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

The human body is a fragile thing. Even when people keep themselves fueled, functioning, and free of pathogens, they are vulnerable to “the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.” Our ancestors were easy pickings for predators like crocodiles and large cats. They were done in by the venom of snakes, spiders, insects, snails, and frogs. Trapped in the omnivore’s dilemma, they could be poisoned by toxic ingredients in their expansive diets, including fish, beans, roots, seeds, and mushrooms. As they ventured up trees in pursuit of fruit and honey, their bodies obeyed Newton’s law of universal gravitation and were liable to accelerate toward the ground at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second. If they waded too far into lakes and rivers, the water could cut off their air supply. They played with fire and sometimes got burned. And they could be victims of malice aforethought: any technology that can fell an animal can fell a human rival.

Few people get eaten today, but every year tens of thousands die from snakebites, and other hazards continue to kill us in large numbers.¹ Accidents are the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer, and respiratory diseases. Worldwide, injuries account for about a tenth of all deaths, outnumbering the victims of AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, and are responsible for 11 percent of the years lost to death and disability.² Personal violence also takes a toll: it is among the top five hazards for young people in the United States and for all people in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.³

People have long given thought to the causes of danger and how they might be forfended. Perhaps the most stirring moment in Jewish religious observance is a prayer recited before the open Torah ark during the Days of Awe:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed: . . . who will live and who will die; who will die at his allotted time and who before his time, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangling and who by stoning. . . . But repentance, prayer, and charity annul the severity of the decree.

Fortunately, our knowledge of how fatalities are caused has gone beyond divine inscription, and our means of preventing them have become more reliable than repentance, prayer, and charity. Human ingenuity has been vanquishing the major hazards of life, including every one enumerated in the prayer, and we are now living in the safest time in history.

In previous chapters we have seen how cognitive and moralistic biases work to damn the present and absolve the past. In this one we will see another way in which they conceal our progress. Though lethal injuries are a major scourge of human life, bringing the numbers down is not a sexy cause. The inventor of the highway guard rail did not get a Nobel Prize, nor are humanitarian awards given to designers of clearer prescription drug labels. Yet humanity has benefited tremendously from unsung efforts that have decimated the death toll from every kind of injury.

Who by sword. Let’s begin with the category of injury that is the hardest to eliminate precisely because it is no accident, homicide. With the exception of the world wars, more people are killed in homicides than wars.⁴ During the battle-scarred year of 2015 the ratio was around 4.5 to 1; more commonly it is 10 to 1 or higher. Homicides were an even greater threat to life in the past. In medieval Europe, lords massacred the serfs of their rivals, aristocrats and their retinues fought each other in duels, brigands and highwaymen murdered the victims of their robberies, and ordinary people stabbed each other over insults at the dinner table.⁵