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

We could crow about historic triumphs in human rights, such as the abolition of slavery and the defeat of fascism. But however inspiring these victories are, they consist in the removal of obstacles we set in our own path. It would be like listing in the achievements section of a résumé that you overcame a heroin addiction.¹

We would certainly include the masterworks of art, music, and literature. Yet would the works of Aeschylus or El Greco or Billie Holiday be appreciated by sentient agents with brains and experiences unimaginably different from ours? Perhaps there are universals of beauty and meaning that transcend cultures and would resonate with any intelligence—I like to think there are—but it is devilishly difficult to know.

Yet there is one realm of accomplishment of which we can unabashedly boast before any tribunal of minds, and that is science. It’s hard to imagine an intelligent agent that would be incurious about the world in which it exists, and in our species that curiosity has been exhilaratingly satisfied. We can explain much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our mental life.

Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily. The physicist Sean Carroll argues in The Big Picture that the laws of physics underlying everyday life (that is, excluding extreme values of energy and gravitation like black holes, dark matter, and the Big Bang) are completely known. It’s hard to disagree that this is “one of the greatest triumphs of human intellectual history.”² In the living world, more than a million and a half species have been scientifically described, and with a realistic surge of effort the remaining seven million could be named within this century.³ Our understanding of the world, moreover, consists not in mere listings of particles and forces and species but in deep, elegant principles, such as that gravity is the curvature of space-time, and that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates itself.

Scientific discoveries continue to astound, to delight, to answer the formerly unanswerable. When Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they could not have dreamed of a day when the genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil would be sequenced and found to contain a gene connected to speech and language, or when an analysis of Oprah Winfrey’s DNA would tell her she was descended from the Kpelle people of the Liberian rain forest.

Science is shedding new light on the human condition. The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they often tinkered with precursors and approximations). The problems these thinkers introduced to us are today being enriched with these ideas, and are being probed with methods such as 3-D imaging of brain activity and the mining of big data to trace the propagation of ideas.

Science has also provided the world with images of sublime beauty: stroboscopically frozen motion, flamboyant fauna from tropical rain forests and deep-sea ocean vents, graceful spiral galaxies and diaphanous nebulae, fluorescing neural circuitry, and a luminous Planet Earth rising above the moon’s horizon into the blackness of space. Like great works of art, these are not just pretty pictures but prods to contemplation, which deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in nature.

And science, of course, has granted us the gifts of life, health, wealth, knowledge, and freedom documented in the chapters on progress. To take just one example from chapter 6, scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone. In case anyone has skimmed over this feat of moral greatness, let me say it again: scientific knowledge eradicated smallpox, a painful and disfiguring disease which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.

These awe-inspiring achievements put the lie to any moaning that we live in an age of decline, disenchantment, meaninglessness, shallowness, or the absurd. Yet today the beauty and power of science are not just unappreciated but bitterly resented. The disdain for science may be found in surprising quarters: not just among religious fundamentalists and know-nothing politicians, but among many of our most adored intellectuals and in our most august institutions of higher learning.