# Enlightenment Now  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Steven Pinker]] - Full Title:: Enlightenment Now - Category: #books ## Highlights > Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. —Baruch Spinoza ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=108)) > Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. —David Deutsch ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=110)) > The sociologist Robert Merton identified Communalism as a cardinal scientific virtue, together with Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism: CUDOS.2 ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=239)) > The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering, and of the obvious demands of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing. —Alfred North Whitehead ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=272)) > l’esprit de l’escalier, the wit of the staircase—went ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=283)) > And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=293)) > The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense. We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights. In the memories of many readers of this book—and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of the world—war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=300)) > ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism). ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=308)) > The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=314)) > The Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=334)) > The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields, scientific, political, and moral: ([Location 347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=347)) > The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=360)) > 5 If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=365)) > (As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”) ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=371)) > The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=378)) > The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 ([Location 381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=381)) > To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=400)) > The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=412)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices that had been commonplace across civilizations ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=426)) > Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=446)) > As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=450)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > He only said that in a market, whatever tendency people have to care for their families and themselves can work to the good of all. ([Location 471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=471)) > If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=489)) > I’ll often refer to the statistical version of the Second Law, which does not apply specifically to temperature differences evening out but to order dissipating, as the Law of Entropy. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=516)) > The principles of information, computation, and control bridge the chasm between the physical world of cause and effect and the mental world of knowledge, intelligence, and purpose. ([Location 641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=641)) > Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny. ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=666)) > (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.) ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=673)) > When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=680)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=688)) > Awareness of the indifference of the universe was deepened still further by an understanding of evolution. Predators, parasites, and pathogens are constantly trying to eat us, and pests and spoilage organisms try to eat our stuff. It may make us miserable, but that’s not their problem. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=700)) > They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25 ([Location 731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=731)) > Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=754)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=767)) - Note: Natural democracy > (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits). ([Location 774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=774)) > Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=777)) > They absolutely do. Since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk, and the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment.1 They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=785)) > But my main reaction to the claim that the Enlightenment is the guiding ideal of the West is: If only! The Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since.3 No sooner did people step into the light than they were advised that darkness wasn’t so bad after all, that they should stop daring to understand so much, that dogmas and formulas deserved another chance, and that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=796)) > see how political ideology undermines reason and science.7 It scrambles people’s judgment, inflames a primitive tribal mindset, and distracts them from a sounder understanding of how to improve the world. ([Location 852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=852)) > Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=854)) > One form of declinism bemoans our Promethean dabbling with technology. ([Location 861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=861)) > not that modernity has made life too harsh and dangerous, but that it has made it too pleasant and safe. According to these critics, health, peace, and prosperity are bourgeois diversions from what truly matters in life. ([Location 867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=867)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “hollow men eating their naked lunches in the wasteland while waiting for Godot.” ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=871)) > Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the term will to power, recommends the aristocratic violence of the “blond Teuton beasts” and the samurai, Vikings, and Homeric heroes: “hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience, crushing everything, and bespattering everything with blood.”11 ([Location 874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=874)) > A final alternative to Enlightenment humanism condemns its embrace of science. Following C. P. Snow, we can call it the Second Culture, the worldview of many literary intellectuals and cultural critics, as distinguished from the First Culture of science. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=881)) > Science is commonly blamed for racism, imperialism, world wars, and the Holocaust. And it is accused of robbing life of its enchantment and stripping humans of freedom and dignity. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=903)) > “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=931)) > In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=956)) > The peace researcher Johan Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10 ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=974)) > It’s easy to see how the Availability heuristic, stoked by the news policy “If it bleeds, it leads,” could induce a sense of gloom about the state of the world. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=992)) > Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, . . . complete avoidance of the news.”15 And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”16 ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1002)) > A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, 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. ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1009)) > And since the 1950s the world has been swept by a cascade of Rights Revolutions: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, and animal rights. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1019)) > As for accusations of romanticism, I can reply with some confidence. I am also the author of the staunchly unromantic, anti-utopian The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, in which I argued that human beings are fitted by evolution with a number of destructive motives such as greed, lust, dominance, vengeance, and self-deception. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1066)) > David Deutsch observes, “The most important of all limitations on knowledge-creation is that we cannot prophesy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.”19 ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1080)) > Tversky.22 How much better can you imagine yourself feeling than you are feeling right now? How much worse can you imagine yourself feeling? ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1110)) > As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1124)) > 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.” ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1150)) > If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you’re in no position to turn your nose up at these values—or to deny that other people should share your good fortune. ([Location 1191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1191)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it. ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1196)) > But starting in the 19th century, the world embarked on the Great Escape, the economist Angus Deaton’s term for humanity’s release from its patrimony of poverty, disease, and early death. Life expectancy began to rise, picked up speed in the 20th century, and shows no signs of slowing down. ([Location 1236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1236)) > Until recently about one percent of mothers died in the process; for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1283)) > Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever don’t”—as amended by Davies’s Corollary—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.” ([Location 1368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1368)) > Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) and Joseph Lister (1827–1912) got them to sterilize their hands and equipment. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1398)) > Between 2000 and 2015, the number of deaths from malaria (which in the past killed half the people who had ever lived) fell by 60 percent. The World Health Organization has adopted a plan to reduce the rate by another 90 percent by 2030, and to eliminate it from thirty-five of the ninety-seven countries in which it is endemic today (just as it was eliminated from the United States, where it had been endemic until 1951).11 ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1471)) > Many of those who were not starving were too weak to work, which locked them into poverty. Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet. ([Location 1523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1523)) > and kwashiorkor (the protein deficiency which causes the swollen bellies of the children in photographs that have become icons of famine).8 ([Location 1577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1577)) > None of this was supposed to happen. In 1798 Thomas Malthus explained that the frequent famines of his era were unavoidable and would only get worse, because “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.” ([Location 1595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1595)) > As Hans Rosling put it, “You can’t stop population growth by letting poor children die.”14 ([Location 1614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1614)) > The wild ancestor of corn was a grass with a few tough seeds; the ancestor of carrots looked and tasted like a dandelion root; the ancestors of many wild fruits were bitter, astringent, and more stone than flesh. ([Location 1618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1618)) > In Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, the moral imperative was explained to Gulliver by the King of Brobdingnag: “Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” ([Location 1622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1622)) > In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17 ([Location 1628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1628)) > In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber ([Location 1635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1635)) > Norman Borlaug, ([Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1645)) > As Brand put it, “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”31 ([Location 1686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1686)) > For all the importance of agronomy, food security is not just about farming. Famines are caused not only when food is scarce but when people can’t afford it, when armies prevent them from getting it, or when their governments don’t care how much of it they have. ([Location 1696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1696)) > Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.” ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1718)) > Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.5 It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary, just as radical, is that we can figure out how to make more of it. ([Location 1741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1741)) > The machines and factories of the Industrial Revolution, the productive farms of the Agricultural Revolution, and the water pipes of the Public Health Revolution could deliver more clothes, tools, vehicles, books, furniture, calories, clean water, and other things that people want than the craftsmen and farmers of a century before. ([Location 1791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1791)) > Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal. But in 18th-century England and the Netherlands, commerce came to be seen as moral and uplifting. Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophes valorized the spirit of commerce for its ability to dissolve sectarian hatreds: ([Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1820)) > The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.” ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1829)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In 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. ([Location 1875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1875)) > John Rawls’s thought experiment for defining a just society: specify a world in which you would agree to be incarnated as a random citizen from behind a veil of ignorance as to that citizen’s circumstances.24 A world with a higher percentage of long-lived, healthy, well-fed, well-off people is a world in which one would prefer to play the lottery of birth. ([Location 1882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1882)) > It shows that the number of poor people declined just as the number of all people exploded, from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.3 billion in 2015. (Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.) We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1890)) > The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works. ([Location 1917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1917)) > “In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”32 Though China’s rise is not exclusively responsible for the Great Convergence, the country’s sheer bulk is bound to move the totals around, and the explanations for its progress apply elsewhere. The death of Mao Zedong is emblematic of three of the major causes of the Great Convergence. ([Location 1925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1925)) > It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.35 ([Location 1944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1944)) > “while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the granddaddy of all sweatshops: working in the fields as an agricultural day laborer.” ([Location 1988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1988)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country. ([Location 2035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2035)) > Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times. ([Location 2079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2079)) > The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and self-destructive. ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2152)) > Either way, I suspect that it’s less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on. ([Location 2188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2188)) > The simplest narrative of the history of inequality is that it comes with modernity. We must have begun in a state of original equality, because when there is no wealth, everyone has equal shares of nothing, and then, when wealth is created, some can have more of it than others. Inequality, in this story, started at zero, and as wealth increased over time, inequality grew with it. But the story is not quite right. ([Location 2197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2197)) > But sedentary hunter-gatherers, such as the natives of the Pacific Northwest, which is flush with salmon, berries, and fur-bearing animals, were florid inegalitarians, and developed a hereditary nobility who kept slaves, hoarded luxuries, and flaunted their wealth in gaudy potlatches. ([Location 2204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2204)) > A recent survey of inequality in the forms of wealth that are possible for hunter-gatherers (houses, boats, and hunting and foraging returns) found that they were “far from a state of ‘primitive communism’”: the Ginis averaged .33, close to the value for disposable income in the United States in 2012.23 ([Location 2210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2210)) > According to a famous conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of work while the rest stay in rural squalor. ([Location 2217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2217)) > As Deaton observes, “A better world makes for a world of differences; escapes make for inequality.”25 Then, as globalization proceeded and wealth-generating know-how spread, poor countries started catching up in a Great Convergence. ([Location 2223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2223)) > The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2265)) > Many of the programs indemnify citizens against misfortunes for which they can’t or won’t insure themselves (hence the euphemism “social safety net”). ([Location 2296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2296)) > This is the principle known as redistribution, the welfare state, social democracy, or socialism (misleadingly, because free-market capitalism is compatible with any amount of social spending). Whether or not the social spending is designed ([Location 2301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2301)) > some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force. As they proceed, certain factions oppose them hammer and tongs, but resistance turns out to be futile. Social spending is an example. ([Location 2307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2307)) > When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.34 ([Location 2313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2313)) > In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system. ([Location 2320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2320)) > called Wagner’s Law. ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2323)) > Its success thus depends on the degree to which the citizens of a country sense they are part of one community, and that fellow feeling can be strained when the beneficiaries are disproportionately immigrants or ethnic minorities.40 These tensions are inherent to social spending and ([Location 2335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2335)) > A “second industrial revolution” driven by electronic technologies replayed the Kuznets rise by creating a demand for highly skilled professionals, who pulled away from the less educated at the same time that the jobs requiring less education were eliminated by automation. ([Location 2350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2350)) > These are the focus of the new concern about inequality: the “hollowed-out middle class,” the Trump supporters, the people globalization left behind. ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2367)) > Now, it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it. ([Location 2395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2395)) > A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. ([Location 2404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2404)) > In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.) ([Location 2478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2478)) > The hardships faced by one sector of the population—middle-aged, less-educated, non-urban white Americans—are real and tragic, manifested in higher rates of drug overdose (chapter 12) and suicide (chapter 18). Advances in robotics threaten to make millions of additional jobs obsolete. ([Location 2497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2497)) > Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost (defying the inexpensification of almost every other good), and in poor American neighborhoods, primary and secondary education are unconscionably substandard. ([Location 2500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2500)) > The trends of the past century, and a survey of the world’s countries, point to governments playing an increasing role in both. They are uniquely suited to invest in education, basic research, and infrastructure, to underwrite health and retirement benefits (relieving American corporations of their enervating mandate to provide social services), and to supplement incomes to a level above their market price, which for millions of people may decline even as overall wealth rises.67 ([Location 2515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2515)) > For all that, the long-term trend in history since the Enlightenment is for everyone’s fortunes to rise. In addition to generating massive amounts of wealth, modern societies have devoted an increasing proportion of that wealth to benefiting the less well-off. ([Location 2539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2539)) > grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism. ([Location 2563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2563)) > As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer. For example, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society wrote, “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. . . . Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”2 ([Location 2575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2575)) > It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.3 ([Location 2581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2581)) > Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!7 ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2602)) > it happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies. ([Location 2633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2633)) > Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. ([Location 2634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2634)) > Two of the deadliest forms of pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor cooking smoke—are afflictions of poor countries. ([Location 2737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2737)) > All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. ([Location 2806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2806)) > The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.38 ([Location 2820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2820)) > Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of ([Location 2824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2824)) > An enlightened environmentalism must face the facts, hopeful or alarming, and one set of facts is unquestionably alarming: the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate.41 ([Location 2836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2836)) > Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges—such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only because the sun is getting hotter—have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced.45 ([Location 2866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2866)) > A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”46 ([Location 2870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2870)) > In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2875)) > Even when it comes to the purely rhetorical challenge of “moving people’s hearts,” efficacy matters: people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.55 ([Location 2908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2908)) > Forgive the bean-counting, but even if everyone gave up their jewelry, it would not make a scratch in the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15 percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent). (Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.) ([Location 2921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2921)) > but if one doesn’t think in scale and in orders of change, one can be satisfied with policies that accomplish nothing. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2934)) > I’ve done with the psychologists Jason Nemirow, Max Krasnow, and Rhea Howard—people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.59 ([Location 2939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2939)) > Thanks in good part to prosperity, humanity has been getting healthier (chapters 5 and 6), better fed (chapter 7), more peaceful (chapter 11), and better protected from natural hazards and disasters (chapter 12). These advances have made humanity more resilient to natural and human-made threats: disease outbreaks don’t become pandemics, crop failures in one region are alleviated by surpluses in another, local skirmishes are defused before they erupt into war, populations are better protected against storms, floods, and droughts. ([Location 2967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2967)) > The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. ([Location 2983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2983)) > “There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. ([Location 3074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3074)) > It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.88 ([Location 3096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3096)) > “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”89 ([Location 3105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3105)) > China, Russia, India, and Indonesia, which are hungry for energy, sick of smog, and free from American squeamishness and political gridlock, may take the lead. ([Location 3138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3138)) > The combination, sometimes called BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage—has been called climate change’s savior technology.99 ([Location 3176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3176)) > The economist Paul Romer distinguishes between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents on Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. ([Location 3249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3249)) > How did it happen? The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought denunciations of war from Pascal, Swift, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, and the Quakers, among others. It also saw practical suggestions for how to reduce or even eliminate war, particularly Kant’s famous essay “Perpetual Peace.”19 The spread of these ideas has been credited with the decline in great power wars in the 18th and 19th centuries and with several hiatuses in war during that interval.20 But it was only after World War II that the pacifying forces identified by Kant and others were systematically put into place. ([Location 3379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3379)) > The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. ([Location 3400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3400)) > The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. ([Location 3404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3404)) > Also, as countries get richer, they become less vulnerable to civil war. Their governments can afford to provide services like health care, education, and policing and thus outcompete rebels for the allegiance of their citizens, and they can regain control of the frontier regions that warlords, mafias, and guerrillas (often the same people) stake out. ([Location 3425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3425)) > (the game-theoretic scenario called a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap), ([Location 3429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3429)) > War was glorious, thrilling, spiritual, manly, noble, heroic, altruistic—a cleansing purgative for the effeminacy, selfishness, consumerism, and hedonism of decadent bourgeois society. ([Location 3437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3437)) > Romantic militarism became increasingly fashionable, not just among Pickelhaube-topped military officers but among many artists and intellectuals. War “enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. It is “life itself,” said Émile Zola; “the foundation of all the arts . . . [and] the high virtues and faculties of man,” wrote John Ruskin.30 ([Location 3441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3441)) > It drew strength from the muzzy notion that violent struggle is the life force of nature (“red in tooth and claw”) and the engine of human progress. (This can be distinguished from the Enlightenment idea that the engine of human progress is problem-solving.) ([Location 3447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3447)) > Cultural pessimism became particularly entrenched in Germany through the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, and Oswald Spengler, author in 1918–23 of The Decline of the West. (We will return to these ideas in chapter 23.) ([Location 3455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3455)) > In particular, they thought they were bravely resisting the creep of a liberal, democratic, commercial culture that had been sapping the vitality of the West since the Enlightenment, with the complicity of Britain and the United States. Only from the ashes of a redemptive cataclysm, many thought, could a new heroic order arise. They got their wish for a cataclysm. After a second and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded. ([Location 3460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3460)) > we are now living in the safest time in history. ([Location 3498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3498)) > The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. ([Location 3535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3535)) > The lopsided skew of violent crime also points a flashing red arrow at the best way to reduce it.27 Forget root causes. Stay close to the symptoms—the neighborhoods and individuals responsible for the biggest wedges of violence—and chip away at the incentives and opportunities that drive them. ([Location 3600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3600)) > This “Hobbesian trap,” as it is sometimes called, can easily set off cycles of feuding and vendetta: you have to be at least as violent as your adversaries lest you become their doormat. ([Location 3607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3607)) > The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians. ([Location 3624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3624)) > Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33 ([Location 3630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3630)) > Troublemakers also have narcissistic and sociopathic thought patterns, such as that they are always in the right, that they are entitled to universal deference, that disagreements are personal insults, and that other people have no feelings or interests. ([Location 3646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3646)) > Conspicuous by their absence from the list of what works are bold initiatives like slum clearance, gun buybacks, zero-tolerance policing, wilderness ordeals, three-strikes-and-you’re-out mandatory sentencing, police-led drug awareness classes, and “scared straight” programs in which at-risk youths are exposed to squalid prisons and badass convicts. ([Location 3666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3666)) > Figure 12-3: Motor vehicle accident deaths, US, 1921–2015 Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accessed from http://www.informedforlife.org/demos/FCKeditor/UserFiles/File/TRAFFICFATALITIES(1899-2005).pdf, http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx, and https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812384. ([Location 3686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3686)) > The additional miles driven did not eat up the safety gains: automobile deaths per capita (as opposed to per vehicle mile) peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 per year, and have been in steady decline since the late 1970s, hitting 10.2 in 2014, the lowest rate since 1917.43 ([Location 3711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3711)) > Starting in the 1970s, cars were equipped with catalytic converters, which had been designed to reduce air pollution but which also prevented them from becoming mobile gas chambers. ([Location 3796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3796)) > On top of all the lethal hazards we’ve examined, industrial workplaces add countless others, because whatever a machine can do to its raw materials—sawing, crushing, baking, rendering, stamping, threshing, or butchering them—it can also do to the workers tending it. ([Location 3832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3832)) > The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse. ([Location 3936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3936)) > Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm. ([Location 3940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3940)) > Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.10 ([Location 4021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4021)) > Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. ([Location 4029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4029)) > With many terrorists, the goal is little more than publicity itself. ([Location 4047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4047)) > The state has stressed so many times that it will not tolerate political violence within its borders that it has no alternative but to see any act of terrorism as intolerable. