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

How should we think about the existential threats that lurk behind our incremental progress? No one can prophesy that a cataclysm will never happen, and this chapter contains no such assurance. But I will lay out a way to think about them, and examine the major menaces. Three of the threats—overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution, including greenhouse gases—were discussed in chapter 10, and I will take the same approach here. Some threats are figments of cultural and historical pessimism. Others are genuine, but we can treat them not as apocalypses in waiting but as problems to be solved.

At first glance one might think that the more thought we give to existential risks, the better. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher. What harm could there be in getting people to think about these terrible risks? The worst that could happen is that we would take some precautions that turn out in retrospect to have been unnecessary.

But apocalyptic thinking has serious downsides. One is that false alarms to catastrophic risks can themselves be catastrophic. The nuclear arms race of the 1960s, for example, was set off by fears of a mythical “missile gap” with the Soviet Union.¹ The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified by the uncertain but catastrophic possibility that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons and planning to use them against the United States. (As George W. Bush put it, “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”) And as we shall see, one of the reasons the great powers refuse to take the common-sense pledge that they won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons is that they want to reserve the right to use them against other supposed existential threats such as bioterror and cyberattacks.² Sowing fear about hypothetical disasters, far from safeguarding the future of humanity, can endanger it.

A second hazard of enumerating doomsday scenarios is that humanity has a finite budget of resources, brainpower, and anxiety. You can’t worry about everything. Some of the threats facing us, like climate change and nuclear war, are unmistakable, and will require immense effort and ingenuity to mitigate. Folding them into a list of exotic scenarios with minuscule or unknown probabilities can only dilute the sense of urgency. Recall that people are poor at assessing probabilities, especially small ones, and instead play out scenarios in their mind’s eye. If two scenarios are equally imaginable, they may be considered equally probable, and people will worry about the genuine hazard no more than about the science-fiction plotline. And the more ways people can imagine bad things happening, the higher their estimate that something bad will happen.

And that leads to the greatest danger of all: that people will think, as a recent New York Times article put it, “These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed.”³ If humanity is screwed, why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil fuels, or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die! A 2013 survey in four English-speaking countries showed that among the respondents who believe that our way of life will probably end in a century, a majority endorsed the statement “The world’s future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love.”⁴

Few writers on technological risk give much thought to the cumulative psychological effects of the drumbeat of doom. As Elin Kelsey, an environmental communicator, points out, “We have media ratings to protect children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a scientist into a second grade classroom and telling the kids the planet is ruined. A quarter of (Australian) children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older.”⁵ According to recent polls, so do 15 percent of people worldwide, and between a quarter and a third of Americans.⁶ In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.