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

More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. . . . A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.³⁵

If the left and right are equally stupid in quizzes and experiments, we might expect them to be equally off the mark in making sense of the world. The data on human history presented in chapters 5 through 18 provide an opportunity to see which of the major political ideologies can explain the facts of human progress. I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have anything to add? Do the seventy-odd graphs entitle either side to say, “Bias, shmias: we’re right; you’re wrong”? It seems that each side can take some credit while also missing big parts of the story.

Foremost is the conservative skepticism about the ideal of progress itself. Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss, a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best-laid plans of mice and men. The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie.

Well, that’s wrong. Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion.³⁶ Good riddance. The arcs in figures 5-1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable.

The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism. Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st. Over the same time span, communism brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea–style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions.³⁷ Yet in a recent survey 18 percent of social science professors identified themselves as Marxist, and the words capitalist and free market still stick in the throats of most intellectuals.³⁸ Partly this is because their brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false dichotomy: a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws. And a free market can coexist with high levels of spending on health, education, and welfare (chapter 9)—indeed, some of the countries with the greatest amount of social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom.³⁹