Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Humanity’s conquest of everyday danger is a peculiarly unappreciated form of progress. (Some readers of a draft of this chapter wondered what it was even doing in a book on progress.) Though accidents kill more people than all but the worst wars, we seldom see them through a moral lens. As we say: Accidents will happen. Had we ever been confronted with the dilemma of whether a million deaths and tens of millions of injuries a year was a price worth paying for the convenience of driving our own cars at enjoyable speeds, few would have argued that it was. Yet that is the monstrous choice we tacitly made, because the dilemma was never put to us in those terms.⁶⁵ Now and again a hazard is moralized and a crusade against it is mounted, particularly if a disaster makes the news and a villain can be fingered (a greedy factory owner, a negligent public official). But soon it recedes back into the lottery of life.

Just as people tend not to see accidents as atrocities (at least when they are not the victims), they don’t see gains in safety as moral triumphs, if they are aware of them at all. Yet the sparing of millions of lives, and the reduction of infirmity, disfigurement, and suffering on a massive scale, deserve our gratitude and demand an explanation. That is true even of murder, the most moralized of acts, whose rate has plummeted for reasons that defy standard narratives.

Like other forms of progress, the ascent of safety was led by some heroes, but it was also advanced by a motley of actors who pushed in the same direction inch by inch: grassroots activists, paternalistic legislators, and an unsung cadre of inventors, engineers, policy wonks, and number-crunchers. Though we sometimes chafe at the false alarms and the nanny-state intrusions, we get to enjoy the blessings of technology without the threats to life and limb.

And though the story of seat belts, smoke alarms, and hot-spot policing is not a customary part of the Enlightenment saga, it plays out the Enlightenment’s deepest themes. Who will live and who will die are not inscribed in a Book of Life. They are affected by human knowledge and agency, as the world becomes more intelligible and life becomes more precious.

CHAPTER 13TERRORISM

When I wrote in the preceding chapter that we are living in the safest time in history, I was aware of the incredulity those words would evoke. In recent years, highly publicized terrorist attacks and rampage killings have set the world on edge and fostered an illusion that we live in newly dangerous times. In 2016, a majority of Americans named terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, said they were worried that they or a family member would be a victim, and identified ISIS as a threat to the existence or survival of the United States.¹ The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse. The political philosopher John Gray, an avowed progressophobe, has described the contemporary societies of Western Europe as “terrains of violent conflict” in which “peace and war [are] fatally blurred.”²

But yes, all this is an illusion. Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm. I will not count trends in terrorism as an example of progress, since they don’t show the long-term decline we’ve seen for disease, hunger, poverty, war, violent crime, and accidents. But I will show that terrorism is a distraction in our assessment of progress, and, in a way, a backhanded tribute to that progress.

Gray dismissed actual data on violence as “amulets” and “sorcery.” The following table shows why he needed this ideological innumeracy to prosecute his jeremiad. It shows the number of victims of four categories of killing—terrorism, war, homicide, and accidents—together with the total of all deaths, in the most recent year for which data are available (2015 or earlier). A graph is impossible, because swatches for the terrorism numbers would be smaller than a pixel.

Table 13-1: Deaths from Terrorism, War, Homicide, and Accidents

US

Western Europe

World

Terrorism

44

175

38,422

War

28

5

97,496

Homicide

15,696

3,962

437,000

Motor vehicle accidents

35,398

19,219

1,250,000

All accidents

136,053

126,482

5,000,000

All deaths

2,626,418

3,887,598

56,400,000

“Western Europe” is defined as in the Global Terrorism Database, comprising 24 countries and a 2014 population of 418,245,997 (Statistics Times 2015). I omit Andorra, Corsica, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and the Isle of Man.