There’s real, scientific data that shows we’re doing better than ever!
In a May 2018 podcast, Dr. Jordan Peterson interviewed Dr. Steven Pinker about his new book, Enlightenment Now. But why should you care? Well, they talk a lot about why the human mind might be prone to see the present as worse than the past, even if it isn’t. And their discoveries just might relieve a little of your stress.
Read on and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He has come to fame over the last few years through the release of his best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, as well as (and perhaps more influentially) his YouTube and public speaking occurrences, in which he speaks about the importance of responsibility and meaning in life, while at the same time opposing identity politics and the viewpoint that society is a tyrannical patriarchy.
Dr. Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. He’s also been named a member of Time’s 100 Most Influential People and a multi-finalist for the Nobel Prize (neither small feats).
That said, Dr. Pinkner put out a new book recently that’s on the New York Times Bestseller List, called Enlightenment Now, and the book and its topics were the subjects of Jordan Peterson’s podcast.
Disclaimer: I have not read all of Steven Pinker’s new book.
Thankfully however, the two professors did a good job summarizing the book’s premise, which is this:
As much as it may seem like things are bad in this crazy world of ours (and many things are), things are actually better than they used to be. And by a LOT.
Let me list some examples. Did you know:
- From 1820 – 2015 the average life expectancy of the world population increased from 30yrs to over 70yrs.
- In the same time period, the percentage of the world living in extreme poverty dropped from 90%-10%.
- Other positive statistics include rates of war deaths, domestic violence, crime, starvation, education, literacy, and even a dramatic decline in lightning strikes!
Pinker dives into the environment too.
Since 1960, the world CO² emissions per dollar of GDP have dropped from 0.6 to less than 0.4 (we’re getting more efficient in our use of carbon even as the world economy grows).
This has a lot to do with the dramatic increases of efficiency gained by moving from wood to coal to natural gas, and now to wind, solar, and nuclear energy sources.Deforestation of tropical forests has dropped nearly 70% since 1970, and the number of oil spills per year (nearly 120 spills in 1970) has been reduced to less than 10 in 2015.
Pinker, of course, has a caveat.
“Like all demonstrations of progress, reports on the improving state of the environment are often met with a combination of anger and illogic. The fact that many measures of environmental quality are improving does not mean that everything is OK, that the environment got better by itself, or that we can just sit back and relax.”
But he goes on to talk about how important our energy efficiency improvements have been and lists some policy and technology changes that can force the large scale changes we still need (hint: carbon taxes and nuclear energy). Agree with it or not, read the chapter – you’ll learn a lot.
So, in so many ways, the bad things have gone down dramatically and the good things have gone up.
“BUT [these kinds of positive statistics aren’t] the kind of development that you’d learn about by reading the papers,” says Pinker.
No – everyone seems to know that the news is bad news. But why does it seem worse than usual?
Firstly, Pinker shows data indicating how the “tone” of news reporting has decreased greatly since 1945.
Additionally, Peterson and Pinker discuss how technology has, on its own, affected our perception and consumption of the news. Internet access means we’re more able than ever to see bad things happening all over the world. The sheer ease by which any single person can become a “videographer on the ground” (through the use of one’s smart phone) means we, as consumers of media, are more and more likely to see terrible events that are happening everywhere.
But don’t worry, the professors don’t only blame “the media” (at least not as terrible puppet masters of information looking to make us all depressed).
Rather, they dive in further, talking about why our brains themselves are actually dispositioned toward seeing (or perhaps remembering) more bad than good.
First, I’ll interject an outside reference I enjoy: Alan Watts.
As one of my favorite scholars and philosophers (a Brit who gave hundreds of talks in the 1960s and 70s on eastern philosophy) I’ve learned a lot from his work. One thing that sunk in the most is his description of our brains.
He says that despite our brains being the most powerful and complex things in the known universe, they have a key limitation: they’re “scanning mechanisms.”
Like radar, our brains pick up anomalies much more prominently than that which lies behind the anomalies. In art terms, human brains tend to notice the “object” and not the “field.” That’s just how we’re built. Additionally, we like to form finite experiences into “events.”
Pinker and Peterson explain how this same tendency of our brains to pick out anomalies and call them “events” tends to color our world toward the negative. See, good things (like a lasting peace in a given country, for example) don’t tend to be perceived by humans as “events.” More often they’re gradual evolutions, and seemingly devoid of occurrences. Conversely, negative things (especially that which warrants news coverage) often happen more rapidly.
This made me think: perhaps the famous quote “Rome wasn’t built in a day” should be followed by “but it burnt down in six.”
And while we tend to notice the negative events more often, the ratio by which we remember “notable things” (these negative turns of events) compared to “non-notable things” isn’t very accurate either. We, as humans, just aren’t very good at quantitatively comparing the length of time of good things (and appreciating them) to the occurrence of the bad.
I remember often wondering, as a child, “Why does it seem like I’m always at the END of a vacation?” It was as if that one single bummer-of-a-day always stood out more noticeably than the seven days prior to it.
