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

Pessimism among the intelligentsia can also be a form of one-upmanship. A modern society is a league of political, industrial, financial, technological, military, and intellectual elites, all competing for prestige and influence, and with differing responsibilities for making the society run. Complaining about modern society can be a backhanded way of putting down one’s rivals—for academics to feel superior to businesspeople, businesspeople to feel superior to politicians, and so on. As Thomas Hobbes noted in 1651, “Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.”

Pessimism, to be sure, has a bright side. The expanding circle of sympathy makes us concerned about harms that would have passed unnoticed in more callous times. Today we recognize the Syrian civil war as a humanitarian tragedy. The wars of earlier decades, such as the Chinese Civil War, the partition of India, and the Korean War, are seldom remembered that way, though they killed and displaced more people. When I grew up, bullying was considered a natural part of boyhood. It would have strained belief to think that someday the president of the United States would deliver a speech about its evils, as Barack Obama did in 2011. As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.

But relentless negativity can itself have unintended consequences, and recently a few journalists have begun to point them out. In the wake of the 2016 American election, the New York Times writers David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg reflected on the media’s role in its shocking outcome:

Trump was the beneficiary of a belief—near universal in American journalism—that “serious news” can essentially be defined as “what’s going wrong.” . . . For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incurable pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of discontent and despair to take root. . . . One consequence is that many Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in the promise of incremental system change, which leads to a greater appetite for revolutionary, smash-the-machine change.³⁰

Bornstein and Rosenberg don’t blame the usual culprits (cable TV, social media, late-night comedians) but instead trace it to the shift during the Vietnam and Watergate eras from glorifying leaders to checking their power—with an overshoot toward indiscriminate cynicism, in which everything about America’s civic actors invites an aggressive takedown.

If the roots of progressophobia lie in human nature, is my suggestion that it is on the rise itself an illusion of the Availability bias? Anticipating the methods I will use in the rest of the book, let’s look at an objective measure. The data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied a technique called sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005, and to an archive of translated articles and broadcasts from 130 countries between 1979 and 2010. Sentiment mining assesses the emotional tone of a text by tallying the number and contexts of words with positive and negative connotations, like good, nice, terrible, and horrific. Figure 4-1 shows the results. Putting aside the wiggles and waves that reflect the crises of the day, we see that the impression that the news has become more negative over time is real. The New York Times got steadily more morose from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, lightened up a bit (but just a bit) in the 1980s and 1990s, and then sank into a progressively worse mood in the first decade of the new century. News outlets in the rest of the world, too, became gloomier and gloomier from the late 1970s to the present day.

So has the world really gone steadily downhill during these decades? Keep figure 4-1 in mind as we examine the state of humanity in the chapters to come.

Figure 4-1: Tone of the news, 1945–2010

Source: Leetaru 2011. Plotted by month, beginning in January.

What is progress? You might think that the question is so subjective and culturally relative as to be forever unanswerable. In fact, it’s one of the easier questions to answer.

Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.

All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress.