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

Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, Victimization Analysis Tool, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat, with additional data provided by Jennifer Truman of BJS. The gray line represents “Intimate partner violence” with female victims. The arrows point to 2005, the last year plotted in fig. 7–13, and 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 7–10, of Pinker 2011.

These forces can prevail over the long term even against the tug of populist backlash. The global momentum toward abolition of the death penalty (chapter 14), despite its perennial popular appeal, offers a lesson in the messy ways of progress. As indefensible or unworkable ideas fall by the wayside, they are removed from the pool of thinkable options, even among those who like to think that they think the unthinkable, and the political fringe is dragged forward despite itself. That’s why even in the most regressive political movement in recent American history there were no calls for reinstating Jim Crow laws, ending women’s suffrage, or recriminalizing homosexuality.

Racial and ethnic prejudice is declining not just in the West but worldwide. In 1950, almost half the world’s countries had laws that discriminated against ethnic or racial minorities (including, of course, the United States). By 2003 fewer than a fifth did, and they were outnumbered by countries with affirmative action policies that favored disadvantaged minorities.²⁷ A huge 2008 survey by the World Public Opinion poll of twenty-one developed and developing nations found that in every one, large majorities of respondents (around 90 percent on average) say that it’s important for people of different races, ethnicities, and religions to be treated equally.²⁸ Notwithstanding the habitual self-flagellation by Western intellectuals about Western racism, it’s non-Western countries that are the least tolerant. But even in India, the country at the bottom of the list, 59 percent of the respondents affirmed racial equality, and 76 percent affirmed religious equality.²⁹

With women’s rights, too, the progress is global. In 1900, women could vote in only one country, New Zealand. Today they can vote in every country in which men can vote but one, Vatican City. Women make up almost 40 percent of the labor force worldwide and more than a fifth of the members of national parliaments. The World Opinion Poll and Pew Global Attitudes Project have each found that more than 85 percent of their respondents believe in full equality for men and women, with rates ranging from 60 percent in India, to 88 percent in six Muslim-majority countries, to 98 percent in Mexico and the United Kingdom.³⁰

In 1993 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Since then most countries have implemented laws and public-awareness campaigns to reduce rape, forced marriage, child marriage, genital mutilation, honor killings, domestic violence, and wartime atrocities. Though some of these measures are toothless, there are grounds for optimism over the long term. Global shaming campaigns, even when they start out as purely aspirational, have in the past led to dramatic reductions in slavery, dueling, whaling, foot-binding, piracy, privateering, chemical warfare, apartheid, and atmospheric nuclear testing.³¹ Female genital mutilation is an example: though still practiced in twenty-nine African countries (together with Indonesia, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and Yemen), a majority of both men and women in those countries believe it should stop, and over the past thirty years rates have fallen by a third.³² In 2016 the Pan-African Parliament, working with the UN Population Fund, endorsed a ban on the practice, together with child marriage.³³

Gay rights is another idea whose time has come. Homosexual acts used to be a criminal offense in almost every country in the world.³⁴ The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham. A smattering of countries decriminalized homosexuality soon thereafter, and the number shot up with the gay rights revolution of the 1970s. Though homosexuality is still a crime in more than seventy countries (and a capital crime in eleven Islamic ones), and despite backsliding in Russia and several African countries, the global trend, encouraged by the UN and every human rights organization, continues toward liberalization.³⁵ Figure 15-5 shows the time line: in the past six years, an additional eight countries have stricken homosexuality from their criminal codes.

Figure 15-5: Decriminalization of homosexuality, 1791–2016