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

I’ll start with the case for continuing progress. We began the book with a non-mystical, non-Whiggish, non-Panglossian explanation for why progress is possible, namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. At the time skeptics could reasonably say, “It will never work.” But more than two centuries later we can say that it has worked: we have seen six dozen graphs that have vindicated the hope for progress by charting ways in which the world has been getting better.

Lines that plot good things over time cannot automatically be extrapolated rightward and upward, but with many of the graphs that’s a good bet. It’s unlikely we’ll wake up one morning and find that our buildings are more flammable, or that people have changed their minds about interracial dating or gay teachers keeping their jobs. Developing countries are unlikely to shut down their schools and health clinics or stop building new ones just as they are starting to enjoy their fruits.

To be sure, changes that take place on the time scale of journalism will always show ups and downs. Solutions create new problems, which take time to solve in their term. But when we stand back from these blips and setbacks, we see that the indicators of human progress are cumulative: none is cyclical, with gains reliably canceled by losses.³

Better still, improvements build on one another. A richer world can better afford to protect the environment, police its gangs, strengthen its social safety nets, and teach and heal its citizens. A better-educated and connected world cares more about the environment, indulges fewer autocrats, and starts fewer wars.

The technological advances that have propelled this progress should only gather speed. Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think), and genomics, synthetic biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, materials science, data science, and evidence-based policy analysis are flourishing. We know that infectious diseases can be extinguished, and many are slated for the past tense. Chronic and degenerative diseases are more recalcitrant, but incremental progress in many (such as cancer) has been accelerating, and breakthroughs in others (such as Alzheimer’s) are likely.

So too with moral progress. History tells us that barbaric customs can not only be reduced but essentially abolished, lingering at most in a few benighted backwaters. Not even the most worrying worrywart expects a comeback for human sacrifice, cannibalism, eunuchs, harems, chattel slavery, dueling, family feuding, foot-binding, heretic burning, witch dunking, public torture-executions, infanticide, freak shows, or laughing at the insane. While we can’t predict which of today’s barbarisms will go the way of slave auctions and autos-da-fé, heading that way are capital punishment, the criminalization of homosexuality, and male-only suffrage and education. Given a few decades, who’s to say they could not be followed by female genital mutilation, honor killings, child labor, child marriage, totalitarianism, nuclear weapons, and interstate war?

Other blights are harder to extirpate because they depend on the behavior of billions of individuals with all their human stains, rather than policies adopted by entire countries at a stroke. But even if they are not wiped off the face of the earth, they can be reduced further, including violence against women and children, hate crimes, civil war, and homicide.

I can present this optimistic vision without blushing because it is not a naïve reverie or sunny aspiration. It’s the view of the future that is most grounded in historical reality, the one with the cold, hard facts on its side. It depends only on the possibility that what has already happened will continue to happen. As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”⁴

In chapters 10 and 19 I examined replies to Macaulay’s question which foresaw a catastrophic end to all that progress in the form of climate change, nuclear war, and other existential threats. In the rest of this one I’ll consider two 21st-century developments that fall short of global catastrophe but still have been taken to suggest that our best days are behind us.