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

In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen sidesteps this trap by proposing that the ultimate goal of development is to enable people to make choices: strawberries and cream for those who want them. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has taken the idea a step further and laid out a set of “fundamental capabilities” that all people should be given the opportunity to exercise.³ One can think of them as the justifiable sources of satisfaction and fulfillment that human nature makes available to us. Her list begins with capabilities that, as we have seen, the modern world increasingly allows people to realize: longevity, health, safety, literacy, knowledge, free expression, and political participation. It goes on to include aesthetic experience, recreation and play, enjoyment of nature, emotional attachments, social affiliations, and opportunities to reflect on and engage in one’s own conception of the good life.

In this chapter I’ll show how modernity is increasingly allowing people to exercise these capabilities, too—that life is getting better even beyond the standard economists’ metrics like longevity and wealth. Admittedly, many people still don’t like strawberries and cream, and they may exercise one capability—enjoying their freedom to watch television and play video games—to forgo others, such as aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment of nature. (When Dorothy Parker was challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she answered, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”) But an expansive cafeteria of opportunities to enjoy the aesthetic, intellectual, social, cultural, and natural delights of the world, regardless of which ones people put on their trays, is the ultimate form of progress.

Time is what life is made of, and one metric of progress is a reduction in the time people must devote to keeping themselves alive at the expense of the other, more enjoyable things in life. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said the ever-merciful God as he exiled Adam and Eve from Eden, and for most people throughout history, sweat they did. Farming is a sunup-to-sundown occupation, and though foragers hunt and gather just a few hours a day, they spend many more hours processing the food (for example, smashing rock-hard nuts), in addition to gathering firewood, carrying water, and laboring at other chores. The San of the Kalahari, once called “the original affluent society,” turn out to work at least eight hours a day, six to seven days a week, on food alone.⁴

The 60-hour workweek of Bob Cratchit, with only one day off a year (Christmas, of course), was in fact lenient by the standards of his era. Figure 17-1 shows that in 1870 Western Europeans worked an average of 66 hours a week (the Belgians worked 72), while Americans worked 62 hours. Over the past century and a half, workers have increasingly been emancipated from their wage slavery, more dramatically in social-democratic Western Europe (where they now work 28 fewer hours a week) than in the go-getter United States (where they work 22 fewer hours).⁵ As late as the 1950s, my paternal grandfather worked behind the cheese counter in an unheated Montreal market day and night, seven days a week, afraid to ask for shorter hours lest he be replaced. When my young parents protested on his behalf, he was given sporadic days off (which the owner no doubt perceived, like Scrooge, as “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket”), until better labor-law enforcement gave him a predictable six-day workweek.

Figure 17-1: Work hours, Western Europe and US, 1870–2000

Source: Roser 2016t, based on data from Huberman & Minns 2007 on full-time production workers (both sexes) in nonagricultural activities.

Though a lucky few of us are paid to exercise our fundamental capabilities and willingly put in Victorian hours, most workers are grateful for the two dozen extra hours a week they have available to fulfill themselves in other ways. (On his hard-won day off, my grandfather would read the Yiddish papers, dress up in a jacket, tie, and fedora, and visit his sisters or my family.)