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence, so the theatre of terror incites in them visceral fears of anarchy, making them feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody struggles, we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we feel that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities and we imagine that we are falling back in.19 ([Location 4077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4077)) > Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. ([Location 4111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4111)) > authoritarian capitalism in China. ([Location 4149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4149)) > After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14 Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. ([Location 4181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4181)) > Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.” ([Location 4200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4200)) > When an election is a contest between aspiring despots, rival factions fear the worst if the other side wins and try to intimidate each other from the ballot box. Also, autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color revolutions sent several of them packing.) ([Location 4226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4226)) > Mueller concludes that “inequality, disagreement, apathy, and ignorance seem to be normal, not abnormal, in a democracy, and to a considerable degree the beauty of the form is that it works despite these qualities—or, in some important respects, because of them.”26 ([Location 4248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4248)) > The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens. ([Location 4265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4265)) > Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison. Sixth, social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience. ([Location 4371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4371)) > The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion. ([Location 4428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4428)) > Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 ([Location 4482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4482)) > Today, women make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.23 Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-4).24 Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still. ([Location 4509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4509)) > The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham. ([Location 4558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4558)) > Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies). ([Location 4658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4658)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress. ([Location 4663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4663)) > The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely. ([Location 4772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4772)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. ([Location 4789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4789)) > Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. ([Location 4797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4797)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Stein’s Law: Things that can’t go on forever don’t. ([Location 4902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4902)) > The fact that all aspects of human flourishing tend to improve over the long run even when they are not in perfect sync vindicates the idea that there is such a thing as progress. ([Location 5001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5001)) > People can be healthy, solvent, and literate and still not lead rich and meaningful lives. ([Location 5009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5009)) > For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution. ([Location 5095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5095)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”17 ([Location 5123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5123)) > and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness. ([Location 5170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5170)) > Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact with flesh-and-blood companions. ([Location 5174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5174)) > In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.3 Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer. ([Location 5284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5284)) > Wallis Simpson was half-right when she said, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” ([Location 5421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5421)) > Over the past thirty-five years African Americans have been getting much happier while American whites have gotten a bit less happy.35 Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women. In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.36 ([Location 5480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5480)) > That makes three segments of the population that have become happier amid the American happiness stagnation: African Americans, the successive cohorts leading up to the Baby Boom, and young people today. ([Location 5507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5507)) > Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes. ([Location 5570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5570)) > But partly it came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but in more co-workers. ([Location 5574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5574)) > Dorothy Parker’s macabre poem “Resumé” (which ends, “Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live”) ([Location 5585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5585)) > Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no. ([Location 5694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5694)) > Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. ([Location 5729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5729)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness. ([Location 5744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5744)) > But as George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” ([Location 5798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5798)) > The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” ([Location 5828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5828)) > black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm. ([Location 5835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5835)) > In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. ([Location 5884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5884)) > Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!” ([Location 5897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5897)) > The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks. ([Location 5900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5900)) > Quite generally, the distinction between a “natural” disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial. ([Location 5960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5960)) > And all those options add up to the overarching option that they failed to create, namely that of forming a scientific and technological civilization like ours. Traditions of criticism. An Enlightenment.18 ([Location 5963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5963)) > The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a modern scientific understanding. ([Location 5973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5973)) > The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” ([Location 6053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6053)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > (Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.) ([Location 6440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6440)) > People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. ([Location 6552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6552)) > The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, ([Location 6567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6567)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The lower middle classes have seen their incomes rise by less than 10 percent in two decades. ([Location 6581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6581)) > namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. ([Location 6602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6602)) > Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think), ([Location 6615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6615)) > As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”4 ([Location 6630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6630)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American Growth, point to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people). ([Location 6659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6659)) > A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience. ([Location 6756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6756)) > By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. ([Location 6763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6763)) > Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. ([Location 6768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6768)) > all hallmarks of a dictator. ([Location 6809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6809)) > For one thing, the latest elections are not referenda on the Enlightenment. ([Location 6856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6856)) > “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.” ([Location 6882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6882)) > But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36 ([Location 6889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6889)) > Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance. ([Location 6901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6901)) > supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . ([Location 6907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6907)) > Populism is an old man’s movement. As figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit, and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. ([Location 6925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6925)) > By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more. ([Location 6974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6974)) > Yet in a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. ([Location 6979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6979)) > Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform: ([Location 6983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6983)) > Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion: Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.53 ([Location 6989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6989)) > My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”55 ([Location 6999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6999)) > The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. —John Maynard Keynes ([Location 7004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7004)) > Illiberal ideas like authoritarianism, tribalism, and magical thinking easily get the blood pumping, and have no shortage of champions. It’s hardly a fair fight. ([Location 7020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7020)) > I like to think that some good might come to the world if more of the ideas that trickle into these tributaries embodied the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and humanism. ([Location 7027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7027)) > But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery. ([Location 7073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7073)) > To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” ([Location 7076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7076)) > Often the cynicism about reason is justified with a crude version of evolutionary psychology (not one endorsed by evolutionary psychologists) in which humans think with their amygdalas, reacting instinctively to the slightest rustle in the grass which may portend a crouching tiger. ([Location 7082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7082)) > A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers). ([Location 7198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7198)) > Tragedy of the Belief Commons runs even deeper. ([Location 7206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7206)) > As Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” ([Location 7208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7208)) > As two other magazines summarized the results: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math” and “How Politics Makes Us Stupid.”29 ([Location 7262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7262)) > I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have anything to add? ([Location 7300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7300)) > Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion. ([Location 7310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7310)) > The arcs in figures 5-1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable. ([Location 7312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7312)) > The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. ([Location 7335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7335)) > And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. ([Location 7338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7338)) > A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. ([Location 7347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7347)) > Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “integrative complexity” (appreciating uncertainty and seeing multiple sides). They are anti-impulsive, distrusting their first gut feeling. They are neither left-wing nor right-wing. They aren’t necessarily humble about their abilities, but they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as “hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.” They constantly ask themselves, “Are there holes in this reasoning? Should I be looking for something else to fill this in? Would I be convinced by this if I were somebody else?” They are aware of cognitive blind spots like the Availability and confirmation biases, and they discipline themselves to avoid them. They display what the psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness,” with opinions such as these:48 ([Location 7416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7416)) > The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing. ([Location 7470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7470)) > A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.57 ([Location 7502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7502)) > Of the two forms of politicization that are subverting reason today, the political is far more dangerous than the academic, for an obvious reason. It’s often quipped (no one knows who said it first) that academic debates are vicious because the stakes are so small. But in political debates the stakes are unlimited, including the future of the planet. ([Location 7537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7537)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses. ([Location 7542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7542)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We are not in a post-truth era. Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that some ideas are right and others are wrong.75 The same decade that has seen the rise of pants-on-fire Trump and his reality-challenged followers has also seen the rise of a new ethic of fact-checking. ([Location 7564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7564)) > eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking. ([Location 7571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7571)) > Over the long run, the institutions of reason can mitigate the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and allow the truth to prevail. ([Location 7581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7581)) > The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy . . . upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. . . . Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.78 ([Location 7586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7586)) > Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities. ([Location 7652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7652)) > And in the day-to-day functioning of governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge) and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax dollars. ([Location 7690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7690)) > It took centuries for Francis Bacon’s observations on anecdotal reasoning and the confusion of correlation with causation to become second nature to scientifically literate people. ([Location 7742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7742)) > The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they often tinkered with precursors and approximations). ([Location 7776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7776)) > (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table”), ([Location 7809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7809)) > Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters.” ([Location 7859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7859)) > On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.13 The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment. ([Location 7863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7863)) > As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” ([Location 7873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7873)) > Regardless of whether Popper or Bayes has the better account, a scientist’s degree of belief in a theory depends on its consistency with empirical evidence. