution has increased somewhat, not least because highly paid, unionised workers in rich countries now have to compete with newly skilled, eager workers in Third World locations. Moreover, relative income distribution is not suc
h a problem, because individuals typically move from one percentile to another in the course of their lives. Pinker documents how many individual Americans, who began their working lives in the lower middle class, moved into the upper middle class, while a new generation began in the “poor bracket”. On a world scale, relative income differentials have kept falling thanks to globalisation. Pinker invites anyone who still believes Thomas Piketty’s Marxist message to reflect on Piketty’s statement that the “poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910”. Pinker lambasts the socialists for not recognising that the 5 per cent poorest today are massively better off than the 5 per cent poorest were back in 1910. We are also told that people’s wellbeing is not determined by what some celebrity billionaire earns, but by whether they consider society and income opportunities to be fair and see themselves as getting ahead. It is ridiculous, Pinker tells us, to decry the fact that the author J.K. Rowling—by becoming a billionaire—worsened relative income distribution, when millions voluntarily paid her $10 or so for the enjoyment of reading her books or viewing Harry Potter films. Pinker, the psychologist, shows us just how wrong-headed the leftist theory of “status anxiety” is.

Pinker does not dwell on the inequality of wealth. I would add that, in countries like Australia, we have had the welcome trend that young people study longer, hence remain relatively poor longer, and old people accumulate more assets for a longer and more comfortable retirement. Both are worthwhile social developments. Yet, the mirror of Gini coefficients (which I call “envy coefficients”) now shows a more uneven wealth distribution, which is cause for the populist Left not only to dwell ceaselessly on undeserving millionaires, but also to propose new redistributive interventions.

Pinker is well qualified to address the bugbear that prosperity does not make us happier. The facts speak against the assertion that material wellbeing does not contribute to happiness and contentment. The misanthropes at the Australia Institute, who have fallen to “the occupational hazard of the social critic … evidence-free pronouncements about the misery of mankind”, should read Pinker’s Chapter 18 and eat their hearts out!

The book also tackles issues such as the environment (many quotable pearls of wisdom there, but also an acknowledgment that a wealthier world will address global warming), peace (big improvements), terrorism (slight increase in deaths), safety (huge decline in deaths), and political and civil rights—always casting the light of updated Enlightenment thinking on these issues. Pinker concludes that the facts have been “as unkind to right-wing libertarians … as to left-wing Marxists … people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending and judicious regulation”.

In the final—and at times garrulous-lengthy—part of the book, our polymath author returns to the basic Enlightenment ideas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The non-political ideals of reason (instead of myth-making), science (not fake-fact politicking) and genuine humanism will be required to ensure future human flourishing. That will not come automatically. But nor is a new Dark Age inevitable. Of course, all Enlightenment observers acknowledged that people were not consistently rational. Many people tend to hold myopic beliefs because they are shared within their social circle, instead of examining the evidence critically. Nonetheless, we ought to be rational.

The world has nevertheless become more rational (except in electoral politics). Knowledge is growing, thanks to systematic science that sheds new light on the human condition. Pinker pleads for more respect for science, including from right-wing politicians. There may be good reasons to “scorn scientific consensus”, he says, but we must beware of “broad-band know-nothingness”. He also warns against handing decision-making to scientists, who can be perilously naive and biased. But we must embrace true science, because it considers the world’s complexities as intelligible and tells us which (testable) insights are true, rejecting religious beliefs, dogmas and authorities. And finally, there is a need to reconsider humanity, a kind of thinking that emerged in Europe during the Reformation and Scientific Revolution when the emphasis shifted from salvation of the soul to practical improvement of life opportunities on Earth. Without humane motivation, reason and science would not achieve the great promise of a remade Enlightenment.

Since every reviewer is expected to prove his metal by a bit of nit-picking, let me offer three minor criticisms. First, when listing the many recent books arguing for rational optimism based on the facts, Pinker omits the pioneering master of these analyses, the late Julian Simon’s 1995 compendium on the State of Humanity. Second, Pinker makes the odd observation that German economist-sociologist Max Weber was an “assimilated German Jew”. News to me! Would that have also been news to Max’s staunchly Calvinist mum, who had such influence on him? News also certainly to Ludwig von Mises who, in his 2009 Memoirs, lamented Weber’s early death in 1920, because he, an Aryan of outstanding intellectual calibre, would have vigorously resisted the Nazis. Last and not least, I record my plea to depict long-term time series in graphs with a semi-logarithmic scale, lest a steady trend not create the misleading impression of cumulative improvement. While Pinker often only reproduces such misleading graphs, I would expect a high-class empiricist to do better. End of my nit-picking!

Just as the writings of John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, the American Founding Fathers, David Hume, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville lifted the spirits of their readers and inspired them to view the world and the future in a positive light, so can Steven Pinker (and the many others whom he quotes) inspire our generation. At a time when bad news and angst are spread through social media and increasingly left-leaning universities, when public figures from Al Gore to Pope Francis preach the ersatz religion of Greenism, when most Western polities are hopelessly polarised, when the West faces new challenges from China, Islam and mass immigration, and when Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un play nuclear Va Banque, Pinker’s elegant, sensible, informed and balanced call to reason, the scientific refinement of observed facts, freedom and humanity deserves to be widely noted. And it is more: it is a mighty invitation for us to be optimistic.