Life is better today than it has ever been before and Steven Pinker has the data to show us how and why. He posits that reason, science, and humanism (all Enlightenment values) are foundational to the progress that humankind has made and why we experience the relative luxuries that we do today. The average human alive today can expect to live well into their 70s or 80s (depending on what country they’re in), when just a century ago the global average life expectancy was around 33. That statistic alone is proof that we are doing something right.
Pinker examines his research through the lens of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in an isolated system entropy never decreases. In physics, entropy is the loss of energy available to do work, and because the total amount of energy in a system is constant (the First Law of Thermodynamics) it can never decrease. So, if you have an isolated system unencumbered by outside forces, that system will “become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes” as it continues to exist and transfer energy back and forth. Basically, the flow of energy will always work against us if we let it. For example, a cup of coffee will cool down as its heat leaves and it approaches the temperature of the room it is in. The fast-moving molecules in the hot coffee want to find equilibrium with the slower-moving cooler molecules of the room (pretending, for the sake of this example, that this room is a closed system). While this law was originally codified in the name of physics, it has a socially-ordered application as well. We humans have directed enormous amounts of energy towards bettering our collective existence, and if we stop, entropy will take the reins. “Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal silver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities” Pinker writes, and continues: “far more of the arrangements of matter found on Earth are of no worldly use to us, so when things change without a human agent directing the change, they are likely to change for the worse.” To use our hot beverage example as a metaphor, the societies that humankind have developed over time are like a hot cup of coffee (in the form of peace and prosperity), and we must continually keep them warm through applications of reason, science, and humanism, for if we ever stop applying progressive energy and let it cool, the worse off humanity would objectively become (and things like tyranny and violence would reemerge en mass again).
Through this lens of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Pinker shows (with literal graphs) the many ways in which we Homo Sapiens have improved over the course of our existence. For one example, “in [the past] two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.” Life today is healthier, wealthier, more equal, more peaceful, safer, more democratic, smarter, happier, and longer lasting than at any point in our history. “An American in 2015, compared with his or her counterpart a half-century earlier, will live nine years longer, have had three more years of education, earn an additional $33,000 a year per family member (only a third of which, rather than half, will go to necessities), and have an additional eight hours a week of leisure.” Reason has shown that people of different cultural and spiritual beliefs can coexist in harmonious communities. Humanism has led societies to provide children with education and play as opposed to hard work and toil. Science has given us the ability to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer on an industrial scale, enabling us to enrich depleted soil and feed billions.
With these statistical truths in mind, an important question that needs addressing is why we don’t feel better about it? Where are the news stories talking about the amazing acts of progress being made individually and collectively by different members of our global community? Pinker takes a shot at this answer as well. One explanation is what psychologists call the Availability Heuristic, which states that “people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind.” This explains why people can conjure up many examples of mass shootings, but not mass births of healthy babies born to healthy mothers. All of this leads to a second explanation: The news is overwhelmingly negative. While the goal of a news company is ostensibly to report the news, they cannot do this without an audience. And what is the best way to hold an audience’s attention? Stories of fear or destruction. Negative news trumps positive news by a wide margin. (Fun Fact: In the English language, there are around three-times as many words for negative emotions than positive ones.) With this in mind, it’s no wonder that regardless of progression in any field through any lens, we all still feel the presence of the negative areas of our lives. The daily news cycle keeps it fresh in our minds. We feel the burden of unhappy relationships, financial debt, and looming terrorism without appreciating that we have the opportunity to pursue fulfilling relationships in the first place, or that we have some money and the relative freedom to choose what we do with it, or that ‘terrorism’ has killed less people in the twenty years since September 11th, 2001, than died on that actual day. Once upon a time marriages were arranged, money couldn’t change anything in your life (if you were fortunate enough to even have any), and war was the norm. Instead of allowing cultural and political pundits to frame life today for us, Pinker believes we should let data lead the way, reasoning that a quantitative approach “is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic.” With this sentiment, I fervently agree.
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and through millennia of repeated applications of ever-progressing reason, science, and humanism, we humans have built a peaceful world out of a violent one. We have sewn safety with needles of chaos. We have grown democracies from the ashes of fascism. Against impossible odds, we have kept our cup of coffee warm, but looming threats like global warming and political tribalism require that we continue working together towards keeping social entropy at bay. What we have is precious, and we should be both grateful to those who came before us and disciplined enough ourselves to continue keeping our coffee warm. The moment we take our foot off the progress gas pedal, entropy will begin the process of slowing down and reverting us back to a state of chaos and poverty—what life was like before the Enlightenment.