Pinker and Peterson’s discussion was amazing to me; finally there was some reasoning behind the perpetual string of negative events we read about in the papers, and this inescapable feeling that things are really wrong, and getting worse.
And while I agree that their reasons seem valid, it got me thinking that perhaps there are more reasons too.
1) Memory failure – we can’t help but forget.
Imagine we were to mentally compare the number of current, negative events over a given time period to the number of past negative events over the same time period (say we compare one week this year to the same week 10 years ago, such that we’re comparing apples to apples). We simply won’t be able to accurately remember the number of past negative events – we’ll certainly have forgotten many. So when we bring up the news in the morning, it will seem like more bad things are happening now than they were.
So even if we weren’t dealing with the increased ability of the media to show us all the bad things (as Pinker explained with the smart phone revolution), we would likely still surmise that things are worse now.
I’m wondering if this is the reason for the “good old days” mentality that seems to be so prevalent among so many older people?
2) The worry that we’ll get complacent
Don’t we all worry a little that if we display data that says that things are, in fact, better than they were, that people might ease off at fixing the horrors of the world? I know myself, and my own ability to be complacent. I can certainly suspect that of others.
And isn’t there some sense that if I say that things are better, people around me might conclude that I’m somehow okay with, or justifying the negative things that are still happening?
3) Unfairness is what irks us most.
Most people agree that as a society we should pursue equality of opportunity. Concurrently, if we’re given the same opportunities, the choices we then make as individuals are our individual responsibility.
Pinker cited studies to show that while people are (to a given degree) ok with different outcomes in any given system (people earning different amounts of money, for example) the thing that people find least acceptable in any system is evidence that it might be unfair.
As soon as a system seems rigged, or we find evidence of people abusing the system, we tend to cry foul.
Peterson gave an example of leftists and their arguments that the elites have abused the capitalist system to gain or maintain power, and I think that’s a fair example. Power corrupts, and it’s important to always analyze those in power to minimize corruption.
The same fear of “unfairness” exists with those of the right – especially when it comes to issues like illegal immigration or welfare abuse, for example. Discarding outright racists and bigots, there’s a real (and logical) distaste for people who aren’t playing by the rules.
I’d hypothesize that as we grow up and become more educated, we become more aware of the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which people are abusing the systems in which we live and operate. It’s easy to get more resentful as we get older, especially if the system doesn’t get fixed in the way that we want it, and this may add to our sense that “things used to be better.”
4) To get what we want, we have to convince others that something is wrong
If everyone is desiring more (more money, more power, etc), then everyone is desiring change of some sort. And change often requires getting other people to do what you want.
Talk to any marketer – getting others to do what you want requires convincing them that there’s a problem that THEY have, a problem that must be solved. Whether it’s buying the next iPhone, or running for political office, our society is inundated with messages that things are WRONG.
And maybe our politics and our consumerism ARE actually worse than they used to be – I don’t know (do we spend more time buying things? Perhaps).
But that aside, the very mechanisms and messaging of politics and consumerism are hell-bent on convincing you that things aren’t right, and that something must be done.
And finally…
5) Our inability to see balance
We, as humans, have a hard time perceiving that it might actually be the very push and pull of our different politics and ways of thinking that lead to progress.
As Alan Watts likes to remind us, there are organisms in our body that are at constant war with each other, fighting and eating and battling for domination. I’m sure that the white blood cells, if polled, would tell you how much of a problem the bacteria are. And yet the bacteria play a pivotal role in our body’s health too.
This scenario, though seen as a battle at the microscopic level, is actually the balance that allows our body to function as a larger organism.
As Jordan Peterson likes to say, “We need both the right and the left – the right to maintain some order and hierarchy, and the left to fight for those at the bottom and prevent the hierarchy from becoming ossified.”
In conclusion…
Steven Pinker leaves us with his take on what’s especially good right now.
“The fact that there are new efforts to transcend political divisions and find out what works, to depoliticize and rationalize problems like poverty, like climate change, like war and peace, like crime – those are very much worth supporting.”
In Bill Gates’ review of the book he wrote, “The world is getting better, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I’m glad we have brilliant thinkers like Steven Pinker to help us see the big picture.”
So yeah, listen to the podcast. Read the book.
You’ll walk away feeling both more at ease, and at the same time more empowered to make the positive changes that we of course still need in this world.
Don’t get me wrong – bad things are still happening. It’s just that despite all the bad news you read, it’s not indicative of the world going to… well, you know where.
And with a little good news and recognition of the POSITIVE things the human race has done and continues to do, we all might even hate each other a little less.
But still, please vote.
Hey – we all have opinions. I’d love yours. Please comment below, and if you think that this topic is interesting, beneficial, or controversial, please consider sharing it on your social media – let’s get the conversation happening!
~Cecil
UPDATE: I’m now a full-time recording artist out of Nashville, TN (Cecil Charles). I’m supporting myself (and releasing one, studio quality song per month for 2019 and, well, as far into the future as I can see), by generous listeners and readers like you.
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