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

Sources: Ottosson 2006, 2009. Dates for an additional sixteen countries were obtained from “LGBT Rights by Country or Territory,” Wikipedia, retrieved July 31, 2016. Dates for an additional thirty-six countries that currently allow homosexuality are not listed in either source. The arrow points to 2009, the last year plotted in fig. 7–23 of Pinker 2011.

The worldwide progress against racism, sexism, and homophobia, even with its bumpiness and setbacks, can feel like an overarching sweep. Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s image of an arc bending toward justice. Parker confessed that he could not complete the arc by sight but could “divine it by conscience.” Is there a more objective way of determining whether there is a historical arc toward justice, and if so, what bends it?

One view of the moral arc is provided by the World Values Survey, which has polled 150,000 people in more than ninety-five countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population over a span of several decades. In his book Freedom Rising, the political scientist Christian Welzel (building on a collaboration with Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, and others) has proposed that the process of modernization has stimulated the rise of “emancipative values.”³⁶ As societies shift from agrarian to industrial to informational, their citizens become less anxious about fending off enemies and other existential threats and more eager to express their ideals and to pursue opportunities in life. This shifts their values toward greater freedom for themselves and others. The transition is consistent with the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs from survival and safety to belonging, esteem, and self-actualization (and with Brecht’s “Grub first, then ethics”). People begin to prioritize freedom over security, diversity over uniformity, autonomy over authority, creativity over discipline, and individuality over conformity. Emancipative values may also be called liberal values, in the classical sense related to “liberty” and “liberation” (rather than the sense of political leftism).

Welzel derived a way to capture a commitment to emancipative values in a single number, based on his discovery that the answers to a cluster of survey items tend to correlate across people, countries, and regions of the world with a common history and culture. The items embrace gender equality (whether people feel that women should have an equal right to jobs, political leadership, and a university education), personal choice (whether they feel that divorce, homosexuality, and abortion may be justified), political voice (whether they believe that people should be guaranteed freedom of speech and a say in government, communities, and the workplace), and childrearing philosophy (whether they feel that children should be encouraged to be obedient or independent and imaginative). The correlations among these items are far from perfect—abortion, in particular, divides people who agree on much else—but they tend to go together and collectively predict many things about a country.

Before we look at historical changes in values, we have to keep in mind that the passage of time doesn’t simply flip the pages of the calendar. As time goes by, people get older, and eventually they die and are replaced by a new generation. Any secular (in the sense of historical or long-term) change in human behavior, then, can take place for three reasons.³⁷ The trend can be a Period Effect: a change in the times, the zeitgeist, or the national mood that lifts or lowers all the boats. It can be an Age (or Life Cycle) Effect: people change as they grow from mewling infant to whining schoolboy to sighing lover to round-bellied justice, and so on. Since there are booms and busts in a nation’s birthrate, the population average will automatically change with the changing proportion of young, middle-aged, and old people, even if the prevailing values at each age are the same. Finally, the trend can be a Cohort (or Generational) Effect: people born at a certain time may be stamped with traits they carry through their lives, and the average for the population will reflect the changing mixture of cohorts as one generation exits the stage and another enters. It’s impossible to disentangle the effects of age, period, and cohort perfectly, because as one period transitions into the next, each cohort gets older. But by measuring a trait across a population in several periods, and separating the data from the different cohorts in each one, one can make reasonable inferences about the three kinds of change.