Pink And Gold

It's not just the data, it's how you interpret it.

I recently finished Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, where he claims life has improved tremendously in the past 200 years or so, and we can expect the trends to continue.  On my last trip to the library, I looked at Jonah Goldberg's new book, Suicide Of The West.  As you can tell from the title, he thinks things are on the verge of collapse.

But here's the funny part.  Both rely on pretty much the same data.  Pinker's book has pages and pages of charts showing the mind-boggling improvements since 1800.  And Goldberg says the same thing in his introduction, while including an appendix that reproduces much of the same data that Pinker offers. (The data have been out there for anyone to see for some time--both these books explain the data, they didn't create it.)

Pinker's argument is pretty simple.  Values supported by the Enlightenment, such as logic and science (as opposed to superstition and appeal to authority), helped draw us up out of the swamp.  Certain things work, like free markets and democracy and basic rights.  We have been following Enlightenment ideals and show no sign of stopping any time soon, so the most likely outcome is further improvement.

Goldberg claims that recent history is an outlier.  He refers to the rise in wealth and well-being in the past two centuries as the Miracle.  Democracy, human rights, capitalism and so on are not the norm for society, or human nature.  People were around for tens of thousands of years, living in squalor, and the only era where things really got better for just about everyone has been the past couple centuries.

So there's no reason why we might not return to the muck.  And Goldberg sees troubling trends, as modern politics turns its back on the classical liberalism that served us so well, and instead embraces "tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics."

So who's right?  I'd lean heavily toward Pinker.  Yes, there are storm clouds on the horizon, but there area always storm clouds on the horizon.  The rise in human fortune since 1800 has been spectacular, but not always steady--there have repeatedly been movements ready to drag us down if they get big enough, but they haven't been able to stop the overall progress of the past two hundred years.  In fact, even the people in the groups that seem to worry Goldberg still tend to accept the basic principles that have helped humanity progress. (And even among the worst of the worst, things have still generally been getting better over the decades.)

Sure, some movements seem to be leading toward authoritarianism, and know-nothingism, but really, they can't compare to the threats of fascism and communism not that long ago, to pick two obvious examples.  And the amount of people living in freedom and prosperity today are much greater than ever before--even if they backslide a bit they'd still be better off than the norm not too long ago.

It's not as if we haven't seen Goldberg's thesis before.  It's a perennial.  Books written ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago and so on say pretty much the same thing.  Apparently, the Western world and all it represents is always on the brink of annihilation.

I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about groups and ideas that move us in the wrong direction (even assuming we can assess them properly). But the need to claim the end is near requires a strained interpretation of the available data.