In the last few months, three books have appeared hailing humanity’s ‘huge’ recent progress: Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It looks, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. And in the previous few years, several more were published on the same theme. Hence, Joshua Kim last week coined a new expression to describe this “genre”: ‘Prog. Lit.’ (Progress Literature). This new wave has been hailed by many; Bill Gates, for example, recently described Rosling’s book as “one of the most important books I’ve ever read” and Pinker’s as “my favourite book of all time”.
These books’ thesis is that humanity has made huge progress not just in health, longevity, education, technology, etc, but also in moral values, i.e. human rights, gender equality, democracy, and such. It is, the claim goes, a triumph of science and reason: Science has given us well-being; reason has given us moral progress.
Many examples can indeed be given to illustrate the progress made on both fronts: Extreme poverty (barely feeding a family) has dropped from four out of 10 families in the world in 1981 to 1 in 10 today; average life expectancy in the world has increased from about 48 years in the early 1960s to about 70 years today (it is 80 years in the more developed parts of the world); illiteracy in the world dropped from 38 per cent in 1970 to 14 per cent in 2015; child and mother mortality are at an all-time low. We spend much less time on housework and more on culture today; and so forth. Even our intelligence is increasing: we humans are now gaining 3 points on IQ (Intelligence Quotient) every decade (the Flynn effect).
Hans Rosling, who became famous through the spectacular animated charts and graphs he showed in his TED talks about human progress in various fields, stresses the importance of looking at the world through facts, not through the window of daily news. Indeed, the latter by nature tend to present only negative and short-spanned information, which then gives us a very wrong impression of the state of the world. Whereas statistical facts (thus the title of his book, Factfulness) show slow but steady progress over decades or centuries.
Steven Pinker further insists that the progress we are witnessing is not just in our material well-being, but more importantly in our moral standpoints, and this is due to the “enlightenment” (the age of reason replacing a history of religion and tradition) that the world has been living in recent times. Liberal values of human rights, gender equality, democracy, and such, have not only been adopted by the largest majority of people around the world; they have led to better governance and more opportunity, safety, and comfort for everyone.
As you might guess, while the above facts and statistics are all true and impressive, the story is not so simple. Indeed, the books, presentations, and interviews (Pinker in particular) have generated quite a bit of (healthy) debate. First, some have pointed out that one must be careful not to be selective in the data that one presents, whether the indicators that are chosen to illustrate the progress, the countries that are picked, or the time period that one selects in trying to highlight a given trend.
Corruption is a cancer
For example: In the United States, jails are fuller and more numerous than ever; in Europe, teenage suicide has been increasing in the last 30 years; education and economic opportunity even in the west depends strongly on where one is born or lives (schools are far from equal in any given country despite efforts by all ministries); scientific research is not open to everyone, no matter how smart or enthusiastic one may be; corruption is a cancer that has eaten up many countries; and so forth. Secondly, even if we leave aside these ills for a minute, the progress in terms of well-being has come at a high cost, namely the destruction of forests and lakes, a serious climate change problem, new deadly bacteria and viruses, etc. And last but not least: this progress has not brought equality and happiness to many communities, on the contrary.
Pinker responds that progress is not synonymous with perfection. The road to equality and happiness is still very long, and mistakes are made and problems are appearing along the way. But this should not make us ignore the huge improvements that we have made, thanks to science (in large parts) and rational approaches to the various problems of the world.
How then should we proceed to support progress without falling prey to some naive cheerfulness? We must avoid both fatalism (believing that the problems are too big and we, at least individually, are too small) and complacency (assuming that things are going great and we should just continue with what we’ve been doing). And as always, education has a very important role to play: We must teach youngsters how to analyse data critically, not just look at curves, as well as avoid biases and reasoning fallacies. Be positive and optimistic, but be critical at the same time. The future bodes well, but only if we hold its reins carefully.
Nidhal Guessoum is a professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. Twitter: @NidhalGuessoum.
