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

But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them.

Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. They are less racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and authoritarian.¹⁰ They place a higher value on imagination, independence, and free speech.¹¹ They are more likely to vote, volunteer, express political views, and belong to civic associations such as unions, political parties, and religious and community organizations.¹² They are also likelier to trust their fellow citizens—a prime ingredient of the precious elixir called social capital which gives people the confidence to contract, invest, and obey the law without fearing that they are chumps who will be shafted by everyone else.¹³

For all these reasons, the growth of education—and its first dividend, literacy—is a flagship of human progress. And as with so many other dimensions of progress, we see a familiar narrative: until the Enlightenment, almost everyone was abject; then, a few countries started to pull away from the pack; recently, the rest of the world has been catching up; soon, the bounty will be near-universal. Figure 16-1 shows that before the 17th century, literacy was the privilege of a small elite in Western Europe, less than an eighth of the population, and that was true for the world as a whole well into the 19th century. The world’s literacy rate doubled in the next century and quadrupled in the century after that, so now 83 percent of the world is literate. Even that figure understates the literatization of the world, because the illiterate fifth is mostly middle-aged or elderly. In many Middle Eastern and North African countries, more than three-quarters of the people over sixty-five are illiterate, whereas the rate for those in their teens and twenties is in the single digits.¹⁴ The literacy rate for young adults (aged fifteen to twenty-four) in 2010 was 91 percent—about the same as for the entire population of the United States in 1910.¹⁵ Not surprisingly, the lowest rates of literacy are found in the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries, such as South Sudan (32 percent), Central African Republic (37 percent), and Afghanistan (38 percent).¹⁶

Figure 16-1: Literacy, 1475–2010

Source: Our World in Data, Roser & Ortiz-Ospina 2016b, including data from the following. Before 1800: Buringh & Van Zanden 2009. World: van Zanden et al. 2014. US: National Center for Education Statistics. After 2000: Central Intelligence Agency 2016.

Literacy is the foundation for the rest of education, and figure 16-2 shows the world’s progress in sending children to school.¹⁷ The time line is familiar: in 1820, more than 80 percent of the world was unschooled; by 1900, a large majority of Western Europe and the Anglosphere had the benefit of a basic education; today, that’s true of more than 80 percent of the world. The least fortunate region, sub-Saharan Africa, has a rate comparable to that of the world in 1980, Latin America in 1970, East Asia in the 1960s, Eastern Europe in 1930, and Western Europe in 1880. According to current projections, by the middle of this century, only five countries will have more than a fifth of their population uneducated, and by the end of the century the worldwide proportion will fall to zero.¹⁸

Figure 16-2: Basic education, 1820–2010

Source:Our World in Data, Roser & Nagdy 2016c, based on data from van Zanden et al. 2014. The graphs indicate the share of the population aged 15 or older that had completed at least a year of education (more in later eras); see van Leeuwen & van Leewen-Li 2014, pp. 88–93.