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

The Brooklyn Dodgers, before they moved to Los Angeles, had been named after the city’s pedestrians, famous for their skill at darting out of the way of hurtling streetcars. (Not everyone in that era succeeded: my grandfather’s sister was killed by a streetcar in Warsaw in the 1910s.) Like the lives of drivers and passengers, the lives of pedestrians have become more precious, thanks to lights, crosswalks, overpasses, traffic law enforcement, and the demise of hood ornaments, bumper bullets, and other chrome-plated weaponry. Figure 12-4 shows that walking the streets of America today is six times as safe as it was in 1927.

Figure 12-4: Pedestrian deaths, US, 1927–2015

Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For 1927–1984: Federal Highway Administration 2003. For 1985–1995: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 1995. For 1995–2005: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2006. For 2005–2014: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2016. For 2015: National Center for Statistics and Analysis 2017.

The almost 5,000 pedestrians killed in 2014 is still a shocking toll (just compare it with the 44 killed by terrorists to much greater publicity), but it’s better than the 15,500 who were mowed down in 1937, when the country had two-fifths as many people and far fewer cars. And the biggest salvation is to come. Within a decade of this writing, most new cars will be driven by computers rather than by slow-witted and scatterbrained humans. When robotic cars are ubiquitous, they could save more than a million lives a year, becoming one of the greatest gifts to human life since the invention of antibiotics.

A cliché in discussions of risk perception is that many people have a fear of flying but almost no one a fear of driving, despite the vastly greater safety of plane travel. But the overseers of air traffic safety are never satisfied. They scrutinize the black box and wreckage after every crash, and have steadily made an already safe mode of transportation even safer. Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

Figure 12-5: Plane crash deaths, 1970–2015

Source: Aviation Safety Network 2017. Data on the number of passengers are from World Bank 2016b.

Who by water and who by fire. Well before the invention of cars and planes, people were vulnerable to lethal dangers in their environments. The sociologist Robert Scott began his history of life in medieval Europe as follows: “On December 14, 1421, in the English city of Salisbury, a fourteen-year-old girl named Agnes suffered a grievous injury when a hot spit pierced her torso.” (She was reportedly cured by a prayer to Saint Osmund.)⁴⁶ It was just one example of how the communities of medieval Europe were “very dangerous places.” Infants and toddlers, who were left unattended while their parents worked, were especially vulnerable, as the historian Carol Rawcliffe explains:

The juxtaposition in dark, cramped surroundings of open hearths, straw bedding, rush-covered floors and naked flames posed a constant threat to curious infants. [Even at play] children were in danger because of ponds, agricultural or industrial implements, stacks of timber, unattended boats and loaded wagons, all of which appear with depressing frequency in coroners’ reports as causes of death among the young.⁴⁷

The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society notes that “to modern audiences, the image of a sow devouring a baby, which appears in Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale,’ borders on the bizarre, but it almost certainly reflected the common threat that animals posed to children.”⁴⁸

Adults were no safer. A Web site called Everyday Life and Fatal Hazard in Sixteenth-Century England (sometimes known as the Tudor Darwin Awards) posts monthly updates on the historians’ analyses of coroners’ reports. The causes of death include eating tainted mackerel, getting stuck while climbing through a window, being crushed by a stack of peat slabs, being strangled by a strap that hung baskets from one’s shoulders, plunging off a cliff while hunting cormorants, and falling onto one’s knife while slaughtering a pig.⁴⁹ In the absence of artificial lighting, anyone who ventured out after dark faced the risk of drowning in wells, rivers, ditches, moats, canals, and cesspools.