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

A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones. By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.

The challenge in making the case for modernity is that when one’s nose is inches from the news, optimism can seem naïve, or in the pundits’ favorite new cliché about elites, “out of touch.” Yet in a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. As the philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy, and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will frustrate another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they are treated unequally. Moreover, among the perquisites of freedom is the freedom of people to screw up their own lives. Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform:

The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for—greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements—and so on, forever—and unpredictably.⁵²

Such is the nature of progress. Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy, and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion:

Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.⁵³

We don’t have a catchy name for a constructive agenda that reconciles long-term gains with short-term setbacks, historical currents with human agency. “Optimism” is not quite right, because a belief that things will always get better is no more rational than the belief that things will always get worse. Kelly offers “protopia,” the pro- from progress and process. Others have suggested “pessimistic hopefulness,” “opti-realism,” and “radical incrementalism.”⁵⁴ My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”⁵⁵

PART IIIREASON, SCIENCE, AND HUMANISM

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

—John Maynard Keynes

Ideas matter. Homo sapiens is a species that lives by its wits, concocting and pooling notions of how the world works and how its members can best lead their lives. There can be no better proof of the power of ideas than the ironic influence of the political philosopher who most insisted on the power of vested interests, the man who wrote that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Karl Marx possessed no wealth and commanded no army, but the ideas he scribbled in the reading room of the British Museum shaped the course of the 20th century and beyond, wrenching the lives of billions.