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement. ([Location 7932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7932)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > To begin with, the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. ([Location 7944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7944)) > By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. ([Location 7958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7958)) > And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions—that all of us value our own welfare, and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. ([Location 7961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7961)) > Genocide and autocracy were ubiquitous in premodern times, and they decreased, not increased, as science and liberal Enlightenment values became increasingly influential after World War II.29 ([Location 8011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8011)) > In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic warrior civilization across Eurasia, diverging into the Persians, Hittites, Homeric Greeks, and Vedic Hindus, and later into the Vikings, Goths, and other Germanic tribes. (The speck of reality in this story is that these tribes spoke languages that fell into a single family, Indo-European.) ([Location 8027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8027)) > Gobineau’s ideas were eaten up by Richard Wagner (whose operas were held to be re-creations of the original Aryan myths) and by Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a philosopher who wrote that Jews polluted Teutonic civilization with capitalism, liberal humanism, and sterile science). From them the ideas reached Hitler, who called Chamberlain his “spiritual father.”32 ([Location 8033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8033)) > One of these movements was retroactively dubbed social Darwinism, though it was advocated not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, who laid it out in 1851, eight years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Spencer did not believe in random mutation and natural selection; he believed in a Lamarckian process in which the struggle for existence impelled organisms to strive toward feats of greater complexity and adaptation, which they passed on to later generations. Spencer thought that this progressive force was best left unimpeded, and so he argued against social welfare and government regulation that would only prolong the doomed lives of weaker individuals and groups. His political philosophy, an early form of libertarianism, was picked up by robber barons, advocates of laissez-faire economics, and opponents of social spending. ([Location 8049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8049)) > Many countries forcibly sterilized delinquents, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and other people who fell into a wide net of ailments and stigmas. ([Location 8062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8062)) - Note: Mississippi appendectomy > And when the study began, it may even have been defensible by the standards of the day: treatments for syphilis (mainly arsenic) were toxic and ineffective; when antibiotics became available later, their safety and efficacy in treating syphilis were unknown; and latent syphilis was known to often resolve itself without treatment. ([Location 8096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8096)) - Note: The road of medical history is a tour of graveyards. > In 1954 Paul Meehl stunned his fellow psychologists by showing that simple actuarial formulas outperform expert judgment in predicting psychiatric classifications, suicide attempts, school and job performance, lies, crime, medical diagnoses, and pretty much any other outcome in which accuracy can be judged at all. Meehl’s work inspired Tversky and Kahneman’s discoveries on cognitive biases and Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments, and his conclusion about the superiority of statistical to intuitive judgment is now recognized as one of the most robust findings in the history of psychology.47 ([Location 8152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8152)) > Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). We have already seen some dangerous misconceptions that arise from this statistical obtuseness. People think that crime and war are spinning out of control, though homicides and battle deaths are going down, not up. They think that Islamist terrorism is a major risk to life and limb, whereas the danger is smaller than that from wasps and bees. They think that ISIS threatens the existence or survival of the United States, whereas terrorist movements rarely achieve any of their strategic aims. ([Location 8163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8163)) > The political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones.50 Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it. ([Location 8182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8182)) > A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change. ([Location 8198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8198)) > Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech, the structure of language, and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.57 ([Location 8231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8231)) - Note: Jim Rochefort ca wv band > In 1782 Thomas Paine extolled the cosmopolitan virtues of science: Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.63 ([Location 8272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8272)) > In this and other ways, the spirit of science is the spirit of the Enlightenment. ([Location 8278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8278)) > Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” ([Location 8284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8284)) > The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism. ([Location 8287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8287)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Humanist Manifesto III, from 2003, affirms: ([Location 8292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8292)) > the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.6 (The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are designed to anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other sticking points for the Golden Rule.) ([Location 8331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8331)) > That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people. ([Location 8362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8362)) > Tooby), the Law of Entropy sentences us to another permanent threat. Many things must all go right for a body (and thus a mind) to function, but it takes just one thing going wrong for it to shut down permanently—a leak of blood, a constriction of air, a disabling of its microscopic clockwork. ([Location 8369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8369)) > (As Hobbes put it, “No covenants with beasts.”) ([Location 8379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8379)) > At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to insist that vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial marriage, and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature. ([Location 8415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8415)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day.17 ([Location 8429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8429)) > whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.20 (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. ([Location 8442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8442)) > Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right. ([Location 8483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8483)) > As Ambrose Bierce noted in The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity. ([Location 8664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8664)) > The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. ([Location 8681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8681)) > Matthew White, the necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.47 (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) ([Location 8699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8699)) > Religious organizations can also provide a sense of communal solidarity and mutual support, together with art, ritual, and architecture of great beauty and historical resonance, thanks to their millennia-long head start. I partake of these myself, with much enjoyment. ([Location 8747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8747)) > But no: Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic. ([Location 8770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8770)) > the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all. ([Location 8821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8821)) > American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off. ([Location 8910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8910)) > All these troubling patterns were once true of Christendom, but starting with the Enlightenment, the West initiated a process (still ongoing) of separating the church from the state, carving out a space for secular civil society, and grounding its institutions in a universal humanistic ethics. In most Muslim-majority countries, that process is barely under way. Historians and social scientists (many of them Muslim) have shown how the stranglehold of the Islamic religion over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has impeded their economic, political, and social progress.99 ([Location 8960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8960)) > Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a hothouse of science and secular philosophy.103 ([Location 8987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8987)) > Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them. ([Location 9076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9076)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > tyrannophilia. ([Location 9088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9088)) > With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for neo-theo-reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt. ([Location 9153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9153)) > Roots are for trees; people have feet. ([Location 9178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9178)) > After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world. ([Location 9182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9182)) > Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? ([Location 9203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9203)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. ([Location 9212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9212)) > And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance. ([Location 9231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9231)) # Enlightenment Now  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Steven Pinker]] - Full Title:: Enlightenment Now - Category: #books ## Highlights > Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind. —Baruch Spinoza ([Location 108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=108)) > Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. —David Deutsch ([Location 110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=110)) > The sociologist Robert Merton identified Communalism as a cardinal scientific virtue, together with Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism: CUDOS.2 ([Location 239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=239)) > The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of human suffering, and of the obvious demands of human nature, acted on the world like a bath of moral cleansing. —Alfred North Whitehead ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=272)) > l’esprit de l’escalier, the wit of the staircase—went ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=283)) > And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=293)) > The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense. We take its gifts for granted: newborns who will live more than eight decades, markets overflowing with food, clean water that appears with a flick of a finger and waste that disappears with another, pills that erase a painful infection, sons who are not sent off to war, daughters who can walk the streets in safety, critics of the powerful who are not jailed or shot, the world’s knowledge and culture available in a shirt pocket. But these are human accomplishments, not cosmic birthrights. In the memories of many readers of this book—and in the experience of those in less fortunate parts of the world—war, scarcity, disease, ignorance, and lethal menace are a natural part of existence. We know that countries can slide back into these primitive conditions, and so we ignore the achievements of the Enlightenment at our peril. ([Location 300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=300)) > ideals of the Enlightenment (also called humanism, the open society, and cosmopolitan or classical liberalism). ([Location 308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=308)) > The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=314)) > The Enlightenment has worked—perhaps the greatest story seldom told. And because this triumph is so unsung, the underlying ideals of reason, science, and humanism are unappreciated as well. Far from being an insipid consensus, these ideals are treated by today’s intellectuals with indifference, skepticism, and sometimes contempt. When properly appreciated, I will suggest, the ideals of the Enlightenment are in fact stirring, inspiring, noble—a reason to live. ([Location 334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=334)) > The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch argues that if we dare to understand, progress is possible in all fields, scientific, political, and moral: ([Location 347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=347)) > The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress. ([Location 360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=360)) > 5 If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=365)) > (As Montesquieu wrote, “If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.”) ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=371)) > The deliberate application of reason was necessary precisely because our common habits of thought are not particularly reasonable. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=378)) > The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 ([Location 381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=381)) > To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=400)) > The idea of a universal human nature brings us to a third theme, humanism. The thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion. They laid that foundation in what we now call humanism, which privileges the well-being of individual men, women, and children over the glory of the tribe, race, nation, or religion. ([Location 412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=412)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Enlightenment is sometimes called the Humanitarian Revolution, because it led to the abolition of barbaric practices that had been commonplace across civilizations ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=426)) > Rather than trying to shape human nature, the Enlightenment hope for progress was concentrated on human institutions. Human-made systems like governments, laws, schools, markets, and international bodies are a natural target for the application of reason to human betterment. ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=446)) > As the most famous product of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, put it, in order to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=450)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > He only said that in a market, whatever tendency people have to care for their families and themselves can work to the good of all. ([Location 471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=471)) > If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you’re committed to progress, you can’t very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn’t. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information. ([Location 489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=489)) > I’ll often refer to the statistical version of the Second Law, which does not apply specifically to temperature differences evening out but to order dissipating, as the Law of Entropy. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=516)) > The principles of information, computation, and control bridge the chasm between the physical world of cause and effect and the mental world of knowledge, intelligence, and purpose. ([Location 641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=641)) > Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny. ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=666)) > (Confucius, Buddha, Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and the last of the Hebrew prophets walked the earth at the same time.) ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=673)) > When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=680)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. ([Location 688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=688)) > Awareness of the indifference of the universe was deepened still further by an understanding of evolution. Predators, parasites, and pathogens are constantly trying to eat us, and pests and spoilage organisms try to eat our stuff. It may make us miserable, but that’s not their problem. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=700)) > They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.25 ([Location 731](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=731)) > Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=754)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The wisdom of crowds can also elevate our moral sentiments. ([Location 767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=767)) - Note: Natural democracy > (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits). ([Location 774](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=774)) > Among those norms are free speech, nonviolence, cooperation, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and an acknowledgment of human fallibility, and among the institutions are science, education, media, democratic government, international organizations, and markets. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=777)) > They absolutely do. Since the 1960s, trust in the institutions of modernity has sunk, and the second decade of the 21st century saw the rise of populist movements that blatantly repudiate the ideals of the Enlightenment.1 They are tribalist rather than cosmopolitan, authoritarian rather than democratic, contemptuous of experts rather than respectful of knowledge, and nostalgic for an idyllic past rather than hopeful for a better future. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=785)) > But my main reaction to the claim that the Enlightenment is the guiding ideal of the West is: If only! The Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since.3 No sooner did people step into the light than they were advised that darkness wasn’t so bad after all, that they should stop daring to understand so much, that dogmas and formulas deserved another chance, and that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline. ([Location 796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=796)) > see how political ideology undermines reason and science.7 It scrambles people’s judgment, inflames a primitive tribal mindset, and distracts them from a sounder understanding of how to improve the world. ([Location 852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=852)) > Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=854)) > One form of declinism bemoans our Promethean dabbling with technology. ([Location 861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=861)) > not that modernity has made life too harsh and dangerous, but that it has made it too pleasant and safe. According to these critics, health, peace, and prosperity are bourgeois diversions from what truly matters in life. ([Location 867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=867)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > “hollow men eating their naked lunches in the wasteland while waiting for Godot.” ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=871)) > Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the term will to power, recommends the aristocratic violence of the “blond Teuton beasts” and the samurai, Vikings, and Homeric heroes: “hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience, crushing everything, and bespattering everything with blood.”11 ([Location 874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=874)) > A final alternative to Enlightenment humanism condemns its embrace of science. Following C. P. Snow, we can call it the Second Culture, the worldview of many literary intellectuals and cultural critics, as distinguished from the First Culture of science. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=881)) > Science is commonly blamed for racism, imperialism, world wars, and the Holocaust. And it is accused of robbing life of its enchantment and stripping humans of freedom and dignity. ([Location 903](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=903)) > “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” ([Location 931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=931)) > In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. ([Location 956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=956)) > The peace researcher Johan Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.10 ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=974)) > It’s easy to see how the Availability heuristic, stoked by the news policy “If it bleeds, it leads,” could induce a sense of gloom about the state of the world. ([Location 992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=992)) > Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, . . . complete avoidance of the news.”15 And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”16 ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1002)) > A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, 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. ([Location 1009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1009)) > And since the 1950s the world has been swept by a cascade of Rights Revolutions: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, and animal rights. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1019)) > As for accusations of romanticism, I can reply with some confidence. I am also the author of the staunchly unromantic, anti-utopian The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, in which I argued that human beings are fitted by evolution with a number of destructive motives such as greed, lust, dominance, vengeance, and self-deception. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1066)) > David Deutsch observes, “The most important of all limitations on knowledge-creation is that we cannot prophesy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.”19 ([Location 1080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1080)) > Tversky.22 How much better can you imagine yourself feeling than you are feeling right now? How much worse can you imagine yourself feeling? ([Location 1110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1110)) > As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1124)) > 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.” ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1150)) > If you’re reading this, you are not dead, starving, destitute, moribund, terrified, enslaved, or illiterate, which means that you’re in no position to turn your nose up at these values—or to deny that other people should share your good fortune. ([Location 1191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1191)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it. ([Location 1196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1196)) > But starting in the 19th century, the world embarked on the Great Escape, the economist Angus Deaton’s term for humanity’s release from its patrimony of poverty, disease, and early death. Life expectancy began to rise, picked up speed in the 20th century, and shows no signs of slowing down. ([Location 1236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1236)) > Until recently about one percent of mothers died in the process; for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today. ([Location 1283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1283)) > Stein’s Law—“Things that can’t go on forever don’t”—as amended by Davies’s Corollary—“Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.” ([Location 1368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1368)) > Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) and Joseph Lister (1827–1912) got them to sterilize their hands and equipment. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1398)) > Between 2000 and 2015, the number of deaths from malaria (which in the past killed half the people who had ever lived) fell by 60 percent. The World Health Organization has adopted a plan to reduce the rate by another 90 percent by 2030, and to eliminate it from thirty-five of the ninety-seven countries in which it is endemic today (just as it was eliminated from the United States, where it had been endemic until 1951).11 ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1471)) > Many of those who were not starving were too weak to work, which locked them into poverty. Hungry Europeans titillated themselves with food pornography, such as tales of Cockaigne, a country where pancakes grew on trees, the streets were paved with pastry, roasted pigs wandered around with knives in their backs for easy carving, and cooked fish jumped out of the water and landed at one’s feet. ([Location 1523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1523)) > and kwashiorkor (the protein deficiency which causes the swollen bellies of the children in photographs that have become icons of famine).8 ([Location 1577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1577)) > None of this was supposed to happen. In 1798 Thomas Malthus explained that the frequent famines of his era were unavoidable and would only get worse, because “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.” ([Location 1595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1595)) > As Hans Rosling put it, “You can’t stop population growth by letting poor children die.”14 ([Location 1614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1614)) > The wild ancestor of corn was a grass with a few tough seeds; the ancestor of carrots looked and tasted like a dandelion root; the ancestors of many wild fruits were bitter, astringent, and more stone than flesh. ([Location 1618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1618)) > In Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, the moral imperative was explained to Gulliver by the King of Brobdingnag: “Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” ([Location 1622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1622)) > In the mid-19th century it took twenty-five men a full day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain; today one person operating a combine harvester can do it in six minutes.17 ([Location 1628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1628)) > In 1909 Carl Bosch perfected a process invented by Fritz Haber ([Location 1635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1635)) > Norman Borlaug, ([Location 1645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1645)) > As Brand put it, “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”31 ([Location 1686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1686)) > For all the importance of agronomy, food security is not just about farming. Famines are caused not only when food is scarce but when people can’t afford it, when armies prevent them from getting it, or when their governments don’t care how much of it they have. ([Location 1696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1696)) > Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.” ([Location 1718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1718)) > Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.5 It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor. The corollary, just as radical, is that we can figure out how to make more of it. ([Location 1741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1741)) > The machines and factories of the Industrial Revolution, the productive farms of the Agricultural Revolution, and the water pipes of the Public Health Revolution could deliver more clothes, tools, vehicles, books, furniture, calories, clean water, and other things that people want than the craftsmen and farmers of a century before. ([Location 1791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1791)) > Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal. But in 18th-century England and the Netherlands, commerce came to be seen as moral and uplifting. Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophes valorized the spirit of commerce for its ability to dissolve sectarian hatreds: ([Location 1820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1820)) > The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.” ([Location 1829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1829)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > In 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. ([Location 1875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1875)) > John Rawls’s thought experiment for defining a just society: specify a world in which you would agree to be incarnated as a random citizen from behind a veil of ignorance as to that citizen’s circumstances.24 A world with a higher percentage of long-lived, healthy, well-fed, well-off people is a world in which one would prefer to play the lottery of birth. ([Location 1882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1882)) > It shows that the number of poor people declined just as the number of all people exploded, from 3.7 billion in 1970 to 7.3 billion in 2015. (Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.) We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1890)) > The point of calling attention to progress is not self-congratulation but identifying the causes so we can do more of what works. ([Location 1917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1917)) > “In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”32 Though China’s rise is not exclusively responsible for the Great Convergence, the country’s sheer bulk is bound to move the totals around, and the explanations for its progress apply elsewhere. The death of Mao Zedong is emblematic of three of the major causes of the Great Convergence. ([Location 1925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1925)) > It’s important to add that the market economies which blossomed in the more fortunate parts of the developing world were not the laissez-faire anarchies of right-wing fantasies and left-wing nightmares. To varying degrees, their governments invested in education, public health, infrastructure, and agricultural and job training, together with social insurance and poverty-reduction programs.35 ([Location 1944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1944)) > “while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the granddaddy of all sweatshops: working in the fields as an agricultural day laborer.” ([Location 1988](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=1988)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > According to one estimate, every cell phone adds $3,000 to the annual GDP of a developing country. ([Location 2035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2035)) > Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times. ([Location 2079](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2079)) > The economic inequality causes the ills, they argue: unequal societies make people feel that they are pitted in a winner-take-all competition for dominance, and the stress makes them sick and self-destructive. ([Location 2152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2152)) > Either way, I suspect that it’s less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on. ([Location 2188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2188)) > The simplest narrative of the history of inequality is that it comes with modernity. We must have begun in a state of original equality, because when there is no wealth, everyone has equal shares of nothing, and then, when wealth is created, some can have more of it than others. Inequality, in this story, started at zero, and as wealth increased over time, inequality grew with it. But the story is not quite right. ([Location 2197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2197)) > But sedentary hunter-gatherers, such as the natives of the Pacific Northwest, which is flush with salmon, berries, and fur-bearing animals, were florid inegalitarians, and developed a hereditary nobility who kept slaves, hoarded luxuries, and flaunted their wealth in gaudy potlatches. ([Location 2204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2204)) > A recent survey of inequality in the forms of wealth that are possible for hunter-gatherers (houses, boats, and hunting and foraging returns) found that they were “far from a state of ‘primitive communism’”: the Ginis averaged .33, close to the value for disposable income in the United States in 2012.23 ([Location 2210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2210)) > According to a famous conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of work while the rest stay in rural squalor. ([Location 2217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2217)) > As Deaton observes, “A better world makes for a world of differences; escapes make for inequality.”25 Then, as globalization proceeded and wealth-generating know-how spread, poor countries started catching up in a Great Convergence. ([Location 2223](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2223)) > The historian Walter Scheidel identifies “Four Horsemen of Leveling”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. ([Location 2265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2265)) > Many of the programs indemnify citizens against misfortunes for which they can’t or won’t insure themselves (hence the euphemism “social safety net”). ([Location 2296](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2296)) > This is the principle known as redistribution, the welfare state, social democracy, or socialism (misleadingly, because free-market capitalism is compatible with any amount of social spending). Whether or not the social spending is designed ([Location 2301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2301)) > some kinds of social change really do seem to be carried along by an inexorable tectonic force. As they proceed, certain factions oppose them hammer and tongs, but resistance turns out to be futile. Social spending is an example. ([Location 2307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2307)) > When this privately administered social spending is added to the public portion, the United States vaults from twenty-fourth into second place among the thirty-five OECD countries, just behind France.34 ([Location 2313](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2313)) > In Canada the top two national pastimes (after hockey) are complaining about their health care system and boasting about their health care system. ([Location 2320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2320)) > called Wagner’s Law. ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2323)) > Its success thus depends on the degree to which the citizens of a country sense they are part of one community, and that fellow feeling can be strained when the beneficiaries are disproportionately immigrants or ethnic minorities.40 These tensions are inherent to social spending and ([Location 2335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2335)) > A “second industrial revolution” driven by electronic technologies replayed the Kuznets rise by creating a demand for highly skilled professionals, who pulled away from the less educated at the same time that the jobs requiring less education were eliminated by automation. ([Location 2350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2350)) > These are the focus of the new concern about inequality: the “hollowed-out middle class,” the Trump supporters, the people globalization left behind. ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2367)) > Now, it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it. ([Location 2395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2395)) > A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $3,000 to $10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. ([Location 2404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2404)) > In 2011, more than 95 percent of American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV.58 (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.) ([Location 2478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2478)) > The hardships faced by one sector of the population—middle-aged, less-educated, non-urban white Americans—are real and tragic, manifested in higher rates of drug overdose (chapter 12) and suicide (chapter 18). Advances in robotics threaten to make millions of additional jobs obsolete. ([Location 2497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2497)) > Education, a major driver of economic mobility, is not keeping up with the demands of modern economies: tertiary education has soared in cost (defying the inexpensification of almost every other good), and in poor American neighborhoods, primary and secondary education are unconscionably substandard. ([Location 2500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2500)) > The trends of the past century, and a survey of the world’s countries, point to governments playing an increasing role in both. They are uniquely suited to invest in education, basic research, and infrastructure, to underwrite health and retirement benefits (relieving American corporations of their enervating mandate to provide social services), and to supplement incomes to a level above their market price, which for millions of people may decline even as overall wealth rises.67 ([Location 2515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2515)) > For all that, the long-term trend in history since the Enlightenment is for everyone’s fortunes to rise. In addition to generating massive amounts of wealth, modern societies have devoted an increasing proportion of that wealth to benefiting the less well-off. ([Location 2539](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2539)) > grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism. ([Location 2563](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2563)) > As with many apocalyptic movements, greenism is laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer. For example, Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society wrote, “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. . . . Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”2 ([Location 2575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2575)) > It has been called Ecomodernism, Ecopragmatism, Earth Optimism, and the Blue-Green or Turquoise movement, though we can also think of it as Enlightenment Environmentalism or Humanistic Environmentalism.3 ([Location 2581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2581)) > Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!7 ([Location 2602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2602)) > it happens not because people in poor countries start breeding like rabbits but because they stop dying like flies. ([Location 2633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2633)) > Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. ([Location 2634](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2634)) > Two of the deadliest forms of pollution—contaminated drinking water and indoor cooking smoke—are afflictions of poor countries. ([Location 2737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2737)) > All these processes are helped along by another friend of the Earth, dematerialization. ([Location 2806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2806)) > The era of the Beach Boys and American Graffiti is over: half of American eighteen-year-olds do not have a driver’s license.38 ([Location 2820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2820)) > Indeed, we may be reaching Peak Stuff: of ([Location 2824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2824)) > An enlightened environmentalism must face the facts, hopeful or alarming, and one set of facts is unquestionably alarming: the effect of greenhouse gases on the earth’s climate.41 ([Location 2836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2836)) > Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges—such as that global temperatures have stopped rising, that they only seem to be rising because they were measured in urban heat islands, or that they really are rising but only because the sun is getting hotter—have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced.45 ([Location 2866](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2866)) > A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that “the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].”46 ([Location 2870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2870)) > In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2875)) > Even when it comes to the purely rhetorical challenge of “moving people’s hearts,” efficacy matters: people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.55 ([Location 2908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2908)) > Forgive the bean-counting, but even if everyone gave up their jewelry, it would not make a scratch in the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15 percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent). (Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.) ([Location 2921](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2921)) > but if one doesn’t think in scale and in orders of change, one can be satisfied with policies that accomplish nothing. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2934)) > I’ve done with the psychologists Jason Nemirow, Max Krasnow, and Rhea Howard—people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.59 ([Location 2939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2939)) > Thanks in good part to prosperity, humanity has been getting healthier (chapters 5 and 6), better fed (chapter 7), more peaceful (chapter 11), and better protected from natural hazards and disasters (chapter 12). These advances have made humanity more resilient to natural and human-made threats: disease outbreaks don’t become pandemics, crop failures in one region are alleviated by surpluses in another, local skirmishes are defused before they erupt into war, populations are better protected against storms, floods, and droughts. ([Location 2967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2967)) > The enlightened response to climate change is to figure out how to get the most energy with the least emission of greenhouse gases. ([Location 2983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=2983)) > “There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. ([Location 3074](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3074)) > It’s often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.88 ([Location 3096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3096)) > “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”89 ([Location 3105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3105)) > China, Russia, India, and Indonesia, which are hungry for energy, sick of smog, and free from American squeamishness and political gridlock, may take the lead. ([Location 3138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3138)) > The combination, sometimes called BECCS—bioenergy with carbon capture and storage—has been called climate change’s savior technology.99 ([Location 3176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3176)) > The economist Paul Romer distinguishes between complacent optimism, the feeling of a child waiting for presents on Christmas morning, and conditional optimism, the feeling of a child who wants a treehouse and realizes that if he gets some wood and nails and persuades other kids to help him, he can build one. ([Location 3249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3249)) > How did it happen? The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought denunciations of war from Pascal, Swift, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, and the Quakers, among others. It also saw practical suggestions for how to reduce or even eliminate war, particularly Kant’s famous essay “Perpetual Peace.”19 The spread of these ideas has been credited with the decline in great power wars in the 18th and 19th centuries and with several hiatuses in war during that interval.20 But it was only after World War II that the pacifying forces identified by Kant and others were systematically put into place. ([Location 3379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3379)) > The reason that Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah are American states is that in 1846 the United States conquered them from Mexico in a war over unpaid debts. ([Location 3400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3400)) > The idea that nations should agree to make war illegal was proposed by Kant in 1795. It was first agreed upon in the much-ridiculed 1928 Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand pact, but really became effective only with the founding of the United Nations in 1945. ([Location 3404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3404)) > Also, as countries get richer, they become less vulnerable to civil war. Their governments can afford to provide services like health care, education, and policing and thus outcompete rebels for the allegiance of their citizens, and they can regain control of the frontier regions that warlords, mafias, and guerrillas (often the same people) stake out. ([Location 3425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3425)) > (the game-theoretic scenario called a security dilemma or Hobbesian trap), ([Location 3429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3429)) > War was glorious, thrilling, spiritual, manly, noble, heroic, altruistic—a cleansing purgative for the effeminacy, selfishness, consumerism, and hedonism of decadent bourgeois society. ([Location 3437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3437)) > Romantic militarism became increasingly fashionable, not just among Pickelhaube-topped military officers but among many artists and intellectuals. War “enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. It is “life itself,” said Émile Zola; “the foundation of all the arts . . . [and] the high virtues and faculties of man,” wrote John Ruskin.30 ([Location 3441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3441)) > It drew strength from the muzzy notion that violent struggle is the life force of nature (“red in tooth and claw”) and the engine of human progress. (This can be distinguished from the Enlightenment idea that the engine of human progress is problem-solving.) ([Location 3447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3447)) > Cultural pessimism became particularly entrenched in Germany through the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Georg Simmel, and Oswald Spengler, author in 1918–23 of The Decline of the West. (We will return to these ideas in chapter 23.) ([Location 3455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3455)) > In particular, they thought they were bravely resisting the creep of a liberal, democratic, commercial culture that had been sapping the vitality of the West since the Enlightenment, with the complicity of Britain and the United States. Only from the ashes of a redemptive cataclysm, many thought, could a new heroic order arise. They got their wish for a cataclysm. After a second and even more horrific one, the romance had finally been drained from war, and peace became the stated goal of every Western and international institution. Human life has become more precious, while glory, honor, preeminence, manliness, heroism, and other symptoms of excess testosterone have been downgraded. ([Location 3460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3460)) > we are now living in the safest time in history. ([Location 3498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3498)) > The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. ([Location 3535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3535)) > The lopsided skew of violent crime also points a flashing red arrow at the best way to reduce it.27 Forget root causes. Stay close to the symptoms—the neighborhoods and individuals responsible for the biggest wedges of violence—and chip away at the incentives and opportunities that drive them. ([Location 3600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3600)) > This “Hobbesian trap,” as it is sometimes called, can easily set off cycles of feuding and vendetta: you have to be at least as violent as your adversaries lest you become their doormat. ([Location 3607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3607)) > The adjectives effective, legitimate, swift, fair, moderate, and humane differentiate his advice from the get-tough-on-crime rhetoric favored by right-wing politicians. ([Location 3624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3624)) > Eisner, together with the historian Randolph Roth, notes that crime often shoots up in decades in which people question their society and government, including the American Civil War, the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia.33 ([Location 3630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3630)) > Troublemakers also have narcissistic and sociopathic thought patterns, such as that they are always in the right, that they are entitled to universal deference, that disagreements are personal insults, and that other people have no feelings or interests. ([Location 3646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3646)) > Conspicuous by their absence from the list of what works are bold initiatives like slum clearance, gun buybacks, zero-tolerance policing, wilderness ordeals, three-strikes-and-you’re-out mandatory sentencing, police-led drug awareness classes, and “scared straight” programs in which at-risk youths are exposed to squalid prisons and badass convicts. ([Location 3666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3666)) > Figure 12-3: Motor vehicle accident deaths, US, 1921–2015 Sources: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, accessed from http://www.informedforlife.org/demos/FCKeditor/UserFiles/File/TRAFFICFATALITIES(1899-2005).pdf, http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx, and https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812384. ([Location 3686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3686)) > The additional miles driven did not eat up the safety gains: automobile deaths per capita (as opposed to per vehicle mile) peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 per year, and have been in steady decline since the late 1970s, hitting 10.2 in 2014, the lowest rate since 1917.43 ([Location 3711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3711)) > Starting in the 1970s, cars were equipped with catalytic converters, which had been designed to reduce air pollution but which also prevented them from becoming mobile gas chambers. ([Location 3796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3796)) > On top of all the lethal hazards we’ve examined, industrial workplaces add countless others, because whatever a machine can do to its raw materials—sawing, crushing, baking, rendering, stamping, threshing, or butchering them—it can also do to the workers tending it. ([Location 3832](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3832)) > The fear has addled not just ordinary citizens trying to get a pollster off the phone but public intellectuals, especially cultural pessimists perennially hungry for signs that Western civilization is (as always) on the verge of collapse. ([Location 3936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3936)) > Terrorism is a unique hazard because it combines major dread with minor harm. ([Location 3940](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=3940)) > Excluding 9/11 and Oklahoma, about twice as many Americans have been killed since 1990 by right-wing extremists as by Islamist terror groups.10 ([Location 4021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4021)) > Though terrorism poses a minuscule danger compared with other risks, it creates outsize panic and hysteria because that is what it is designed to do. ([Location 4029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4029)) > With many terrorists, the goal is little more than publicity itself. ([Location 4047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4047)) > The state has stressed so many times that it will not tolerate political violence within its borders that it has no alternative but to see any act of terrorism as intolerable. The citizens, for their part, have become used to zero political violence, so the theatre of terror incites in them visceral fears of anarchy, making them feel as if the social order is about to collapse. After centuries of bloody struggles, we have crawled out of the black hole of violence, but we feel that the black hole is still there, patiently waiting to swallow us again. A few gruesome atrocities and we imagine that we are falling back in.19 ([Location 4077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4077)) > Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. ([Location 4111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4111)) > authoritarian capitalism in China. ([Location 4149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4149)) > After swelling in the 1990s, this third wave spilled into the 21st century in a rainbow of “color revolutions” including Croatia (2000), Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005), bringing the total at the start of the Obama presidency in 2009 to 87.14 Belying the image of a rollback or meltdown under his watch, the number continued to grow. As of 2015, the most recent year in the dataset, the total stood at 103. ([Location 4181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4181)) > Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.” ([Location 4200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4200)) > When an election is a contest between aspiring despots, rival factions fear the worst if the other side wins and try to intimidate each other from the ballot box. Also, autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color revolutions sent several of them packing.) ([Location 4226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4226)) > Mueller concludes that “inequality, disagreement, apathy, and ignorance seem to be normal, not abnormal, in a democracy, and to a considerable degree the beauty of the form is that it works despite these qualities—or, in some important respects, because of them.”26 ([Location 4248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4248)) > The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens. ([Location 4265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4265)) > Meanwhile, the billable hours from expensive lawyers cost the state eight times as much as life in prison. Sixth, social disparities in death sentences, with poor and black defendants disproportionately being put to death (“Those without the capital get the punishment”), have weighed increasingly on the nation’s conscience. ([Location 4371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4371)) > The Pew Research Center has probed Americans’ opinions on race, gender, and sexual orientation over the past quarter century, and has reported that these attitudes have undergone a “fundamental shift” toward tolerance and respect of rights, with formerly widespread prejudices sinking into oblivion. ([Location 4428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4428)) > Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011.14 Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites).15 African Americans who make it to 65 have longer lives ahead of them than white Americans of the same age. The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today.16 ([Location 4482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4482)) > Today, women make up 47 percent of the labor force and a majority of university students.23 Violence against women is best measured by victimization surveys, because they circumvent the problem of underreporting to the police; these instruments show that rates of rape and violence against wives and girlfriends have been sinking for decades and are now at a quarter or less of their peaks in the past (figure 15-4).24 Too many of these crimes still take place, but we should be encouraged by the fact that a heightened concern about violence against women is not futile moralizing but has brought measurable progress—which means that continuing this concern can lead to greater progress still. ([Location 4509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4509)) > The first arguments that behavior between consenting adults is no one else’s business were formulated during the Enlightenment by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, and Bentham. ([Location 4558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4558)) > Yet the single best predictor of emancipative values is the World Bank’s Knowledge Index, which combines per capita measures of education (adult literacy and enrollment in high schools and colleges), information access (telephones, computers, and Internet users), scientific and technological productivity (researchers, patents, and journal articles), and institutional integrity (rule of law, regulatory quality, and open economies). ([Location 4658](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4658)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress. ([Location 4663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4663)) > The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely. ([Location 4772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4772)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > But some of the causal pathways vindicate the values of the Enlightenment. So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human. You learn that there are other cultures that are as tied to their ways of life as you are to yours, and for no better or worse reason. You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken. You learn that there are better and worse ways to live, and that other people and other cultures may know things that you don’t. Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence. All these epiphanies militate against knuckling under the rule of an autocrat or joining a crusade to subdue and kill your neighbors. Of course, none of this wisdom is guaranteed, particularly when authorities promulgate their own dogmas, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories—and, in a backhanded compliment to the power of knowledge, stifle the people and ideas that might discredit them. ([Location 4789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4789)) > Studies of the effects of education confirm that educated people really are more enlightened. ([Location 4797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4797)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Stein’s Law: Things that can’t go on forever don’t. ([Location 4902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=4902)) > The fact that all aspects of human flourishing tend to improve over the long run even when they are not in perfect sync vindicates the idea that there is such a thing as progress. ([Location 5001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5001)) > People can be healthy, solvent, and literate and still not lead rich and meaningful lives. ([Location 5009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5009)) > For returning “washday” to our lives, Hans Rosling suggests, the washing machine deserves to be called the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution. ([Location 5095](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5095)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”17 ([Location 5123](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5123)) > and many people misremember the mid-20th century as a golden age of family togetherness. ([Location 5170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5170)) > Electronic media are commonly cited as a threat to human relationships, and certainly Facebook friends are a poor substitute for face-to-face contact with flesh-and-blood companions. ([Location 5174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5174)) > In 1973 the economist Richard Easterlin identified a paradox that has since been named for him.3 Though in comparisons within a country richer people are happier, in comparisons across countries the richer ones appeared to be no happier than poorer ones. And in comparisons over time, people did not appear to get happier as their countries got richer. ([Location 5284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5284)) > Wallis Simpson was half-right when she said, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” ([Location 5421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5421)) > Over the past thirty-five years African Americans have been getting much happier while American whites have gotten a bit less happy.35 Women tend to be happier than men, but in Western countries the gap has shrunk, with men getting happier at a faster rate than women. In the United States it has reversed outright, as women got unhappier while men stayed more or less the same.36 ([Location 5480](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5480)) > That makes three segments of the population that have become happier amid the American happiness stagnation: African Americans, the successive cohorts leading up to the Baby Boom, and young people today. ([Location 5507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5507)) > Social media users care too much, not too little, about other people, and they empathize with them over their troubles rather than envying them their successes. ([Location 5570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5570)) > But partly it came from genuine changes in how people interact. People see each other less in traditional venues like clubs, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and dinner parties, and more in informal gatherings and via digital media. They confide in fewer distant cousins but in more co-workers. ([Location 5574](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5574)) > Dorothy Parker’s macabre poem “Resumé” (which ends, “Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live”) ([Location 5585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5585)) > Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no. ([Location 5694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5694)) > Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. ([Location 5729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5729)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness. ([Location 5744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5744)) > But as George Bernard Shaw observed, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” ([Location 5798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5798)) > The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” ([Location 5828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5828)) > black swan, a four-sigma event far along the tail of the statistical distribution of hazards, with low odds but calamitous harm. ([Location 5835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5835)) > In The Progress Paradox, the journalist Gregg Easterbrook suggests that a major reason that Americans are not happier, despite their rising objective fortunes, is “collapse anxiety”: the fear that civilization may implode and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. ([Location 5884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5884)) > Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!” ([Location 5897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5897)) > The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks. ([Location 5900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5900)) > Quite generally, the distinction between a “natural” disaster and one brought about by ignorance is parochial. ([Location 5960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5960)) > And all those options add up to the overarching option that they failed to create, namely that of forming a scientific and technological civilization like ours. Traditions of criticism. An Enlightenment.18 ([Location 5963](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5963)) > The Robopocalypse is based on a muzzy conception of intelligence that owes more to the Great Chain of Being and a Nietzschean will to power than to a modern scientific understanding. ([Location 5973](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=5973)) > The observation of a 1965 report from NASA still holds: “Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.” ([Location 6053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6053)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > (Probably even fewer people realize that about 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from dismantled nuclear warheads, mostly Soviet.) ([Location 6440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6440)) > People are putting their longer, healthier, safer, freer, richer, and wiser lives to good use. Americans work 22 fewer hours a week than they used to, have three weeks of paid vacation, lose 43 fewer hours to housework, and spend just a third of their paycheck on necessities rather than five-eighths. ([Location 6552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6552)) > The Enlightenment is working: for two and a half centuries, ([Location 6567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6567)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The lower middle classes have seen their incomes rise by less than 10 percent in two decades. ([Location 6581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6581)) > namely that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set in motion the process of using knowledge to improve the human condition. ([Location 6602](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6602)) > Stein’s Law continues to obey Davies’s Corollary (Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think), ([Location 6615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6615)) > As Thomas Macaulay reflected in 1830, “We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason. . . . On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”4 ([Location 6630](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6630)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American Growth, point to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people). ([Location 6659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6659)) > A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience. ([Location 6756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6756)) > By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. ([Location 6763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6763)) > Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. ([Location 6768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6768)) > all hallmarks of a dictator. ([Location 6809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6809)) > For one thing, the latest elections are not referenda on the Enlightenment. ([Location 6856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6856)) > “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.” ([Location 6882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6882)) > But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown is a reliable indicator of racism (chapter 15).36 ([Location 6889](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6889)) > Support for populist parties is strongest not from manual workers but from the “petty bourgeoisie” (self-employed tradesmen and the owners of small businesses), followed by foremen and technicians. Populist voters are older, more religious, more rural, less educated, and more likely to be male and members of the ethnic majority. They embrace authoritarian values, place themselves on the right of the political spectrum, and dislike immigration and global and national governance. ([Location 6901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6901)) > supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority “feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share. . . ([Location 6907](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6907)) > Populism is an old man’s movement. As figure 20-1 shows, support for all three of its recrudescences—Trump, Brexit, and European populist parties—falls off dramatically with year of birth. ([Location 6925](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6925)) > By failing to take note of the gifts of modernity, social critics poison voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have enjoyed and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more. ([Location 6974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6974)) > Yet in a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. ([Location 6979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6979)) > Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform: ([Location 6983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6983)) > Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion: Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. . . . [Progress] is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism of the future is rooted in history.53 ([Location 6989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6989)) > My favorite comes from Hans Rosling, who, when asked whether he was an optimist, replied, “I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist.”55 ([Location 6999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=6999)) > The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. —John Maynard Keynes ([Location 7004](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7004)) > Illiberal ideas like authoritarianism, tribalism, and magical thinking easily get the blood pumping, and have no shortage of champions. It’s hardly a fair fight. ([Location 7020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7020)) > I like to think that some good might come to the world if more of the ideas that trickle into these tributaries embodied the Enlightenment ideals of reason, science, and humanism. ([Location 7027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7027)) > But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery. ([Location 7073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7073)) > To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” ([Location 7076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7076)) > Often the cynicism about reason is justified with a crude version of evolutionary psychology (not one endorsed by evolutionary psychologists) in which humans think with their amygdalas, reacting instinctively to the slightest rustle in the grass which may portend a crouching tiger. ([Location 7082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7082)) > A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group (originally, fellow police officers). ([Location 7198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7198)) > Tragedy of the Belief Commons runs even deeper. ([Location 7206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7206)) > As Benjamin Franklin observed, “So convenient a thing is it to be a rational creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” ([Location 7208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7208)) > As two other magazines summarized the results: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math” and “How Politics Makes Us Stupid.”29 ([Location 7262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7262)) > I’ve been arguing that the main drivers were the nonpolitical ideals of reason, science, and humanism, which led people to seek and apply knowledge that enhanced human flourishing. Do right-wing or left-wing ideologies have anything to add? ([Location 7300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7300)) > Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight-warlords, sadistic torture-executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion. ([Location 7310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7310)) > The arcs in figures 5-1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable. ([Location 7312](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7312)) > The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. ([Location 7335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7335)) > And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. ([Location 7338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7338)) > A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. ([Location 7347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7347)) > Successful prediction is the revenge of the nerds. Superforecasters are intelligent but not necessarily brilliant, falling just in the top fifth of the population. They are highly numerate, not in the sense of being math whizzes but in the sense of comfortably thinking in guesstimates. They have personality traits that psychologists call “openness to experience” (intellectual curiosity and a taste for variety), “need for cognition” (pleasure taken in intellectual activity), and “integrative complexity” (appreciating uncertainty and seeing multiple sides). They are anti-impulsive, distrusting their first gut feeling. They are neither left-wing nor right-wing. They aren’t necessarily humble about their abilities, but they are humble about particular beliefs, treating them as “hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.” They constantly ask themselves, “Are there holes in this reasoning? Should I be looking for something else to fill this in? Would I be convinced by this if I were somebody else?” They are aware of cognitive blind spots like the Availability and confirmation biases, and they discipline themselves to avoid them. They display what the psychologist Jonathan Baron calls “active open-mindedness,” with opinions such as these:48 ([Location 7416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7416)) > The major enemy of reason in the public sphere today—which is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization—appears to be on an upswing. ([Location 7470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7470)) > A liberal tilt is also, in moderation, desirable. Intellectual liberalism was at the forefront of many forms of progress that almost everyone has come to accept, such as democracy, social insurance, religious tolerance, the abolition of slavery and judicial torture, the decline of war, and the expansion of human and civil rights.56 In many ways we are (almost) all liberals now.57 ([Location 7502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7502)) > Of the two forms of politicization that are subverting reason today, the political is far more dangerous than the academic, for an obvious reason. It’s often quipped (no one knows who said it first) that academic debates are vicious because the stakes are so small. But in political debates the stakes are unlimited, including the future of the planet. ([Location 7537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7537)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses. ([Location 7542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7542)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > We are not in a post-truth era. Mendacity, truth-shading, conspiracy theories, extraordinary popular delusions, and the madness of crowds are as old as our species, but so is the conviction that some ideas are right and others are wrong.75 The same decade that has seen the rise of pants-on-fire Trump and his reality-challenged followers has also seen the rise of a new ethic of fact-checking. ([Location 7564](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7564)) > eight in 10 Americans have a positive view of political fact-checking. ([Location 7571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7571)) > Over the long run, the institutions of reason can mitigate the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and allow the truth to prevail. ([Location 7581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7581)) > The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. It was contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy . . . upon which social order, public morality and the best interests of both races depend. . . . Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.78 ([Location 7586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7586)) > Experiments have shown that the right rules can avert the Tragedy of the Belief Commons and force people to dissociate their reasoning from their identities. ([Location 7652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7652)) > And in the day-to-day functioning of governments, the application of behavioral insights (sometimes called Nudge) and evidence-based policy has wrung more social benefits out of fewer tax dollars. ([Location 7690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7690)) > It took centuries for Francis Bacon’s observations on anecdotal reasoning and the confusion of correlation with causation to become second nature to scientifically literate people. ([Location 7742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7742)) > The great thinkers of antiquity, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment were born too soon to enjoy ideas with deep implications for morality and meaning, including entropy, evolution, information, game theory, and artificial intelligence (though they often tinkered with precursors and approximations). ([Location 7776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7776)) > (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table”), ([Location 7809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7809)) > Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters.” ([Location 7859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7859)) > On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.13 The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment. ([Location 7863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7863)) > As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” ([Location 7873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7873)) > Regardless of whether Popper or Bayes has the better account, a scientist’s degree of belief in a theory depends on its consistency with empirical evidence. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the testing of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement. ([Location 7932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7932)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > To begin with, the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. ([Location 7944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7944)) > By exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, science forces us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. ([Location 7958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7958)) > And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions—that all of us value our own welfare, and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. ([Location 7961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=7961)) > Genocide and autocracy were ubiquitous in premodern times, and they decreased, not increased, as science and liberal Enlightenment values became increasingly influential after World War II.29 ([Location 8011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8011)) > In 1853 Arthur de Gobineau, a fiction writer and amateur historian, published his cockamamie theory that a race of virile white men, the Aryans, spilled out of an ancient homeland and spread a heroic warrior civilization across Eurasia, diverging into the Persians, Hittites, Homeric Greeks, and Vedic Hindus, and later into the Vikings, Goths, and other Germanic tribes. (The speck of reality in this story is that these tribes spoke languages that fell into a single family, Indo-European.) ([Location 8027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8027)) > Gobineau’s ideas were eaten up by Richard Wagner (whose operas were held to be re-creations of the original Aryan myths) and by Wagner’s son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (a philosopher who wrote that Jews polluted Teutonic civilization with capitalism, liberal humanism, and sterile science). From them the ideas reached Hitler, who called Chamberlain his “spiritual father.”32 ([Location 8033](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8033)) > One of these movements was retroactively dubbed social Darwinism, though it was advocated not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer, who laid it out in 1851, eight years before the publication of The Origin of Species. Spencer did not believe in random mutation and natural selection; he believed in a Lamarckian process in which the struggle for existence impelled organisms to strive toward feats of greater complexity and adaptation, which they passed on to later generations. Spencer thought that this progressive force was best left unimpeded, and so he argued against social welfare and government regulation that would only prolong the doomed lives of weaker individuals and groups. His political philosophy, an early form of libertarianism, was picked up by robber barons, advocates of laissez-faire economics, and opponents of social spending. ([Location 8049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8049)) > Many countries forcibly sterilized delinquents, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, and other people who fell into a wide net of ailments and stigmas. ([Location 8062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8062)) - Note: Mississippi appendectomy > And when the study began, it may even have been defensible by the standards of the day: treatments for syphilis (mainly arsenic) were toxic and ineffective; when antibiotics became available later, their safety and efficacy in treating syphilis were unknown; and latent syphilis was known to often resolve itself without treatment. ([Location 8096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8096)) - Note: The road of medical history is a tour of graveyards. > In 1954 Paul Meehl stunned his fellow psychologists by showing that simple actuarial formulas outperform expert judgment in predicting psychiatric classifications, suicide attempts, school and job performance, lies, crime, medical diagnoses, and pretty much any other outcome in which accuracy can be judged at all. Meehl’s work inspired Tversky and Kahneman’s discoveries on cognitive biases and Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments, and his conclusion about the superiority of statistical to intuitive judgment is now recognized as one of the most robust findings in the history of psychology.47 ([Location 8152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8152)) > Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person’s opinion). We have already seen some dangerous misconceptions that arise from this statistical obtuseness. People think that crime and war are spinning out of control, though homicides and battle deaths are going down, not up. They think that Islamist terrorism is a major risk to life and limb, whereas the danger is smaller than that from wasps and bees. They think that ISIS threatens the existence or survival of the United States, whereas terrorist movements rarely achieve any of their strategic aims. ([Location 8163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8163)) > The political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan assembled a dataset of political resistance movements across the world between 1900 and 2006 and discovered that three-quarters of the nonviolent resistance movements succeeded, compared with only a third of the violent ones.50 Gandhi and King were right, but without data, you would never know it. ([Location 8182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8182)) > A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change. ([Location 8198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8198)) > Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech, the structure of language, and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.57 ([Location 8231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8231)) - Note: Jim Rochefort ca wv band > In 1782 Thomas Paine extolled the cosmopolitan virtues of science: Science, the partisan of no country, but the beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple where all may meet. Her influence on the mind, like the sun on the chilled earth, has long been preparing it for higher cultivation and further improvement. The philosopher of one country sees not an enemy in the philosophy of another: he takes his seat in the temple of science, and asks not who sits beside him.63 ([Location 8272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8272)) > In this and other ways, the spirit of science is the spirit of the Enlightenment. ([Location 8278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8278)) > Spinoza: “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.” ([Location 8284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8284)) > The goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience—may be called humanism. ([Location 8287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8287)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The Humanist Manifesto III, from 2003, affirms: ([Location 8292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8292)) > the Golden Rule and its precious-metallic variants, rediscovered in hundreds of moral traditions.6 (The Silver Rule is “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”; the Platinum Rule, “Do to others what they would have you do to them.” They are designed to anticipate masochists, suicide bombers, differences in taste, and other sticking points for the Golden Rule.) ([Location 8331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8331)) > That means that food, comfort, curiosity, beauty, stimulation, love, sex, and camaraderie are not shallow indulgences or hedonistic distractions. They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being. Unlike ascetic and puritanical regimes, humanistic ethics does not second-guess the intrinsic worth of people seeking comfort, pleasure, and fulfillment—if people didn’t seek them, there would be no people. ([Location 8362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8362)) > Tooby), the Law of Entropy sentences us to another permanent threat. Many things must all go right for a body (and thus a mind) to function, but it takes just one thing going wrong for it to shut down permanently—a leak of blood, a constriction of air, a disabling of its microscopic clockwork. ([Location 8369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8369)) > (As Hobbes put it, “No covenants with beasts.”) ([Location 8379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8379)) > At various times moralists have used deontological thinking to insist that vaccination, anesthesia, blood transfusions, life insurance, interracial marriage, and homosexuality were wrong by their very nature. ([Location 8415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8415)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day.17 ([Location 8429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8429)) > whereas utilitarian conclusions emerge from rational cogitation.20 (He has even shown that the two kinds of moral thinking engage emotional and rational systems of the brain, respectively.) Greene also argues that when people from diverse cultural backgrounds have to agree upon a moral code, they tend to go utilitarian. ([Location 8442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8442)) > Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the alt-right. ([Location 8483](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8483)) > As Ambrose Bierce noted in The Devil’s Dictionary, the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity. ([Location 8664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8664)) > The God of the Old Testament murdered innocents by the millions, commanded the Israelites to commit mass rape and genocide, and prescribed the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, homosexuality, adultery, talking back to parents, and working on the Sabbath, while finding nothing particularly wrong with slavery, rape, torture, mutilation, and genocide. ([Location 8681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8681)) > Matthew White, the necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.47 (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) ([Location 8699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8699)) > Religious organizations can also provide a sense of communal solidarity and mutual support, together with art, ritual, and architecture of great beauty and historical resonance, thanks to their millennia-long head start. I partake of these myself, with much enjoyment. ([Location 8747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8747)) > But no: Donald Trump won the votes of 81 percent of white Evangelical and born-again Christians, a higher proportion than of any other demographic. ([Location 8770](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8770)) > the world’s fastest-growing religion is no religion at all. ([Location 8821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8821)) > American exceptionalism is instructive: the United States is more religious than its Western peers but underperforms them in happiness and well-being, with higher rates of homicide, incarceration, abortion, sexually transmitted disease, child mortality, obesity, educational mediocrity, and premature death.88 The same holds true among the fifty states: the more religious the state, the more dysfunctional its citizens’ lives.89 Cause and effect probably run in many directions. But it’s plausible that in democratic countries, secularism leads to humanism, turning people away from prayer, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority and toward practical policies that make them and their fellows better off. ([Location 8910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8910)) > All these troubling patterns were once true of Christendom, but starting with the Enlightenment, the West initiated a process (still ongoing) of separating the church from the state, carving out a space for secular civil society, and grounding its institutions in a universal humanistic ethics. In most Muslim-majority countries, that process is barely under way. Historians and social scientists (many of them Muslim) have shown how the stranglehold of the Islamic religion over governmental institutions and civil society in Muslim countries has impeded their economic, political, and social progress.99 ([Location 8960](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8960)) > Classical Arabic civilization, as I mentioned, was a hothouse of science and secular philosophy.103 ([Location 8987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=8987)) > Though she later tried to conceal it, Ayn Rand’s celebration of selfishness, her deification of the heroic capitalist, and her disdain for the general welfare had Nietzsche written all over them. ([Location 9076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9076)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > tyrannophilia. ([Location 9088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9088)) > With the stakes this high, it’s good to remind ourselves why the case for neo-theo-reactionary-populist nationalism is intellectually bankrupt. ([Location 9153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9153)) > Roots are for trees; people have feet. ([Location 9178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9178)) > After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world. ([Location 9182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9182)) > Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? ([Location 9203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9203)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > The story of human progress is truly heroic. It is glorious. It is uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. ([Location 9212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9212)) > And the story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity—to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being. For it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance. ([Location 9231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073TJBYTB&location=9231))