The EconomistFebruary 24th 2018 71For daily analysis and debate on books, arts and
culture, visit
Economist.com/culture1T
O ANYONE who reads a newspaper,
this can seem a miserable world. Syria
is still at war. Another lunatic has gone on a
gun rampage in an American school. The
tone of political debate can rarely have
been as crass and poisonous as it is today.
Front pages are grim for the same rea-
son that Shakespeare’s plays feature a lot
of murders. Tragedy is dramatic. Hardly
anyone would read a story headlined
“100,000 AEROPLANES DIDN’T CRASH
YESTERDAY”. Bad things often happen
suddenly and telegenically. A factory
closes; an apartment block burns down.
Good things tend to happen incrementally,
and across a wide area, making them
much harder to film. News outlets could
have honestly reported that the “NUMBER
OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY
137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY” every day for
25 years. But readers might get bored.
Negative news is one reason why peo-
ple consistently underestimate the pro-
gress humanity is making, complains Ste-
ven Pinker. To discern the true state of the
world, he says, we should use numbers. In
“Enlightenment Now”, he doesjust that.
The result is magnificent, uplifting and
makes you want to rush to your laptop and
close your Twitter account.
The world is about 100 times wealthier
than 200 years ago and, contrary to popu-
lar belief, its wealth is more evenly distri-
buted. The share of people killed annually
in wars is less than a quarter of that in theter medicine and sanitation allow people
to live longer, healthier lives, or that la-
bour-saving devices have given people
more free time, or that Amazon and Apple
offer a dazzling variety of entertainment to
fill it. People are also growing more intelli-
gent, and more humane.
In every part of the world IQscores
have been rising, by a whopping30 points
in 100 years, meaning that the average per-
son today scores better than 98% of people
a centuryago. How can this be, given that
intelligence is highly heritable, and clever
folk breed no more prolifically than less
gifted ones? The answer is better nutrition
(“brains are greedy organs”) and more
stimulation. Children are far likelier to go
to school than they were in 1900, while
“outside the schoolhouse, analytic think-
ing is encouraged by a culture that trades in
visual symbols (subway maps, digital dis-
plays), analytic tools(spreadsheets, stock
reports) and academic concepts that trickle
down into common parlance (supply and
demand, on average, human rights).”
Mr Pinker contends that this braininess
has moral consequences, since people
who can reason abstractly can ask: “What
would the world be like if everyone did
this?” That is consistent with the observ-
able spread of Enlightenment values. Two
centuries ago only 1% of people lived in de-
mocracies, and even there women and
working-class men were denied the vote.
Now two-thirds of people live in democra-
cies, and even authoritarian states such as
China are freer than they once were.
Belief in equality for ethnic minorities
and gay people has shot up, as demon-
strated not only by polls (which could be
biased by the knowledge that bigotry is
frowned upon) but also by internet activi-
ty. Searches for racist jokes have fallen by
seven-eighths in America since 2004.
Those who enjoy them are dying out: on-1980s and half a percent of the toll in the
second world war. During the 20th century
Americans became 96% less likely to die in
a car crash, 92% less likely to perish in a fire
and 95% less likely to expire on the job.
Mr Pinker’s best-known previous book,
“The Better Angels of Our Nature”, showed
that humankind has grown less violent.
His new one demonstrates that steady,
cumulative progress is occurring on many
fronts. For this he credits the values of the
18th-century Enlightenment, summarised
by Immanuel Kant as “Dare to under-
stand!” By applying reason to problems,
people can solve them—and move on to
the next. Trade and technology spread
good ideas, allowing rich countries to grow
richer and poor ones to catch up.Best of all possible worlds
Progress has often been stunningly rapid.
The vast majority of poor Americans enjoy
luxuries unavailable to the Vanderbilts
and Astorsof 150 years ago, such as electri-
city, air-conditioning and colour televi-
sions. Street hawkers in South Sudan have
better mobile phones than the brick that
Gordon Gekko, a fictional tycoon, flaunted
in “Wall Street” in 1987. It is not justthat bet-The state of the worldA future perfect
Because people can think logically, life will keep getting better, argues Steven
Pinker in his exhilarating new bookBooks and arts
Also in this section72 A Chinese adventure
72 Risk and rationality
73 Remembering Debussy
73 Journalism in film
74 The history of art, then and nowEnlightenment Now: The Case for Reason,
Science, Humanism and Progress. By
Steven Pinker. Viking; 576 pages; $35.
Allen Lane; £25